Success in research: Factors that contribute to increased research productivity across librarianship and other disciplines.
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Canadian Association for Information Science 42nd Annual Conference, May 29, 2014
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Success in research: Factors that contribute to increased research productivity across librarianship and other disciplines.
- 1. Success in Research: Factors that Contribute to Increased Research Productivity Across Librarianship and Other Disciplines Kristin Hoffmann (University of Western Ontario) Selinda Berg (University of Windsor) Denise Koufogiannakis (University of Alberta)
- 2. Background Some librarians are successful researchers; others struggle to be productive. The library literature focuses on struggles and barriers more than on what contributes to success.
- 3. The Larger Study What factors have contributed to librarians’ success as researchers? Overall goal: to develop a survey tool to help us answer that question Phase One Identify factors – literature review Phase Two Create a validated instrument Phase Three Identify key factors in librarians’ research productivity
- 4. Finding the Literature ● Searched in LISA, Library Literature, Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, and a personal database of literature on librarians as researchers ● Searched more comprehensively for literature on librarians ● Representative, not exhaustive search
- 5. Literature on Research Productivity ● What factors have been identified in the scholarly literature as contributing to academic research productivity and how were these factors identified? ● What are the similarities and differences between the success factors for academic librarians and those for non- librarians? What potential factors have not yet been studied for librarians?
- 7. Individual Peers and Community Institutional Academic rank Collaboration Access to and use of resources Demographics Community Department/Institution qualities Education and experience Guidance and support from editors Extrinsic motivation Personality traits Impact of family and personal relationships Positive organizational climate Professional commitment to research Mentoring Time Peer support Categories of Success Factors
- 8. Individual Peers and Community Institutional Academic rank Collaboration Access to and use of resources Demographics Community Department/Institution qualities Education and experience Guidance and support from editors Extrinsic motivation Personality traits Impact of family and personal relationships Positive organizational climate Professional commitment to research Mentoring Time Peer support Most Prevalent Factors Overall
- 9. Individual Peers and Community Institutional Academic rank Collaboration Access to and use of resources Demographics Community Department/Institution qualities Education and experience Guidance and support from editors Extrinsic motivation Personality traits Impact of family and personal relationships Positive organizational climate Professional commitment to research Mentoring Time Peer support Most Prevalent Factors among Research Papers
- 10. Individual Peers and Community Institutional Academic rank Collaboration Access to and use of resources Demographics Community Department/Institution qualities Education and experience Guidance and support from editors Extrinsic motivation Personality traits Impact of family and personal relationships Positive organizational climate Professional commitment to research Mentoring Time Peer support Most Prevalent among Research Papers – by Group
- 11. Papers with a Measured Component ● 7 librarians, 23 non-librarians ● 26 surveys (including all librarian studies); 4 data set analysis; 1 systematic review o survey sample sizes ranged from 55 to over 10,000 o survey response rates ranged from 6% to 92% ● geographically diverse
- 12. Definitions of Research Productivity ● Dissemination o articles only o articles and books, book chapters, presentations, editorships o publication in top-tier venues ● Grants received ● Designing research projects ● Some definitions also applied other parameters
- 13. Individual Peers and Community Institutional Academic rank Collaboration Access to and use of resources Demographics Community Department/Institution qualities Education and experience Guidance and support from editors Extrinsic motivation Personality traits Impact of family and personal relationships Positive organizational climate Professional commitment to research Mentoring Time Peer support Measured Research Papers – Most Positive Relationship
- 14. Individual Factors Education and experience ● many aspects were noted as having a positive impact: inclusion of research methods training as part of an educational program, participating in continuing education, doing research as part of one’s education, level of education obtained, where participants were educated Professional commitment to research ● several papers showed a positive correlation with an individual’s commitment to doing research (making it a priority, making effort, etc.) and positive outcomes in terms of research productivity
- 15. Peers and Community Mentoring ● many papers identified a positive connection: simply being mentored was most often noted, as well as ease of finding a mentor and having an influential mentor; being a mentor, specifically research-related advising, was significant in two studies
- 16. Institutional Factors Time Access to & Use of Resources ● The two most commonly measured institutional factor aspects with consistent results demonstrating relationship with research productivity. ● Often time and financial support from the institution/ department were tied together. ● Time and Resources appeared to have a relationship with research productivity in most studies, however there was some inconsistency across studies. ● Librarian studies that examined these factors also indicated a relationship.
