Nature Of Academic Research Research Articles

Completing a doctoral dissertation during a global pandemic: Lessons learned.

In March 2020, when the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency, I was a doctoral student at the University of Calgary. I was about three-quarters of the way through the program and was in the early stages of data gathering for my dissertation. The interruption to my studies was sudden and abrupt.
 Fortunately, I was able to continue interviewing research participants after a six week pause, but in a manner dramatically different than planned. I was also able to lean heavily on technology to adapt to the new conditions. The topic of my dissertation was collecting faculty perceptions of the need and urgency for change in the publicly funded postsecondary education system. Ironically, my participants identified technology as a major force of change in their paradigm as well.
 While completing the writing of my dissertation, the results of my data analysis and new literature being published magnified the strength of my findings. In hindsight, I realize that the timing of my work bridged the pre and post-pandemic environments. It also happening in real time, at a pace that might be unprecedented.
 While the pandemic cannot be declared over, it has already become clear that the nature of academic research has been irrevocably altered and that the publicly funded post-secondary education system has been similarly impacted. The results of my research provide a clear view of some of those changing conditions and allows us to project some perceptions of the future of the system.

Investigation of Cognitive and affective Attitude of Teachers toward Research and their behavioral Intention to conduct Research in the Future

The study wants to determine the relationship between the cognitive and affective attitudes of teachers toward research and their intention to conduct research. To support and strengthen the study, theories on human attitude, human behavior, the relationship between attitude and behavior, the nature of academic research, and related studies were discussed. The study used a descriptive correlational method of research design and aided by fact-finding inquiry. The population of the study was 150 teachers of Divine Word Colleges in the Ilocos Region. Validated questionnaires were used to gather the data and to treat the data statistically, mean, and Pearson r was used. Mean was to measure the level of cognitive and affective attitude of teachers toward research and their behavioral intention to conduct research in the future and Pearson r was used to determine the correlation between cognitive and affective attitude toward research and intention to conduct research. The study found that teachers have high attitudes on positive cognition and affection toward research and moderate level on negative cognition and negative affection toward research. Both, cognitive and affective attitude toward research (positive and negative components) correlates to the behavioral intention to conduct research. Thus, the study recommends strengthening cognitive and affective attitudes toward research and minimize their negative attitude toward research through continuous training on research methodology.

Owning the peer review process: If we have to do this work, we should own it

As a new reference librarian, one of the most common questions I’ve encountered over the past year is some variation of “How do I find a peer reviewed scholarly article?” While the goal of professors who’ve assigned this task is to educate students on the nature of academic research, students are usually unclear on what “peer review” means and how to find this information. Often it is quite literally just a check box item amongst the facets. On its face, peer review as a means of authentication seems valid. Why not have a qualified scholar or two review a work to see if it is accurate and relevant for publication? Unfortunately, as we know from countless studies, peer review is subject to systemic and individual bias across multiple genres and forms that undermines the legitimacy of the process. Within the open access movement, this has led to calls for more transparency. Scholars see a move to open peer review, especially as part of the movement for open science, as a solution to the inefficiencies and inequities of a closed process. Certainly, the technologies of publishing on the open web now make this easier than ever, with annotation tools, commenting features, and automation, and this would presumably solve for bad actors who take advantage of the peer review process to enact academic theft, fraud, 4 or private retaliation.

The Nature of and Motive for Academic Research in Higher Education: a sub-Saharan African Perspective

The production of knowledge that is diverse in nature has gained importance in research-led universities. However, the nature of scientific knowledge and researchers’ motives of producing such knowledge across disciplinary fields in research-led Sub-Saharan African universities are not yet known. This study set out to access the voices of lead researchers regarding the nature and motive of academic research in Uganda’s research-led flagship institution-Makerere University. Findings showed that despite the pervasiveness of theoretical/basic research across disciplinary fields, other research orientations are evident as well. Although emphasis is placed on publishing in top-ranked journals, there is production of commercially-biased, policy-relevant and community-oriented research. Due to research funding constraints, the donor-driven research orientation has also become popular. We therefore conclude that although majority of lead researchers engage in basic research, the nature of academic research is varied and lead researchers’ motives of engaging in research are diverse. Because of the dominance basic and donor-driven research, we recommend that there is need to rethink the University promotional assessment model, diversify research funding sources, and selectively collaborate with the donors.
 
