Products > Test Equipment
Ranking test gear using google scholar?
Weston:
I have a few published IEEE papers and have rarely listed the equipment used. Many oscilloscope measurements are largely qualitative, so equipment is not that important.
For anything where you need precision, like accuracy, you are better off mentioning if the equipment is in calibration than the brand name. I would expect even the mid/low tier brands to meet the published specifications, which is what matters.
Its not something that I have really paid close attention to, but it seems that papers from developing countries are more likely to list the equipment model/brand. If they have it, they want to show off having the expensive equipment.
At American institutions, new faculty start off with a big budget (start up package for the lab) based on an equipment list they provide the university. A lot of the quoting and even acquisition is handled by the university itself, and due to existing relationships most of what is bought is pretty nice "high end" stuff. After that, the faculty is pretty much on their own and has to buy new equipment from discretionary budget or request it in project grants. There is typically a threshold of ~$5k where purchases above that have to go through a formal purchase process. Below that it's easy to buy cheap equipment on the discretionary account.
Due to this the lab I am in has some fancy tektronix / Agilent scopes bought with my advisor's start-up budget and a bunch of cheap Rigol scopes and power supplies for general use that were under the $5k limit where we need to go through the official purchase process. I think it's a pretty common situation.
nvmR:
I second ralphrmartin and Weston.
Academics have their own considerations - which are often quite distant from a hobbyist/professionals consideration. It could be using what was on hand, using what "I used when I was a student" and other irrelevant metrics.
Sometimes its swimming in money, or having grant money that is dedicated to equipment purchasing, or a coop with a company.
M Harris:
I agree with others that the basic premise of this is flawed. When I worked in academia we barely had any money for equipment on the vast majority of projects - so we used what we had. If we really needed a capability we could apply to the administration for a specific grant to buy that specific equipment, but it would be the bare minimum we could get away with.
Our Keysight rep was really great, we'd often get 70% off the retail price of equipment, especially if it wasn't the latest and greatest.
As I was leaving we had just received a CA$1.5M grant from the government for a new lab and a bunch of new equipment - there was a lot of equipment in there we had often dreamed about having, but is still lower spec/price than what I have in my lab now as a small business owner.
There was very little regard taken to having the perfect equipment, the best equipment, etc - that is what we dreamed of having. Our priority was putting the project budget into as many person hours as possible so we could all get our contracts renewed... every dollar we spent was less hours for us.
ralphrmartin:
To follow up: perhaps we can turn the quest on its head. Draw up a list of Manufacturers by "reputation", then see where academic paper authors come from who mention using their equipement. This might give an idea of how generous research funding is in each country.
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