The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established the Building University Infrastructure Leading to Diversity (BUILD) initiative to increase engagement and retention of undergraduates from diverse backgrounds in biomedical research. Portland State University, in partnership with ten other academic institutions, received a BUILD award and…

The research ethics committee (REC) is a key element of university administration and has gained increasing importance as a review mechanism for those institutions that wish to conduct responsible research, along with safeguarding research ethics standards, scientific merit and human rights of participants. Given the critical role of the…

Institutional research management (RM) is increasingly seen as a strategic force, not only to raise the research output per academic, but also the quality thereof. RM, therefore, has to attend to researcher development (RD). How RD is achieved, as part of RM, is still viewed as an embryonic field with attendant calls for additional research.…

The purpose of this study was to analyse the determinants of the intention of academic researchers to collaborate on research projects with the carriers of innovation. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach was employed to analyse survey data from 266 stratified sampled researchers and 11 key informants from different disciplines in two…

The purpose of this study was to analyze and develop an in-depth understanding of the characteristics of an R3, predominantly undergraduate institution of higher education with a high-performing externally-funded research portfolio. This study used a qualitative single-bounded case study approach and utilized a focus group structure for the…

In this paper we critically examine the research landscape in South Africa. We do this by documenting the progression and transformation of the country's National Research Foundation (NRF)-rated researchers from 2005 to 2015. Results indicate that most NRF-rated researchers in South Africa are white and male but this trend is slowly changing with…

The nation's leading academic hospitals aspire to being the leader in medical research, but as the role of medical research grows in size and complexity, many departments are left without proper research support or oversight. This research explored the need for a research administrative support program to resolve many of the issues facing faculty…

In 2016, Dalhousie University's Research Ethics Board created an interdisciplinary working group to identify the key ethical challenges of SoTL research, with the overarching aim of recommending best practices and communicating these to researchers in order to support and expand the conduct of ethically sound SoTL research. This essay reflects on…

Drawing on in-depth interviews and classroom observations with 14 academics from the field of applied sciences, this case study provides empirical evidences on the research-teaching nexus in the context of Chinese research universities by examining the multi-layered factors at the individual, institutional and organisational levels. The study…

In the years since the second Thatcher government (1983-87), and continuing until the present, universities in the UK have been subjected to a series of neoliberal reforms which have had a deleterious effect on academics' working conditions and on the kind of research they are required to produce. 1986 saw the introduction of regular sector wide…

Performance management systems have been an inevitable consequence of the development of government research evaluations (GREs) of university research, and have also inevitably affected the working life of academics. The aim of this paper is to track the development of GREs over the past 25 years, by critically evaluating their adoption in the UK…

Academic careers and institutional reputations are closely linked with the ability to secure funding and publish work. In today's competitive environment, it is essential for research to be clearly communicated. In our experience, many researchers need assistance with communication skills, and institutions that offer professional services in…

The Chief Research Administrator (CRA), also known as the Vice President, Vice Provost, or Vice Chancellor for Research, plays a key role in the research university. It is a position of power and not only affects the mission of the institution, but also controls a very large and vital percentage of external funding. The lack of information on how…

Far from allowing a governance of universities by the invisible hand of market forces, research performance assessments do not just measure differences in research quality, but yield themselves visible symptoms in terms of a stratification and standardization of disciplines. The article illustrates this with a case study of UK history departments…

The National Science Foundation data provided the necessary information for the investigation into the top 45 funded predominately undergraduate institutions. These funded institutions sponsored research office staff members were sent surveys regarding the servant leadership characteristics of their managers. The Results showed two areas of the…