Abstract
Introduction: Productivity as a function of demographic variables is a management conundrum. While previous studies have covered the sciences and humanities, the field of allied health sciences remains uninvestigated. Aims: The aims of this study included (a) investigation of publication productivity trend across age groups, (b) finding out the age at which the publication productivity peaks, and (c) to study the variance in publication productivity across age groups, gender-wise. Method: Following a cross-sectional longitudinal study, the data set covered 1174 Research Productive Units (RPU) from 1995-96 to 2014-15 relating to scientific publications involving 114 teaching faculty in speech and hearing institutions. Findings:The findings of this study revealed that research performance score for scientific publications showed two peaks, in the age group >55 yrs and another in the age group of < 30 yrs, the former being the higher of the peaks. Other findings include: The male teaching faculty (N=520, Mean score=12.47, Median =12.00 SD=4.671) fared better than the female teaching faculty (N=654, Mean score=11.70, Median = 9.00 , SD=4.784 ). Conclusion:The study can contribute to formulation of appropriate HRD strategies and policies in areas like determination of age for retirement, fixing of differential teaching workload for different age groups based on the “research productive” yrs.
Highlights
Productivity as a function of demographic variables is a management conundrum
There are nine institutions which are offering doctoral programmes in speech and hearing in India and on the basis of information gathered from the institutional website, the annual reports of the institutions, questionnaires sent to these institutions followed by field visits, information on scientific publications and the demographic data was collected from these speech and hearing institutions
Contrary to the findings of numerous studies exploring the relationship between age and research productivity in the past as well as in recent times, which reported a decline as age increases, especially, after the chronological age of 40 yrs, (Lehman,[4] Cole S,[6] Kyvik,[8], Ebadi A, and Schiffauerova A),[22] the finding of this study reveals that the best productivity yrs in so far as the research productivity is concerned, occurs in the later yrs in the age beyond 50 yrs in the intervals of 51-55 and 56-60 yrs
Summary
Productivity as a function of demographic variables is a management conundrum. While previous studies have covered the sciences and humanities, the field of allied health sciences remains uninvestigated. Method: Following a cross-sectional longitudinal study, the data set covered 1174 Research Productive Units (RPU) from 1995-96 to 2014-15 relating to scientific publications involving 114 teaching faculty in speech and hearing institutions. Findings:The findings of this study revealed that research performance score for scientific publications showed two peaks, in the age group >55 yrs and another in the age group of < 30 yrs, the former being the higher of the peaks. Productivity as a function of demographic variables, especially, age: how much and at what point of time in the life cycle of academicians and researchers is a management conundrum to be understood and solved for proper planning and design of appropriate policies for research management in scientific and academic institutions, and a mat-. While conducting a critical review on Publication Productivity among Scientists, Fox,[2] cites the following studies: Lehman[3] published evidence that
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