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Academic research resources and academic quality: a cross-country analysis

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Abstract

Does devoting more academic research resources promote academic quality? This study aims to examine the influence of higher education R&D expenditure (HERD) on academic quality measured by the relative citation impact (RCI). Both the ordered Probit and panel data models are employed to implement the empirical estimation, the cross-country evidence suggests that an increase in academic R&D is positively related to academic quality. The further analyses on different academic disciplines show the HERD is more relevant to science publications. This finding is robust for various specifications.

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Notes

  1. The inter-disciplinary research is more complicated that the project involves academic researchers from different unrelated disciplines as well as non-academic participants.

  2. Bornmann and Mutz (2011) suggest that a field-normalization index of citation ratio is a more adequate measure.

  3. The indicators of Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) and Leiden Ranking can be aggregated to the country level to measure research quality (Docampo 2011; Waltman et al. 2012). However, both rankings were available since 2003 and 2007 respectively, preventing us to use these alternatively methodologies.

  4. We can further discuss the standards in various fields or disciplines through this indicator, formulated as \( RCI_{ij} = \left( {C_{ij} /P_{ij} } \right)/\left( {\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^{N} {C_{ij} /\sum\nolimits_{i = 1}^{N} {P_{ij} } } } \right) \), where C ij stands for the RCI of discipline j in the ith country, and P ij for the number of papers in the jth discipline in the ith country.

  5. These two thresholds are often adopted in existing studies: for example see Jacobs and Ingwersen (2000) and Lehvo and Nuutinen (2006).

  6. Adopting a longer period to construct the stock measure results in similar estimation results.

  7. The 34 OECD members contain: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, and United States.

  8. Despite journal articles are mostly written by researchers of higher education institutes, some of them are submitted from the government and industries. It means that the dependent variable of academic performance is overestimated, leading to an upward bias on the effect of HERD.

  9. We use the random effects long-term tracking model for more convenient comparison with the order Probit model which considers the regional dummy variable.

  10. For example, the funding of looking for excellent research our university got from the government is NT$500,000,000 per year. The funding distributed to social science (College of Literature and College of Management) is about NT$5,000,000, accounting for only 1 %.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Science & Technology Policy Research and Information Center, Taipei, Taiwan

    Pin-Hua Lin

  2. Graduate Institute of Industrial Economics, National Central University, 300 Jhongda Road, Jhongli, 320, Taiwan

    Pin-Hua Lin & Jong-Rong Chen

  3. Department of Economics, National Central University, 300 Jhongda Road, Jhongli, 320, Taiwan

    Chih-Hai Yang

  4. Research Center for Humanities and Social Science, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jong-Rong Chen

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  1. Pin-Hua Lin
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Correspondence to Chih-Hai Yang.

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Lin, PH., Chen, JR. & Yang, CH. Academic research resources and academic quality: a cross-country analysis. Scientometrics 101, 109–123 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-014-1362-z

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