Examining the Influence of Texas’ Strategic Plan for Increasing University Research: Loose Coupling and Research Production at Regional Public Universities

States have adopted a variety of policies to encourage universities to expand research production, with the hope of supporting economic growth and competitiveness. This paper considers whether a state-level initiative succeeded in influencing university-based research outputs among regional public universities. We test whether the Texas Research Incentive Program increased research production at a set of state universities as measured by total research spending, federally-funded research spending, the number of scholarly publications, and the share of publications published in high impact factor journals. Using a novel dataset and difference-in-differences analytic strategy, we found that TRIP adoption was associated with a 19%-25% increase in research expenditures at emerging research universities in Texas relative to a matched set of comparable universities. However, TRIP did not influence federally-funded research expenditures or journal publication outputs. We also show that federally-funded research expenditures influence publication outputs — both in amount and quality — and that number of full-time faculty influences both federal research expenditures and publication outputs. We discuss contributions to the literature on regional public universities, loose coupling, and research production, as well as implications for policy

In pursuit of excellence: a historical investigation of scientific production in Indonesia’s higher education system, 1990–2020

peer reviewedIn its pursuit of global university rankings, Indonesia introduced a series of higher education policies, one in 2014 to grant autonomy to a select group of universities, and another in 2017 to tie financial and promotional incentives to scientific publications for all researchers. To examine scientific productivity surrounding these policies, we use bibliometric data from Scopus spanning three decades from 1990 to 2020. We investigate the patterns of publication and collaboration and analyze them across journal quartiles, academic fields, and researcher cohorts. Our findings reveal that publications increased dramatically for both autonomous and non-autonomous higher education institutions after 2014. Single-university authorship was common practice and skewed publication quality towards Q3 and Q4 journals, while co-authorships with foreign organizations pulled the shift towards Q1 journals consistently across all fields. New researchers starting in 2014 published fewer Q1 and more Q3 and Q4 publications than the earlier cohort. We highlight policy implications on the need for a balance between publication quantity and quality and call on Indonesian policymakers to introduce holistic higher education reforms rather than introducing reforms that focus on the performance of the university for ranking purpose

Game of Brains: Examining Researcher Brain Gain and Brain Drain and Research University Policy

We leverage a rich bibliometric dataset on Taiwanese academia to explore scientific migration patterns. We investigate the movement and productivity of 21,051 highly active researchers who served in Taiwanese higher education institutions based on 30 years’ worth of publication and affiliation records from 1991 to 2020. The analysis shows evidence of brain drain in Taiwan since the 2010s, with the U.S. being both the biggest source of inbound researchers to Taiwan and top destination for researchers emigrating from Taiwan. China comes a close second to the U.S. as the top destination for outbound scholars. We also study how Taiwan’s universities recruited talent after the country adopted the 2005 excellence initiative and confirm the converging number of scholars recruited by World Class Universities (WCUs) and non-WCUs as WCUs, surprisingly, exhibit a dramatic decrease in new recruits. Our evidence uncovers that inbound scholars, after their move, are more productive than non-mobile colleagues; however, this effect declines over time. We discuss implications for the study of excellence initiatives and mechanisms of talent circulation that greatly impact research production and research university development