I found a
useful definition of productivity at
the following website, at least in terms of how it can be measured: http://www.investorwords.com/3876/productivity.html
‘The amount of output per unit of input (labor, equipment, and capital). There are many different ways of measuring
productivity. For example, in a factory productivity might be
measured based on the number of hours it takes to produce a
good, while in the service sector productivity might be
measured based on the revenue generated by an employee divided by his/her salary.’
Another definition comes from the Merriam Webster online dictionary http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/productive:
‘yielding results,
benefits, or profits’.
There are difficulties in applying the first definition in its entirety
to an academic researcher, because it is very difficult to directly measure a
researcher’s economic productivity. The number of publications and grant funding (money given to the research organization
where the academic works) are the standard ways of measuring an researcher’s
productivity. A good number of publications often leads to more grant funding. And more
grant funding in turn draws in more students. But all of this depends on the
hierarchical level of the academic. It stands to reason that a staff scientist
without a research group (students) cannot be as ‘productive’ as a professor
with a large group of students around him or her. Can they even be compared? Yet
they often are, especially when it comes to the numbers of publications
produced. This is unfair, because in principle a large research group can
produce many more publications than one scientist alone. Whether that is in
fact true is another discussion. In any case, not all researchers get grants, which
doesn’t mean that they are necessarily bad researchers. It simply means that
they didn’t get funded this time around. But is that acceptable to the business
administrators who control the research institutes and who insist on measuring productivity on an annual basis?
Most other research activities--e.g. advising, teaching, designing
experiments, having meetings with students, and writing--don’t generate revenue.
If a researcher/advisor spends several hours per week helping one graduate
student who is clueless about how to proceed with his or her research article
and data interpretation, how do we measure productivity in this situation? The
advisor has invested time, energy and intellectual focus in these activities--meeting, advising, and discussing. What is the tangible product? Over time, the
product may be (emphasis on the may) an
article or two from a student. Or perhaps not, as this can depend on the whim
of the involved student as to whether he or she will write those articles. There
is no guarantee of a publishable article for all the hard work invested in the
student. If graduate students aren’t productive and won't write articles, it can reflect poorly on the advisor
because there will be no papers to publish unless the adviser ends up writing them himself. A lack of articles can lead to not getting
grants. Published papers are proof that an academic is productive; proof that
an academic has done his or her job, which is to do science and to train
graduate students how to do science, as well as to write/help to write the
articles resulting from research activity. But how many published articles are
enough, and how many are too few? Is it quantity or quality that counts?
And what should be done about the academic researchers whose graduate students leave research for the greener pastures of the business world without finishing their PhD degrees? Who don’t
stick around despite the huge investment of the researchers’ time and money for lab consumables, conferences and travel? Is this the
fault of these researchers? Was it a waste of time and money to train them? The
point is that these graduate students got valuable research training before leaving academia. It has to be accepted that whatever they
do with that training afterwards is their business. If they leave the research
world, well, then they leave it. No one can stop them from doing so. So here’s
the rub. Should academic researchers’ productivity be measured by how many of
the trained students go on to become academics themselves? If that is the case,
it will take years before productivity can be assessed correctly.
The second definition talks about yielding results, benefits or
profits. Research activities such as
doing lab work, generating data, reading, advising, teaching and writing
articles do yield results, but not necessarily
profits, unless ideas are patentable, leading to collaborations with big
business, e.g. pharmaceutical firms that can produce a profitable drug to
treat a specific illness. But getting a patent approved can take many years. So
it’s difficult for me to understand the emphasis on increasing academic
productivity. I'm not sure what this really means. Again I ask, who will define this adequately, and will it be
fair? It strikes me as rather naïve on the part of business administrators to not
even make an attempt to understand the complexities of the academic research world, and
yet this is the current situation—administrators who have no real idea of what
academics do, yet who insist that academics increase their productivity so that
the organizations for which they work can get their 'money’s worth' out of them.
