Patterns and Profiles in Faculty Publication Productivity

Abstract

Unlike prior studies that have examined the research productivity to develop various rank-order metrics of particular scholars or institutions, we seek to determine ways in which criminology and criminal justice faculty at the top 21 doctoral programs publish their research. To account for a potential diversity in faculty publication productivity, our study considers various outlets for faculty publications—journal articles, books, and book chapters—and develops composite profiles of publication productivity. Our intention is not to rank faculty and determine academic stars, but to distinguish groups of faculty similar in their patterns of faculty productivity. We analyze the publications of over 90% of all tenured and tenure-track faculty employed by the top 21 U.S. doctoral programs in criminology and criminal justice. Our latent profile analysis yielded five distinct profiles of productivity among the faculty in the top doctoral programs. Our study reaffirms the need for the use of multidimensional measures of publication productivity.