...from the Directory of Graduate Programs Preparing Student Affairs Professionals. Wilson Education Abstracts was searched for each name. On average each faculty member had 8.6 publications over 23 year period and 2.3 publications between 2000 and 2005. Results of this study indicate that student affairs faculty have low publication productivity.

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Based on numbers of documents about publication productivity, this topic continues to be of acute concern to faculty, administrators, and researchers. Investigations range in scope from single departments or colleges to multiple nations (Teodorescu, 2000), conducted in many disciplines over varying numbers of years, and using differing methodologies and data. Because the literature on this topic is so vast, only a selected sampling of recent educational research is presented in the following review of literature.

Review of Literature

Large Samples

Studies using large samples of faculty in the U.S. were conducted by Fairweath er (2002; 2004), Fairweather and Beach (2002), and Allen (1997). In his 2004 study, Fairweather compared data from three administrations of the National Surveys of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF) to determine the relationships between teaching, research and pay. The samples were 5,056 faculty in 1988, 13,040 in 1993 and 8,341 in 1999 from public two-year colleges and from public and independent four-year institutions. Academic fields included agriculture, business, education, engineering, fine arts, health sciences, humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and other. In 1999 the mean number of career publications was 34 for faculty at public four-year institutions.

In an earlier study, Fairweather (2002) sought to determine the percentages of faculty who were productive in teaching and in research. His data included 25,780 full-time and part-time faculty at 817 colleges and universities. One major finding was that women faculty were less productive than men.

Fairweather and Beach (2002) presented weighted data for 1,518 full-time faculty in Carnegie Research 1 universities. They reported a range of publications in a two-year period from 2.56 for social sciences faculty to 8.0 for health sciences faculty; the mean for all 10 disciplines included in NSOPF-93 was 6.12 publications.

Allen (1997) tapped a NSOPF-93 weighted sample of 31,354 to study research productivity of women and minority faculty. Full-time regular faculty averaged slightly more than two refereed publications during a two-year period, with men faculty publishing three refereed articles for every one published by women.

Disciplines

Examples of disciplines in which investigations of research productivity have been studied include adult education (Rachal & Sargent, 1995), chemistry education (Pienta, 2004), educational administration (Tschannen-Moran, Firestone & Hoy, 2000), educational psychology (Smith, Locke & Boisse, 1998; Smith, Plant & Carney, 2003), gerontology (Rachal, Hereby & Grubb, 1996), mental retardation (Logan, Lott & Mayville, 2000), psychology (Schmauder, Robinson, & Hartley, 1999), and social work (Green, Baskind, Best & Boyd, 1997).

Methods and Duration of Studies

Methods of studying productivity and length of time of studies have varied from analyses of databases, surveys, and interviews, and from one year to more than 20 years. Budd (1999) focused on faculty publications between 1991 and 1993 and between 1995-1997 at institutions belonging to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Searched for numbers of faculty publications were Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index, and Arts and Humanities Citation Index. The mean number of faculty publications was 3.56 for 1991-93 and 4.2 for 1995-97.

Johnson and Hull (1995) sent questionnaires to institutions with undergraduate social work programs to determine faculty productivity. Program coordinators/directors distributed the instruments (no information about the number) and 100 women and 96 men returned them. Faculty were asked to report numbers of journal articles, proceedings, book chapters, monographs and other publications for a five year period. Fifty-six per cent of respondents had no publications. Of those who had published,...

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