Managing Faculty Research Productivity through Professional Networks

The primary function of a university is to produce new knowledge. This study examines the relationship between research productivity, collaboration patterns and individual attributes of a researcher in order to understand how research productivity determinants can be utilized to manage research performance of a university staff. The study is based on the data of 568 faculty members of Higher School of Economics, Saint-Petersburg. The data was collected from staff pages on university website and citation databases Scopus and Web of Science. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data. Research findings support ideas of previous work in the field: collaboration and research productivity are strongly correlated, collaboration patterns across disciplines are different, individual attributes of a researcher do not correlate with or directly influence his/her research performance. While promoting collaboration among faculty, university management should be aware of collaboration patterns within the discipline.