Refining the Measurement of Factors Predicting Faculty Research Publications

Background: Research plays a large role in the professional expectations of faculty in all disciplines. In the health professions, faculty are expected to conduct research while caring for patients, educating learners, and carrying out major administrative roles. Given the difficulty in balancing these many responsibilities, it is sensible for academic institutional officers to seek to understand the factors that strongly relate to faculty research productivity, and to measure faculty members’ standing on those factors. The purpose of the study was to investigate the validity of the research productivity items from Bland and colleagues’ scale as predictors of publication counts among junior and mid-career faculty at the King Abdulaziz University Faculty of Dentistry (KAUFD). Methods: This is an observational study that was conducted at KAUFD. A questionnaire modified from the Bland model was emailed to all full time assistant and associate professors. Two main sets of statistical analyses were run: exploratory factor analysis to investigate the internal structure of the scale and regression analysis to relate scale factors to counts of publications in peer-reviewed journals. Results: Out of 106 faculty, 98 participated (92.5%). Faculty publication count in ISI-indexed journals from January 2013 to the survey time showed a Poisson distribution, with a mode of zero publications (44 participants) and a maximum of 14 publications. The exploratory factor analysis showed that factors 1-4 accounted for 46% of the variance (first factor alone explained 26% of the variance). Conclusion: Our findings suggest a different factor structure between faculty input gathered via Bland and colleagues’ (2005) questionnaire and what the authors originally proposed. Institution- or department-specific validation of this measure is warranted to make reliable conclusions of any comparisons or intervention.