- 17. Conclusions ● Reinforces the need for more research on success factors for academic librarians’ research productivity ● Identifies specific factors for which further research would be valuable ● Focusing on success factors will help develop a stronger research culture
- 18. Next Steps ● Examine tools used in these studies ● Create a validated research tool to further study success factors for academic librarians Phase One Identify factors – literature review Phase Two Create a validated instrument Phase Three Identify key factors in librarians’ research productivity
Editor's Notes
- Happy to be here presenting at CAIS as part of the Librarians’ Research Institute Symposium, and we’re sorry that Denise can’t be here with us.
- The motivation for this research came from the fact that the library literature focuses almost exclusively on barriers to conducting research, almost as a kind of justification for why librarians “can’t” do research – but the three of us are productive researchers, and we know that many other librarians are too, so we wanted to turn the tables and focus on what helps us be successful. We also know that many librarians struggle to get their research off the ground. The challenges and barriers are real and important – we don’t want to minimize their relevance – but they aren’t unique to librarians, and it’s possible that the literature has overemphasized the barriers and has ignored the fact that there are many practicing academic librarians who have successfully completed and disseminated research findings.
- What we’re presenting here is the first component of a larger study to identify the factors that have contributed to librarians’ success as researchers. In this first phase, we’ve conducted an extensive literature review to identify the success factors that have been studied and discussed in the literature.
- In this first phase, we first focused on gathering literature related to librarians’ research productivity. We looked in subject-specific and general article databases. Selinda and I had also created a personal database of literature on librarians as researchers, for a previous research project, and we mined that database as well. After we started looking in the library literature, we realized that it would also be helpful to look at the literature on research productivity in academia more generally, so we added that component to our lit searching as well. We also reviewed reference lists and conducted cited reference searches. But – we want to add the caveat that we did not do an exhaustive search, particularly not for the “non-librarian” literature. We were looking for a representative sample of the literature, so that we would have a good idea of the kinds of research that had been done, the ways it had been done, and what kinds of factors had been identified.
- So here are the questions that guided us as we read through the literature on research productivity. (read them) You may notice that I’ve said “non-librarians” and perhaps you were expecting to hear a contrast between librarians and faculty… well, so were we, and while there was a lot of literature on faculty research productivity, there was also research that looked at doctors (clinical faculty), medical residents or fellows, contract faculty, students, and other practitioner groups such as social workers. So, “non-librarian” is a more comprehensive way of describing that group. Interestingly, none of the papers that we found had studied LIS faculty specifically.
- This chart outlines how we categorized the literature we found. First: we found 121 articles. 68 were about librarians, 53 were about non-librarians. Remember, we were more focused on finding library literature initially, so this does not mean that there are more articles about research productivity in librarianship than in other disciplines – simply that that’s the literature we looked for to inform our study. Third level of the tree: we identified whether the paper presented the results of a research study or not. Non-research papers were primarily opinion pieces, reflections, or descriptions of research support initiatives. In the fourth level: we looked more closely at the research articles to determine whether the paper described a direct connection between a particular factor and research productivity. If it did NOT describe a direct connection, we “excluded” it; if it DID make a direct connection, we “included” it. The Included papers were the ones we looked at in the most detail. You’ll notice that there were only 11 Librarian Included Research articles, and 31 Non-librarian… our sample of non-librarian papers probably favoured research articles that drew a direct link between a factor and productivity, but this also points to a possible need for more librarian research on factors that influence research productivity. The last distinction we made was between papers that measured a link between a factor and research productivity, and those that reported on individuals’ perceptions of what affected their productivity. For example, a “measured” paper might look at the correlation between a researcher’s academic rank and their productivity, while a “perceived” paper might ask researchers how they think their rank affected their productivity. The proportion of measured, perceived, and studies that used both approaches was very close in both the librarian and non-librarian sets of research articles: Both sets of literature used measured approaches approximately 60% of the time within the studies we examined; studies focused on perceived impacts were used 30% of the time within librarianship and 25% in other disciplines; and 10% of the time a mixture of measured and perceived approaches were used in LIS, 15% for other disciplines.
- The overall success factors we identified can be grouped into three broad categories: individual: factors that relate to a quality or an attribute of an individual researcher, something about that person peers and community: factors that relate to the networks around an individual researcher, including personal relationships and professional relationships such as mentors, co-researchers, or colleagues more generally Institutional: factors that relate to the researcher’s institutional environment and context, factors that are imposed from outside the individual Notes: there’s some overlap between the categories: e.g., formal mentoring could be imposed by the institution, but we’ve included it under mentoring; time includes both a component of what an institution allots for time to spend on research and a component of someone chooses to use that time
- These highlighted factors were the factors that were most often addressed in the literature as a whole, out of all 121 papers. No huge surprises, although Professional Commitment to Research was a factor that we hadn’t initially been thinking about, and I think that is largely because the librarian literature focuses on barriers to conducting research, and those barriers are funding, time, skills, education, and the degree to which an individual feels supported to do research.
