As academic research evolves into distinct identities of specialised knowledge, institutional and paradigmatic barriers are formed between research teams, which demand enhanced research collaboration and cross-fertilisation of ideas. Drawing on the concept of cross-fertilisation, this paper adds original contributions to literature on research…

The scientific endeavour involves not only those working in research performing organisations--but also those in science funding, policy making, and think tank organisations, among others. The workforce in all these entities is composed of researchers, policy decision makers, managers, administrators, technicians, and other supporting staff.…

Over the last decades, most EU countries have profoundly reshaped their public research funding systems by shifting from traditional institutional block-funding towards more project-based mechanisms. The main rationale underlying this evolution builds on the assumption that project funding would foster research performance through the introduction…

Higher education institutions dominate research productivity in many parts of the world. Nonetheless, many academics in developing countries--including Tanzania--perform poorly in research. This study aims to qualitatively explore the barriers to research productivity in Tanzanian public higher education institutions. Using semi-structured…

Today, artificial intelligence technologies (AI) add significant complexities to organizational learning, performance, and change, and these technologies are proliferating across all industries at rapidly increasing rates (West, 2018). However, most organizations do not understand how to make sense of AI (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2017), and the…

Background: Pilot project programs offer early-stage and other investigators support to pursue emerging research areas, explore new methodologies, gain experience as principal investigators, and collect pilot data needed to pursue larger extramural research funding, such as from the National Institutes of Health. Pilot project programs may be…

Research administration is a matter of concern for institutions of higher education. While national trends reveal a lack of interest in investing in higher education institutions through federal and state allocations, such institutions have turned to sponsored research as a means of addressing critical issues of instruction, research, and public…

The field of research impact assessment (RIA) has seen remarkable growth over the past three decades. Increasing numbers of RIA frameworks have been developed and applied by research funders and new technologies can capture some research impacts automatically. However, RIAs are too different to draw comparable conclusions about what type of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of overhead rates on research application award success. The pressure to maximize overheads to fund the indirect costs associated with operating a research-intensive university and the perception that higher overhead rates disadvantage research proposals create an unhealthy tension between…

The decline in funding to state-supported institutions of higher education (IHEs) in Kentucky has compelled these universities to secure alternate forms of revenue to support their capacity to meet public expectations. These other funding streams include enrollment, philanthropic support, and acquiring sponsored funding for research projects and…

The academic research enterprise is highly complex, involving multiple sectors of society and a vast array of approaches. In "Demystifying the Academic Research Enterprise," Kelvin K. Droegemeier shows next-generation scholars across all disciplines how to become more productive earlier in their career, as well as how to help shape the…

As a relatively new function of the academic research enterprise, research development offices and research development activities are being used to improve grant funding success and achieve university research goals. This article describes and analyzes survey data collected as part of a sequential explanatory mixed methods investigation of…

Challenge-led interdisciplinary research is a relatively new way of bringing together disciplinary expertise in response to complex societal and environmental problems. Common difficulties include how to define 'interdisciplinary research'; how to improve the participation and flourishing of early-career researchers; and how to manage projects…

This article discusses the intensification of research performance demands in UK universities in relation to the complex terrain of academic identity formation. It considers whether a demand for academic researchers to produce and evidence economic and societal impact -- in the rewards game of the UK's performance-based research funding system,…

This article examines the development, impact and integration of interdisciplinary approaches in British Higher Education Institutions. It evaluates how the concept of interdisciplinarity has become popularised over time and embraced by disciplines such as archaeology. It then explores the extent to which interdisciplinary approaches have impacted…