How do you define and measure research productivity?

Abstract

Productivity is the quintessential indicator of efficiency in any production system. It seems it has become a norm in bibliometrics to define research productivity as the number of publications per researcher, distinguishing it from impact. In this work we operationalize the economic concept of productivity for the specific context of research activity and show the limits of the commonly accepted definition. We propose then a measurable form of research productivity through the indicator "Fractional Scientific Strength (FSS)", in keeping with the microeconomic theory of production. We present the methodology for measure of FSS at various levels of analysis: individual, field, discipline, department, institution, region and nation. Finally, we compare the ranking lists of Italian universities by the two definitions of research productivity.

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• The VQR, Italy's second national research assessment: Methodological failures and ranking distortions
• Counting methods introduced into the bibliometric research literature 1970-2018: A review
• A gender analysis of top scientists' collaboration behavior: evidence from Italy
• Should the research performance of scientists be distinguished by gender?
• Gender bias in academic recruitment
• The effect of multidisciplinary collaborations on research diversification
• The north-south divide in the Italian higher education system
• The effect of the Indonesian higher education evaluation system on conference proceedings publications
• Evaluating university research: same performance indicator, different rankings
• How long do top scientists maintain their stardom? An analysis by region, gender and discipline: evidence from Italy
• Ranking research institutions by the number of highly-cited articles per scientist
• The ratio of top scientists to the academic staff as an indicator of the competitive strength of universities
• Geography of Science: Competitiveness and Inequality
• An investigation on the skewness patterns and fractal nature of research productivity distributions at field and discipline level
• A nation's foreign and domestic professors: which have better research performance? (The Italian case)
• Are all citations worth the same? Valuing citations by the value of the citing items
• A multivariate stochastic model to assess research performance
• Selection committees for academic recruitment: does gender matter?
• The inconsistency of h-index: a mathematical analysis
• A novel methodology to assess the scientific standing of nations at field level
• The determinants of academic career advancement: evidence from Italy
• Research assessment by percentile-based double rank analysis
• A methodology to measure the effectiveness of academic recruitment and turnover
• Comparison of research productivity of Italian and Norwegian professors and universities
• From rankings to funnel plots: the question of accounting for uncertainty when measuring university research performance
• A comparison of university performance scores and ranks by MNCS and FSS
• Funnel plots for visualizing uncertainty in the research performance of institutions
• A methodology to compute the territorial productivity of scientists: The case of Italy
• Authorship analysis of specialized vs diversified research output
• The Research Production of Nations and Departments: A Statistical Model for the Share of Publications
• Accounting for gender research performance differences in ranking universities