A Study on Relationship between Research Resources and Performance for Full-time Faculty in the Area of Science, Engineering, and Computer Science at the National Taiwan University
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Lee, Hsin-Pei
Abstract
Due to the high demand of higher education in Taiwan, the college education has transformed from traditional elite education to a more general education and the number of colleges and universities in Taiwan has increased to 162 in 2008. Although a general college education satisfies the demand by the Taiwan society, such a rapid expansion in quantity may results in a low quality for higher education. Because research is one of the major criteria for evaluation of the quality of university, following Hung (2008), we investigated whether the investment in research fund by the National Science Council (NSC) can uplift the research level of the universities, and examine the relationship between research resource and research performance in the faculty of universities for the field of science and engineering in Taiwan. Our targeted population is the full-time faculty in the sciences and engineering at the National Taiwan Universities which consist of those in College of Science, College of Engineering, and College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The data on research resource consists of the number and amount of research grants awarded to the individual faculty by the NSC during the 5-year period between 2003 and 2007. The data on research performance includes the research papers published in the Science Citation Indexed (SCI) or Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals between 2003 and 2007 for which the individual faculty is the first or the corresponding author. Data on both research resource and performance were collected from the NSC website during the period from November, 2008 to March 2009. In addition, other variables consist of gender, ranks, and years at the current position.The results indicate that there is a general positive trend between the magnitude of research resource and the research performance. In addition, statistically significant differences were observed among distinguished professor or faculty exempt from evaluation, and regular faculty in the following indices (p<0.05): average number of NSC research grants per faculty per year, the amount of NSC research fund per faculty per year, average number of SCI papers per faculty per year; and the average number of the top 15% SCI papers per faculty per year. The abundant research resource by the distinguished professor is also reflected in better research performance than faculty exempt from evaluation or the regular faculty. In summary, our results show that research resource is positively related to the research performance.
Subjects
Endowed faculty
Faculty exempt from evaluation
Type
thesis
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