THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES School for Graduate Studies and Research STRATEGIES TO ENHANCE RESEARCH PRODUCTIVITY
Challenges Constraining Research Productivity While the primary responsibility to conduct research rests with faculty and graduate students, the responsibility for the organisational environment in which they work to produce new knowledge is shared by multiple layers of leadership. The adequacy of that environment is shaped by the effectiveness of each institution’s approach to supporting its research community at all organisational levels. The key constraints to research productivity, many of which were gleaned from the perspectives of The UWI researchers, are summarised below. • Limited research support is a fundamental constraint on research productivity at The UWI. The funding of facilities, equipment, research assistants and administrative support necessary to conduct research is often inadequate as is support to present research work at international conferences. Strategies to increase both internal and external support of research need to be aggressively explored. • There is inadequate financial support for graduate research students in the form of scholarships, bursaries or other awards, resulting in many research students enrolling on a part-time basis. • The dedicated time necessary to do research is limited by other institutional responsibilities, e.g., teaching, counselling, administration, and is decreasing as a consequence of the University’s budgetary constraints. • The criteria and metrics used to measure and assess research productivity should be clarified, and there is a need for greater transparency in how these are used as measures of academic success and promotion potential. • There is inadequate awareness by researchers of policies and procedures still in effect that were approved by the Board for Graduate Studies and Research to facilitate and guide research at The UWI. • The importance to The UWI and the region of conducting high-quality research is inadequately marketed both within and outside of The UWI. Additionally, there appears to be an increasing emphasis on undergraduate teaching at the expense of research, driven by current financial challenges. This is often a demotivation for researchers. • Research at The UWI is too individually driven, with researchers often working in isolation. Collaboration in research promotes the generation and exchange of new ideas, and can promote efficiency in time and use of resources, leading to enhanced research quality and productivity. However, there are few initiatives to facilitate research collaboration whether within campus, cross- campus or internationally. • New staff at The UWI whose research programmes were dependent on facilities and support available overseas are often constrained and demotivated by the prevailing institutional research environment at The UWI. Researchers may need help in altering their research goals to be achievable in their new environment and/or in a priori establishing of international partnerships that would allow access to required equipment. • Challenges regarding publication, assessment and promotion: o The uncertainty about whether research should be targeted at publication in an international high-quality journal or geared towards solving national or regional developmental problems or oriented towards innovation and commercialisation is demotivational and urgently needs to be clarified at the institutional level (see Section on Measuring Research Productivity at The UWI in this Paper). o These different forms of research need to be better accounted for in the assessment and promotion criteria used by The UWI. o The revision of the Assessment and Promotions Policy to accommodate this would produce clarity, create transparency, and foster trust. o Related to this uncertainty, is the controversy of whether impact factors of journals should be the overriding criterion in selecting a journal for publication. An alternative approach is to set numerical expectations, such as two publications per year as an assessment criterion, but this on its own is an inadequate measure given the significant variation in quality among journals.
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