Research productivity, quality, and impact metrics of Australian psychology academics

Crossing disciplinary boundaries: An ethnographic exploration of academic publishing invitations

Background: This autoethnographic study examines email invitations for health researchers to publish in journals outside their expertise, exploring implications for interdisciplinary research and knowledge production.Methods: Over three months, email invitations to publish outside the author's field were documented and analysed thematically and through reflexive journaling.Results: Five main themes in publication invitations were identified: emphasising novelty, promising rapid publication, appealing to research impact, flattering language, and persistent messaging. Reflexive analysis revealed complex factors shaping responses, including publication pressures, desires for prestige, and tensions between disciplinary norms and interdisciplinary collaboration. While invitations may present opportunities for novel collaborations, they often reflect predatory publishing practices.Conclusions: Navigating this landscape requires careful discernment, commitment to academic integrity, and reflexivity about one's positionality. The study underscores the need for researchers to critically interrogate the motivations behind such invitations. Further research could explore decision-making processes across disciplines and implications for academic publishing integrity and equity.

Research performance of academic psychologists in the United Kingdom

Research performance metrics inform decision making across the higher education sector. In this study we calculated up-to-date lifetime bibliometric research performance norms for academic psychologists in the UK, stratified by academic level and university mission group. Our performance metrics were publications, citations, h-index scores, first-author publications and average SJRs (SCImago Journal Ranks) for published in journals. These metrics were extracted from Scopus for a representative sample of 1339 academic psychologists employed at UK universities offering BPS (British Psychological Society) accredited undergraduate courses. We found that lifetime performance increased with seniority, though not in the predictable manner observed overseas. Academic psychologists in the Russell Group outperformed those outside of the Russell Group on all metrics, but these differences were largely due to the very strong research performance of the Russell Group professoriate, and could not be accounted for by the tendency for Russell Group academics to have been research active for a longer period of time than their equivalents outside the group. Overall, the research performance of UK academic psychologists was comparable to that of their Australian equivalents. Our research performance norms will be useful for benchmarking at the individual, departmental and institutional levels. However, they must be interpreted in context and considered alongside other indicators of scholarly productivity and performance.

Incentive Policies for Scientific Publications in the State Universities of Chile

Most state universities in Chile (15 out of 18) have monetary incentive policies for scientific publications, but they are based on criteria that do not necessarily aim to improve institutional performance in all disciplines. This work compares affinities and differences of these policies in three areas: (i) type of publications encouraged, (ii) beneficiaries, and (iii) monetary amounts per type of publication. It was found that the 15 universities encourage publications with WoS indexing, 13 do so for Scopus and SciELO, and 6 are open to other databases. Only seven institutions encourage the production of books and book chapters. As expected, the 15 universities direct the incentives to their academic staff, although with different requirements, six accept non-academic staff, and only one university considers its student body. In general, the highest monetary amounts are received by WoS publications, with differentiation by quartile or impact factor of the journal. All in all, there is a clear need to design incentive policies in universities that are more homogeneous and take into account the “quality” and “impact” of the research they publish based on different metrics that tend to provide robust analyses in the different areas of knowledge.