 Key words: Knowledge production, research-led university, research orientation
 
 

Investigation of Cognitive and affective Attitude of Teachers toward Research and their behavioral Intention to conduct Research in the Future

The study wants to determine the relationship between the cognitive and affective attitudes of teachers toward research and their intention to conduct research. To support and strengthen the study, theories on human attitude, human behavior, the relationship between attitude and behavior, the nature of academic research and related studies were discussed. The study used descriptive correlational method of research design and aided by fact finding inquiry. The population of the study were 150 teachers of Divine Word Colleges in Ilocos Region. Validated questionnaires were used to gather the data and to treat the data statistically, mean, and Pearson r were used. Mean was to measure the level of cognitive and affective attitude of teachers toward research and their behavioral intention to conduct research in the future and Pearson r was used to determine the correlation between cognitive and affective attitude toward research and intention to conduct research. The study found that teachers have high attitudes on positive cognition and affection toward research and moderate level on negative cognition and negative affection toward research. Both, cognitive and affective attitude toward research (positive and negative components) correlates to the behavioral intention to conduct research. Thus, the study recommends to strengthen cognitive and affective attitude toward research and minimize their negative attitude toward research through continuous training on research methodology.

Streams of Thought: Knowledge Flows and Intellectual Cohesion in a Multidisciplinary Era

How has the recent shift toward multidisciplinary research affected intellectual cohesion in academia? We answer this question through an examination of collaborations and knowledge flows among researchers. We examine the relevant case of Stanford University during a period of intense investment in multidisciplinary research, using a novel measure of knowledge flows in the short-cycled movement of published references from one researcher to another. We describe intellectual cohesion and its trajectory among 1,007 faculty members between 1997 and 2006, and then examine the social-structural antecedents of dyadic knowledge flows that help explain macro-level patterns. Results show that university collaborations have grown denser and more integrated across faculty members and their institutional divisions. However, this integration is led by “star” researchers and is accompanied by a greater centralization of knowledge flows around these individuals. Results illustrate important shifts in the nature of academic research, and contribute to a dynamic view of intellectual cohesion.

A Dynamic Capability View on the Determinants of Superior Performance in University Technology Transfer Offices

In addition to the more traditional mandates of teaching and research, universities have recently amplified their missions to become increasingly entrepreneurial (Siegel 2006). Academic entrepreneurship encompasses all the activities through which universities fulfil their ‘third mission’ (economic development): patenting, licensing, creating spin-offs, investing equity in start-ups, creating technology transfer offices (TTOs), incubators and science parks (Rothaermel et al. 2007). Within the broad field of university entrepreneurship, the analysis of the commercialization processes by technology transfer offices, usually the formal gateway between university and industry, focuses on the different mechanisms through which academic research and intellectual property (IP) is capitalized and commercially exploited. The topic of TTO productivity has been quite largely studied (Rothaermel et al. 2007). Prior research, in the attempt to identify the key determinants of technology transfer (TT) success, has mainly focused on the characteristics of inventions, such as patent protection and scope (e.g., Nerkar and Shane 2007; Shane 2002). Studies such as Hsu and Bernstein (1997), Chapple et al. (2005) and Thursby and Thursby (2002), however, have shown that the value of technologies is a not sufficient driver of TT success, as many worthy IP rights remain unlicensed. Indeed, due to high transaction costs characterizing the markets for technologies (Gambardella et al. 2007), only a minority of university inventions are transferred to the industry (Di Gregorio and Shane 2003). There is indeed a need to expand the search for performance determinants to other classes of factors (Rothaermel et al. 2007). Specifically, this chapter focuses on the management and organization of TT activities as key levers to overcome market failure and increase the productivity of TTOs. The study of these aspects is particularly critical because of the complexity of technology commercialization process, which occurs in conditions of high uncertainty. The embryonic and idiosyncratic nature of academic research makes it difficult to assess its commercialization potential (Ziedonis 2007). Also, the diversity of tasks involved in the TT process requires a broad range of competencies (Geuna and Muscio 2009), that is, technical, marketing, legal and proper organizational mechanisms to integrate such knowledge. The complexity of TT activities is reflected in the substantial heterogeneity of performance among the various universities (e.g., Chapple et al. 2005; Markman et al. 2005). By tackling the following research question, ‘How do different managerial and organizational approaches to technology transfer relate to different levels of performance?’, this chapter examines TT management and organization from a comprehensive standpoint. Adopting the dynamic capabilities perspective (Teece 2007) as theoretical lens, the chapter develops an interpretative framework, which aims to identify the managerial antecedents underlying superior capabilities in commercializing academic research. The model is then illustrated through the case of two Italian universities’ TTOs, which have been active in TT for many years with very different degree of success. This work contributes to the literature on university TT in several ways. Firstly, the use of qualitative research is quite original – quantitative empirical research based on survey and patent data tend to dominate this literature – and allows an in-depth illustration of the technology transfer process as a whole. Secondly, the comprehensive description of technology transfer microfoundations is particularly relevant both theoretically, to grasp the underlying mechanisms and process dynamics of TT, and practically, to ascertain implications for the commercialization of academic knowledge. The literature on university TT is gaining in importance in entrepreneurship and management research; a growing community of scholars is collecting extensive evidence, especially on transfer performance and efficiency, but most research has an anecdotal and practice-oriented nature. Few papers adopt well-defined theoretical frameworks to explain transfer dynamics, thus robustly contributing to the debate. Following recent calls for an investigation of capabilities and skills as organizational dimensions of TTOs (e.g., Chapple et al. 2005), this chapter is, to our best knowledge, among the first research work that adopts the dynamic capabilities approach to interpret the phenomenon of TT and to analyze its dynamics. Lastly, being our work based on a European Union (EU)-funded project, we follow Conti and Gaule (2011) who call for more investigation on the specificities of practices and performance of TTOs at the European level. The chapter is structured as follows. The next sections develop the theoretical framework, review the existing literature and describe the methodology employed. This is followed by a section reporting and discussing the findings from the case studies. Finally, conclusions are drawn and some avenues for future research are outlined.

