How to manage individual research performance in academic organizations?

Dr Jolanta Jaškienė. Photo by Jurgita Kunigiškytė

A review and empirical evidence on the drivers of research productivity is published in Research Policy. The top-level journal is included in the Financial Times rankings list.

The authors of the study: Dr Olga Ryazanova from Maynooth University and ISM researcher Dr Jolanta Jaškienė.

The management of research productivity is central to university governance and drives a broad range of decisions, including those on hiring, promotion and funding allocation. Policymakers and academic leaders responsible for improving their institutions’ research performance need an evidence-based understanding of the organisational factors that can be managed in pursuit of better publication outcomes. Our paper reviews the empirical evidence on the drivers of research productivity that can be actively managed by organisations and policymakers. Such drivers include organisational structures, research culture, features of task environment for academic work, and resource allocation. To advance the state of science in research productivity literature, we then analyse assumptions and highlight mechanisms that need to be explored in order to improve the theoretical and methodological state of the field. We suggest directions for future research with the aim to create a deeper and more cohesive body of knowledge on how organisations, funding bodies, and government agencies can influence scientific performance at the individual level. To advance the practice of research management, we offer a rigorous synthesis of existing empirical evidence that can help academic leaders in supporting and developing faculty research productivity within their institutions.

We seek to address the needs of two audiences: (1) scholars who study research outcomes as a type of knowledge creation activity and (2) practitioners who manage research in academic institutions. In some institutions, these audiences overlap significantly, in others they are quite distinct and are united only by the common interest in research outcomes as a subject of study or governance.

Key practical insights from the paper on how to manage individual research productivity in academic institutions are published as Times Higher Education Campus Resource, you may read them HERE.

The full study is available HERE.

Ryazanova, O., & Jaskiene, J. (2022). Managing Individual Research Productivity in Academic Organizations: A Review of the Evidence and a Path Forward. Research Policy, 51(2), 104448.