Research productivity and research system attitudes

Abstract

The release of the 2014 REF results in the UK is a timely reminder that many national governments have aimed to increase the research productivity of universities, by introducing performance-based research systems. This paper examines whether there is a relationship between attitudes to these research systems and research productivity, using interview data from three universities in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. It concludes that attitudes are not strongly related to productivity, and that only a better understanding of system limitations will help to improve them.

Keywords:

• Australia
• higher education
• New Zealand
• performance measurement
• research policy
• UK

Notes

*Since Publish or Perish gathers citation information from Google Scholar, it also includes outputs that are not strictly academic publications (such as websites and blogs, unpublished and draft manuscripts, dissertations, corrigenda and errata, obituaries, teaching materials, and submissions to government inquiries). Patents and abstracts are also included. Sometimes the same publication appears more than once, so the total number of publications, and other measures such as impact scores (which are divided by the number of publications) are incorrect.

**In extracting these data for the interviewees, publications of the types listed in the previous footnote were excluded. Where the same publication appeared more than once, the entry with the largest number of citations was included (the smaller counts of citations were mostly zero or very small). Publications in languages other than English were included where it could be verified that they belonged to the target person. Papers written for government departments and working/discussion papers were included. Commentaries and notes were taken on a case-by-case basis, based on length and whether the content was a substantive matter or merely news about a conference (for example).

Publish or Perish sometimes calculates scores for an individual from data which is from more than one person with the same (or very similar) names. When it was not possible to gather data that was definitely for the target individual, these were excluded. A larger problem was for people with very common names. Here, when the search returned more than 1000 results (the limit per individual in Publish or Perish), these were not included in cases where limiting the search could not resolve whether a single individual had actually been identified. A small number of people were not found at all.