Changing proxies for evaluating research performance: what matters to university programme heads?

ABSTRACT

The tourism and hospitality research and publishing landscape have faced radical changes over the last decade. As a result, there have been calls for more holistic approaches for evaluating an academic’s research performance. Yet, updated research on the perceptions of what constitutes ‘good’ research performance remain under-studied. To address this gap, the objective of this study is to examine how current university programme heads in tourism and hospitality evaluate and define ‘good’ research performance. In doing so, this study offers insights to academics on how the goal posts are indeed shifting for performance evaluation, and provides information for programme heads to assess the relative salience of their own research targets.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance evaluation
• research productivity
• publication
• authorship
• citations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Vincent Tung is an Assistant Professor at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research interests include social marketing, tourism marketing, and consumer behaviour.

Rob Law is a Professor at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His areas of research expertise include information technology, internet and e-commerce, and artificial intelligence.

Kaye Chon is Dean and Chair Professor, Walter Kwok Foundation Professor in International Hospitality Management at the School of Hotel and Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His areas of research expertise include services management, marketing, and convention tourism.

ORCID

Vincent Wing Sun Tung http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9560-8761

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this paper was fully supported by a research grant from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Account Code: G-UA9X).