Minority Entity Disability, Health, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research Productivity Facilitators

Abstract

The U.S. federal research agency’s (i.e., National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research [NIDRR], National Institutes of Health [NIH]) sponsored research capacity building (RCB) efforts in the field of disability, health, independent living, and rehabilitation have historically focused on individual research skill building activities (e.g., postdoctoral fellowships, advanced research methods and statistics courses, grant-writing workshops) as a main intervention to facilitate increased research productivity among investigators. However, investigators’ personal intrinsic attributes as well as federal research agency policy and systems context are rarely considered as research productivity facilitators. On trend, minority entity (ME) RCB efforts tend to focus on addressing a single challenge, research skill building, while oftentimes neglecting the importance of intrinsic factors and federal agency policy and systems context. The purpose of this review was to synthesize the available peer review and gray literature, and policy on factors that facilitate investigators’ research productivity. Recommendations for advancing the current state of the science on research productivity facilitators are presented.