Assessing the publication productivity of clinical psychology professors in Canadian Psychological Association-accredited Canadian psychology departments.

Abstract

Canadian clinical psychology professors in programs accredited by the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) are generally expected to perform in 3 major domains–research, teaching, and service. Measurement of performance in these domains is complicated. Research productivity, as measured by publication and citation counts, are often touted as objective metrics for evaluating professorial research performance; however, such quantifications can be problematic. Despite concerns, evaluators continue to use publication and citation counts for evaluating psychology professors. Use of these metrics without normative data is extremely problematic; moreover, without ceiling reference points or identification of outliers, new professors and those evaluating them have no perspective on reasonable expectations. The current study provides normative data and ceiling reference points using publically available data for the 255 professors currently in CPA-accredited Canadian clinical psychology programs, as well as submissions from an invited subset of those same professors. The data were stratified by professorial rank and sex, with the men and women having the highest publication and citation counts identified to create ceiling references. The results suggest that most CPA-accredited Canadian clinical psychology professors publish between 0 and 4 articles annually. Men publish significantly more than women at the Assistant and Full professorial ranks (p .05), but not at the Associate rank (p .10). Evidence also suggests that professors cannot be appropriately rank-ordered based on any single research index. Comprehensive results, implications, limitations, contextually based caveats, and directions for future research are discussed.