Abstract
This study creates a novel inventory that characterizes factors influencing the research agendas of researchers in all fields of knowledge: the Multi-dimensional Research Agendas Inventory-Revised (MDRAI-R). The MDRAI-R optimizes an initial inventory designed for the social sciences (the MDRAI) by reducing the number of items per dimension, improving the inventory’s psychometric properties, and including new dimensions (“Academia Driven” and “Society Driven”) that reflect the greater influence of social and organizational structures on knowledge production and demands for research impact. This inventory enhances our ability to measure research activities at a time when researchers’ choices matter more than ever, and it will be of interest to researchers, policy makers, research funding agencies, and university and research organizations.
Highlights
With research playing an increasingly central role in driving knowledge creation in fast-paced, globalized, connected, uncertain, and technology-driven contemporary societies, it is critical to better understand the factors that influence researchers’ research agendas, those based in academic settings
This subsection provides a brief introduction to structural equation modeling (SEM) to enable readers unfamiliar with this methodology to better understand the remainder of the study
The pilot study aimed to (a) reinforce any weak preexisting scales; (b) develop new questions related to entirely new themes that had emerged since the development of the original multidimensional research agenda inventory (MDRAI); and (c) ensure that the global number of items was reasonable by filtering out unnecessary items without compromising the factorial structure
Summary
With research playing an increasingly central role in driving knowledge creation in fast-paced, globalized, connected, uncertain, and technology-driven contemporary societies, it is critical to better understand the factors that influence researchers’ research agendas, those based in academic settings. This is important for researchers and those looking to create added value from the available research, such as policy makers, research funding agency managers, and university and research laboratory administrators (Ciarli & Ràfols, 2018; Franzoni & Rossi-Lamastra, 2017; Wallace & Ràfols, 2018). Researchers’ choices of research agendas have been examined in seminal works in the sociology of science (Zuckerman, 1978), the area remains underexplored and has mostly been analyzed from a qualitative perspective (Luukkonen & Thomas, 2016; McGrath, 1981; Shwed & Bearman, 2010).
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