The Influence of Personal and Organizational Factors on Researchers’ Attitudes towards Sustainable Research Productivity in Saudi Universities

This paper studies organisational and personal factors affecting the behaviour of academic staff in Saudi universities. It seeks to investigate the beliefs of academic staff regarding the use of ICT and other factors to enhance the productivity of their scientific research. Also, this study aims to improve the sustainability of publication in Saudi universities. ICT includes using the library system for accessing research repository databases such as Science Direct, Web of Science, Scopus, etc. and other factors. The authors also developed the Importance Performance Map Analysis (IPMA) for these factors in order to provide guidelines for Saudi universities to build university systems to manage and measure the research productivity of academic staff. In summary, this research identifies factors critical to enhancing research productivity in Saudi universities. This will help to improve the sustainability of publication in Saudi universities. By enhancing the sustainability of publication, the reputation of Saudi universities will be improved and the reputation of academic staff in Saudi universities. As well the sustainability of publication will assist the promote of Saudi academic staff. The results show that personal factors such as personal use of ICT and organisational factors such as job satisfaction, university policy, IT funding, international collaboration and the level of ICT use in the university have positive effects on scientific research productivity among academic staff at Saudi universities.The authors wish to thank Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) under Research University Grant Vot-20H04, Malaysia Research University Network (MRUN) Vot 4L876 and the Fundamental Research Grant Scheme (FRGS) Vot 5F073 supported under Ministry of Education Malaysia for the completion of the research. The work is partially supported by the project of the Grant Agency of Excellence, University of Hradec Kralove, FIM, Czech Republic (ID: 2206-2019) and by the SPEV project, University of Hradec Kralove, FIM, Czech Republic (ID: 2103–2019). This project is also partially supported by the grant TIN2016-75850-R from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness with FEDER funds