- Here we are looking at the most prevalent factors studied among the Included Research papers – those that made a direct connection between a particular factor and research productivity – and this shows the most prevalent factors for both measured and perceived connections. So what we see here is that there has been less research about access to and use of resources – although it’s discussed a lot in the literature – and more research about personality traits and positive organizational climate.
- Again, here we are looking at the Included research papers – those that made a direct connection between a particular factor and research productivity – and also looking at which factors were more often researched by librarians and non-librarians. Both librarians and non-librarians often researched Education and Experience, and Time – the blue cells. When we say “often”, we mean that the factor was studied by at least half of the papers in that group. The purple cells are the other factors researched most often by non-librarians. The green cell is the other factor researched most often by librarians. Two interesting things stood out from these factors: Time: while both librarians and non-librarians studied how time affected research productivity, librarians focused a lot on release time while non-librarians focused more on other aspects such as allocation of time Mentoring receives a lot of attention and is an area of interest for librarians, but we have seldom researched its effect on research productivity [transition to Selinda]
- Every paper except for one included some aspect of dissemination as part of their definition of research productivity. (The one that didn’t was Kennedy & Brancolini’s study of librarians, which looked at whether librarians reported doing research or not.) For most studies, dissemination included publication of articles, but other forms of dissemination were sometimes included as well. Some studies also included grants received, and one included the more general concept of “designing research projects.” Some definitions of productivity also applied other parameters: a time frame for publications (last two years / three years / career) frequency of publication, not just a count differentiated between whether the author was primary or secondary A few papers also clustered authors into different categories of productivity: high producers, middle producers, low producers.
- Measured research literature - most positive relationship as reported by the authors
- The vast majority of the studies in this category were non-librarian. The one factor that had 3 positive librarian studies (measured) was Education and Experience. The other 4 categories has 1 librarian study each. For Education and Experience, the librarian studies: 1. Burlingame and Repp - - a higher percentage of librarians with a doctorate (76.9%) were authors as opposed to 53.2% of librarians holding masters degrees. 2. Best and Kneip - LIS school the librarian attended contained a course on research methods and provided options for special topics courses, field placements, and directed studies = connection to a higher number of articles being produced by working librarians 3. Fenske and Dalrymple - for librarians in academic health science library settings, 39% of the variation in research productivity was explained by the combination of “institutional support”, grant activity, courses, and CE training
- Collaboration motivation from research team members and working partnerships one paper looked exclusively at aspects of collaboration that led to greater productivity; strongest predictors were number of research group meetings and number of collaborators
- Time defined by researchers as release time, time dedicated to research by faculty, teaching load. Access to and use of resources defined as clerical support, financial support, computer and lab access, other support services (including libraries) Interesting finding: High producers spent less time in teaching and more in administration. however, time spent on research was not significant (Megel) Availability of time and research productivity did appear to have a relationship in most studies, findings were inconsistent a strong predictor of research productivity (Fenske, Gutovich, Hardre (teaching load inversely), Havener, Hillman); a moderate relationship (Paul); no significant relationship (Valle) Librarian article(s): Havener found a positive relationship between amount of time dedicated to research and research productivity
- This examination and review of the literature on success factors that contribute to increased research productivity reinforces the need for more research on success factors for academic librarians, - and in particular, research that measures a relationship between factors and productivity - one of our initial conversations was - do we need to do another study? but in fact we learned that we do need it and points to specific factors for which further research would be valuable: - mentoring (we think there’s more research on mentoring than there is) - and what specifically is important - professional commitment to research as we work to develop a research culture among librarians, it will help us to be able to identify the factors that are most important for librarians - be mindful of what will actually help us
- add Phase 1-2-3 graphic The authors will use the information gained from this review to create a validated research tool that will be used to further study the factors that academic librarians perceive as being important to their success as researchers. Ultimately, an increased knowledge of what factors allow librarians to become successful researchers should enable more librarians to build on those successes and allow academic institutions to provide better support for research by professional librarians. This will build a stronger foundation of research evidence within our professional knowledge base, which in turn will strengthen the profession and assist with better decision making by practicing librarians.