Increasing Scholarly Productivity
Tips for Administrators
- Define what counts as scholarly activity
- Communicate high expectations for scholarly activity
- Communicate that every faculty member has the capacity for greater productivity
- Communicate that scholarly productivity is valued in the process of faculty recruitment, promotion, and tenure recommendations
- Explain the promotion process to new faculty especially if it includes a requirement in scholarly activity
- Allow faculty to have release time to pursue a scholarly project
- Consider new faculty too; people who publish early tent to continue scholarly activity throughout their tenure at an institution
- Encourage/require graduate students to submit manuscript for publication
- Provide adequate financial support in department budgets
- Utilize grant money for professional growth activities
- Provide formal training to develop publication writing skills
- Through self-examination and trial and error, determine your best time of day to write.
- Design and implement mentoring programs
- Encourage weekly meetings of mentor pairs
- Encourage monthly meetings of all project participants
- Provide workshops
- Provide incentives
- Monetary
- Display work at a prominent place at the university
- Reward small achievements
- Avoid excessive focus on past failures
- Provide positive reinforcement
- Understand that not all faculty will change
- Create specific, measurable, time-bounded objectives to make change happen
- Collect data on every aspect of faculty activity
- Lead by example
- Appoint faculty leaders
- Encourage group projects
- Create research centers
- Reserve slots for a specified number of faculty each year
- Provide proper facilities and equipment
- Allow reasonable amounts of time for research
- Provide adequate training in research
- Provide access to personnel for content expertise and technical support for assistance with tasks such as literature searches, data entry and analysis, and consultation
- Provide opportunities to network with colleagues nationally and locally
- Target faculty development activities to various career stages (e.g., junior faculty, mid-career faculty, senior faculty)
- Design and implement programs to enhance faculty morale, strengthen faculty vitality, and highlight faculty commitment
