The effectiveness of academic research enterprise depends on several factors including talented and interconnected scholars, adequate and dependable resources, and quality research. These elements need to function in harmony in order to result in research knowledge that adds value to society. Given that research capacity and innovation are…

This paper outlines the nature of predatory open-access journals. These are journals that do not exist as vehicles to promote research or the efforts of scholarly organizations, but exist simply as a means for profit. As with many efforts in education and the social sciences, when financial incentive is the main driving force, quality and…

Ever since the publish-or-perish era began sometime ago, academics in the humanities have experienced a widening gap between their two primary obligations, teaching and research. Bad enough for tenure-track junior faculty, the tension between the demands of writing, delivering, and publishing papers is even worse for graduate students because of…

In a response to the Minnesota Conference on the Future of Doctoral Study in English, argues that English departments should not become service departments for other academic departments. Urges the replacement of adjunct faculty members with tenure-earning assistant professor lines and claims that recognition through publication serves the…

Teaching should be honored as teaching and not as scholarship. Instead of redefining scholarship to include teaching, the task force has redefined teaching as scholarship in the generally accepted, "publish-or-perish" sense. (Author/SLD)

The value of research and the career of a university lecturer depend heavily on the success in publishing scientific papers. This article reviews the guidelines for writing and submitting research papers. The three most important success criteria in publishing are as follows: the paper describes a good research, it is written according to the…

From the time a new faculty member is hired until a final decision is made on promotion and tenure, his/her record will undergo constant scrutiny by departmental personnel committees, school and/or university-wide committees, external reviewers, and administrators. A formal and clear-cut mentoring system can benefit new faculty members: senior…

A study investigated why productive scholars do research and what factors they believe contribute most to their success as published researchers. Subjects, 39 mass communications researchers who had been identified by a previous study as being the top producers of mass communications research articles, completed a questionnaire employing a…

For a communication studies administrator, the scholar envisioned in Ernest Boyer's "Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate" is an instructive guide to faculty and administrators pondering the balance or relationship between teaching and research. It is an immodest claim that each discipline teaches well but broadly…

An approach for studying faculty research productivity over time as measured by the number of scholarly articles published was developed and tested. The approach attempts to take into account the fact that both the amount of available professional journal space and the number of faculty competing for publications have changed over time by…

A study focused primarily on determining whether women and men are being published at equal rates in the leading journals of the National Communication Association (NCA). The study also examined whether: females publish more in a particular area or journal; mixed-sex collaboration is as prevalent as same-sex collaboration; female scholars produce…

A study examined a number of sources regarding a growing trend against the importance of academic publishing, including various articles that have appeared in the popular and academic press both for and against the "publish or perish" mentality. The literature review was grounded in E. Boyer's 1990 report "Scholarship Reconsidered:…

The dual purpose of researching what an individual academic loves and using it for career advancement is a created possibility, not an organic outcome. Such possibilities can be created by using the following approaches: (1) research a subject of interest to yourself and then submit it to a population that is interested in the same material; (2)…

Two possible causes for the demands for research and publication on small college campuses are explored with a focus on the effect on promotion and tenure. The first hypothesis is that many administrators feel faculty research is a partner to faculty teaching effectiveness, and thus, if master teaching is the goal, faculty must excel at research.…

Arguments about trade-offs existing between teaching and research affect much of the communication discipline as scholars engage in arguments about the future directions of departments. A study summarized more than 40 quantitative studies and found a small heterogeneous positive correlation between teaching effectiveness and research productivity.…