This study is a critical assessment of research productivity through publication among scientists and engineers. This study scrutinizes previous findings on the correlates and determinants of publication productivity; provides overview and organization of that knowledge ; indicates gaps and shortcomings in the research ; and identifies the questions and issues which are both answered and unanswered.
Through the analysis of the 223 mail questionnaires collected from professors of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry and physics, this study obtains the particular determinants of publication productivity at the science and engineering schools in Korea. Especially, early research productivity and the number of doctoral students are very important to publish good research articles. Also the qualities of professors' Ph.D. institution and employing university are critical influencing factors to publication productivity.
The data are analyzed using correlation, ANOVA, and multiple regression analysis and all the regression models are statistically significant. Addition to traditional statistical method on research productivity, this study uses the path analysis to get the structure of relationship between determinants of research productivity and obtains better results compared to multiple regression analysis.
All the variables in this study are focused on the socialization of individual research scientists and any psychological or personal background variables are excluded, because the perspective of this article is not that of scientific sociologist but of science and technology policy interest.
To draw policy implications, all the sample professors are classified into 4 groups based on the criteria such as the country where he got his Ph.D. degree and the quality of employing university. This study proves that there exists an ascriptive advantage according to the individual background such as his Ph.D. institution and employing university in Korea. This study also shows that all research resources and research performances are unequally distributed. This result proposes that supporting basic research at university must begins with relative assessment of researchers, departments, and institutions in consideration with their research environment and to evaluate researchers in compared with excellent research university like SNU, KAIST, POSTECH is unequal and inadequate.
