Promoting quality research

6 - Conclusion

Obviously, for a policy such as the PBRF to work, there needs to be some evidence for individual staff that higher research quality is rewarded. The analysis by Gibson et al. (2008) found that the impact of quality in determining academic rank appeared to diminish following the introduction of the PBRF. Obviously, if this were the case across other disciplines, it would be a cause of concern to policy makers.

However, the Gibson et al. study examined only one discipline – economics – and used bibliometric databases to determine the quality of research. In addition, the start of the time-frame chosen for comparison in the analysis, 1999 and 2007, predates the introduction of the PBRF by five years. Much could have happened in this five-year period prior to the introduction of the PBRF to influence the academic rank of staff in the Gibson et al. study.

The analysis in this study shows that there is a statistically significant association between higher research quality and a higher likelihood of being promoted. Also, higher research productivity appears to be associated with a higher likelihood of being promoted, particularly at lower academic ranks (ie at lecturer level, more than at senior lecturer and associate professor levels). While research quantity decreases in importance as a factor at higher academic ranks, quality has an increasingly important relationship to the likelihood of promotion at more senior academic ranks.

The analysis of staff in the economics subject area found that the rank of staff prior to promotion, and the quality of their research in the 2003 Quality Evaluation were associated with the likelihood of promotion. The number of research outputs they submitted in the 2003 Quality Evaluation was not a statistically significant factor.

Although the data used in this study cannot be used to show if the association between the quality of research and academic rank has decreased over the last decade, the findings in this study suggest that research quality remains an important contributing factor to whether or not academic staff have been promoted following the introduction of the PBRF.