Resource and Time-Adjusted Research Productivity Index for Funding Allocations Using Critical Thinking and Ethics in Decision Making

Performance-based funding rewards citations and grants already accumulated, not output relative to the resources a researcher actually had. This paper critiques that logic, using Sorzano and Pueche-Granados (2026) as the test case, and proposes the Resource- and Time-Adjusted Research Productivity Index (RTA-RPI): scientific output divided by cumulative resource exposure. RTA-RPI exposes funding efficiency that raw bibliometrics hide, and gives early-career and underfunded researchers a fair basis for comparison. Applied math is only as fair as the assumptions behind it: critical thinking about what a formula leaves out --- who had less time, less money, less visibility --- matters more than the formula itself, since an unexamined metric just launders existing bias through a number neglecting ethics.