Measuring academic clout

Research productivity and impact are key to assessing the performance of academic psychologists.

An Australian study set out to establish new normative data on the productivity and citation impact of publications by Australian academic psychologists at each level. These ranged from lecturer to professor, and represented each university grouping. The team extracted citation and publication data for a representative sample of 732 academics from the psychology field using the Scopus database. Norms for citations, lifetime publications and h-indexes were then generated for each academic level and compared with those outlined in earlier studies. The findings suggest that the perception of academic level based upon the number of publications, citations and h-indexes is highly reliable. Lifetime publication means have increased by a factor of 2 to 3 since the norms were published nearly a decade ago (which is in keeping with the notion that rates of scholarly publication have increased in the past 10 years). As a group, academic psychologists at the research-intensive Go8 universities had significantly higher publication averages at all levels than those from other universities. Despite this, the differences varied notably in size across the university groupings. Overall, the team found that the research conducted offers current and representative norms, and that indices of research productivity and impact are important when assessing the performance of Australian academic psychologists.

doi:10.1111/ajpy.12248