Abstract
We survey tenure-track faculty members employed in three fields in colleges of agriculture at land-grant universities—agricultural economics, agronomy, and food science—to evaluate the effects of different employment structures and incentives on research productivity. These evaluations include conducting statistical tests to assess any effects of different academic appointments and developing a regression model to measure the effects of these and other attributes on individual research productivity, as defined by the number of publications in the Thomson ISI Web of Science. We find faculty who hold larger teaching and extension appointments produce fewer publications; we also find positive effects on the number of publications for grants and university funding, multi-institutional research collaboration, and number of graduate students advised.
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Notes
For a more detailed description of the nature of faculty appointments in colleges of agriculture at land-grant universities, please visit http://caes.ucdavis.edu/facstaff/ce/ce-mentor-handbook.pdf.
The authors do not provide any details regarding these articles; thus, these articles may or may not refer to publications in the WoS.
A small number of individuals effectively removed themselves from our database because they informed us that they no longer met our selection criteria.
The minimum teaching appointment is 4 percent, which we surmise may result from a number of universities that require teaching appointments in order for faculty to be eligible to receive tenure.
We chose a teaching appointment of 25 % because it is typical of teaching faculty in colleges of agriculture; in fact, in our sample the average teaching appointment was 24.6 % and the most common appointment was 30 %.
We acknowledge this quantitative finding does not account for any changes in the quality of either teaching or research outputs that may occur with changes in appointments.
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Miller, J.C., Coble, K.H. & Lusk, J.L. Evaluating top faculty researchers and the incentives that motivate them. Scientometrics 97, 519–533 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-0987-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-0987-7