Improving the Quality of Higher Education: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

A discussion on the importance of shifting our ideas about the nature of academic research.

The Temporal Organization of Bibliographies

Bibliographic reference lists are important constitutive features of academic papers. The nature of academic research involves the production and generation of bibliographic references, and the consequent books and articles contain bibliographic references of works used and/or cited. Bibliographies and reference lists have been used as data for methodological techniques such as citation analysis and network analysis but are rarely treated as socially organized textual artifacts, that is, as topics in their own right. This article looks at some properties of bibliographies and focuses on a known‐in‐common feature of research literature: the temporal organization of bibliographies. This involves the reading and comparison of texts and their accompanying bibliographies. This article concentrates on the emergence of the study of texts in the sociological fields of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis as a demonstration of the contingent and temporally organized nature of academic publishing.

The regional character of Asian multinational enterprises

In recent issues of this Journal a debate has raged concerning the appropriate nature of academic research in the Asia Pacific region. While we support the desire for both rigor and regional relevance in this research, we wish to demonstrate a strong commonality between the performance of large Asian firms and others from Europe and North America. This prompts us to question the need for a new theory of the MNE based on the experience of Asian firms. Like their counterparts elsewhere, the large Asian firms mostly operate on an intra-regional basis. While in the literature it has been assumed that the path to success for Asian firms is globalization, we show that the data supporting this is confined to a handful of unrepresentative case studies. We also present a bibliometric analysis which shows an overwhelming case study sample selection bias in academic studies towards this small number of unrepresentative cases.

A memory clinic in a department of old-age psychiatry: Its role in clinical and academic research

Memory clinics are specialist outpatient services offering assessment and evaluation in clinical practice. Memory clinics have been criticized for being preoccupied with research. We analysed the outcomes of 405 referrals to a memory clinic, providing a framework for discussion of the contributions of research to clinical practice. Of the 80% of referrals receiving a formal diagnosis, one-third were recruited on to treatment studies, contributing to clinical research. The remaining two-thirds of patients referred were followed up by specialized care services, and findings from assessment procedures were used to contribute towards academic research. These findings are discussed with reference to the role of research for a memory clinic in clinical practice. The benefits of clinical research are noted, in relation to the percentage of patients involved. The nature of academic research is clarified; it is a dual process, with findings both aiding clinical research and contributing to the body of knowledge about dementia as a possible disease process. It is concluded that memory clinics, as specialized outpatient services, are concerned with research as well as clinical practice, and it is essentially this research which enables clinical practice to develop.

Some aspects of methodology for research in information systems

A prerequisite for conducting sound academic research in information systems is to understand the research process – how to identify a suitable research problem, how to create a theoretical conjecture and hypotheses, how to collect data and how to test and analyse them. An appreciation of these issues is essential before any professional research may be conducted either for general academic publication or for a higher degree. This paper discusses, in general terms, the nature of academic research and how the scientific method is used in practice. It identifies three major categories of research and explains the steps which the research needs to follow if a claim is to be made that a significant addition has been made to the collection of knowledge. Easy to follow flow charts showing the necessary stages in the research process are supplied.

Some Aspects of Methodology for Research in Information Systems

A prerequisite for conducting sound academic research in information systems is to understand the research process – how to identify a suitable research problem, how to create a theoretical conjecture and hypotheses, how to collect data and how to test and analyse them. An appreciation of these issues is essential before any professional research may be conducted either for general academic publication or for a higher degree. This paper discusses, in general terms, the nature of academic research and how the scientific method is used in practice. It identifies three major categories of research and explains the steps which the research needs to follow if a claim is to be made that a significant addition has been made to the collection of knowledge. Easy to follow flow charts showing the necessary stages in the research process are supplied.