Scholarly Productivity of Academic SIOP Members: What Is Typical and What Is Outstanding?*
Nathan A. Bowling
Wright State University
Gary N. Burns
Wright State University
*The authors wish to thank Jesse Michel for his assistance with this project.
The career success of academic industrial and organizational (I-O) psychologists is largely a function of the number and quality of their journal publications. One’s publication record has implications for whether one receives tenure or is promoted, and it impacts one’s reputation both within the discipline and within one’s department and university. This paper reports normative data for the scholarly productivity of SIOP members who are employed in academia. Specifically, we report normative data for researchers at different career stages and different ranks (i.e., assistant, associate, and full professors), and we report data for psychology and business faculty and for SIOP Fellows and non-Fellows. In the following section, we provide a brief discussion of previous efforts to develop scholarly productivity norms.
Previous Research on Scholarly Productivity Norms
Several studies have reported normative productivity data within specific areas of psychology, including counseling (Royalty & Magoon, 1985), developmental (Byrnes & McNamara, 2001), and clinical psychology (Pasework, Fitzgerald, & Sawyer, 1975). Byrnes and McNamara’s study of developmental science faculty, for instance, reported separate publication rates for assistant, associate, and full professors. Other research has reported normative publication rates for academic psychologists in general without reporting separate analyses for different subdisciplines (Fennell & Kohout, 2002; Joy, 2006). Joy (2006), for example, reported normative data for academic psychologists during different career stages and for researchers working in different types of universities (e.g., elite research universities vs. master’s universities vs. 4-year colleges). Although Judge, Kammeyer-Mueller, and Bretz (2004) and Vancouver, Yoder, and More (2008) have examined predictors of career success among I-O psychologists, both provide very limited normative data.
Because normative publication rates may vary significantly across different disciplines, the above studies provide little information about the typical scholarly productivity of SIOP members. Thus, this paper reports normative data for academic SIOP members. We believe that this research has important practical implications. First, it can help SIOP members gauge their own performance relative to others in the discipline. Thus, the normative data reported later can serve a personal goal-setting and career-development function. Second, our findings could be used to help inform hiring and promotion/tenure decisions. That is, knowledge of typical levels of scholarly productivity could help departmental and university committees judge the performance of particular candidates. With information about normative productivity, committees could more easily avoid setting performance standards that are too high or too low.
Method
Participants
We identified 976 members in the SIOP Membership Directory (http://www.siop.org/memberdirectory/search.aspx) employed in academic settings. Of these academic members, 300 (30.7%) were randomly selected to serve as participants. The average participant earned his or her doctorate in 1989. Approximately 44% of participants were employed in psychology departments, 53% were employed in business schools, 61% were employed in doctoral programs, and 14% were SIOP Fellows. Assistant, associate, and full professors comprised 26%, 29%, and 41% of the sample, respectively.
Coding Participant Background Information
Information regarding year doctorate awarded was collected from the SIOP Membership Directory. Whether a participant was employed in a psychology department or business school was primarily determined from the SIOP Membership Directory. When the directory did not report this information, we obtained the participant’s affiliation from his or her school Web page. We used a number of methods to determine whether or not a participant was employed in a doctoral program. For instance, we examined their school Web page for this information, and we consulted a list of business school doctoral programs compiled by the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB; https://www.aacsb.edu/publications/dfc/phd-schools.asp). SIOP Fellowship status was determined by whether or not the participant’s name appeared on a list provided on the SIOP Web page (http://www.siop.org/siop_fellows.aspx). Academic rank was primarily determined by the SIOP Membership Directory, and in the few cases where the directory did not include rank information, we obtained it from the participant’s school Web page.
Coding Number of Publications
We recorded data for five indices of academic productivity: total number of journal publications, total number of first-author journal publications, number of articles published in the Journal of Applied Psychology (JAP), number of articles published in Personnel Psychology (PPsych), and number of articles published in Academy of Management Journal (AMJ). Data for each of these productivity indices were gathered from the PsycINFO database. Only peer-reviewed journal articles were included in the count of total number of publications and total number of first-author publications. Thus, books, book chapters, dissertations, and other nonarticle publications were not included. Book reviews and erratum were not counted towards the number of publications in any of the productivity indices. The last three productivity indices focused specifically on JAP, PPsych, and AMJ because previous research has indicated that these are generally considered the top peer-reviewed journals by SIOP members (Zickar & Highhouse, 2001).
Results
Table 1 reports the descriptive statistics and correlations between the study variables. As shown in the table, the five productivity indices were positively related to each other. Comparisons across productivity indices were examined using MANOVA (see Table 2). Results indicated that those employed in business schools generally scored higher on the productivity indices than those employed in psychology departments (Wilk’s λ = .88, F(5, 286) = 7.50, p < .01), that those employed in doctoral programs scored higher on the productivity indices than those employed in nondoctoral programs (Wilk’s λ = .88, F(5, 294) = 8.42, p < .01), and that SIOP Fellows scored higher on the performance indices than did non-Fellows (Wilk’s λ = .52, F(5, 294) = 53.89, p < .01). We also report normative productivity data for doctoral and nondoctoral faculty across different career stages and ranks (see Tables 3 and 4).
Discussion
This study provides important insights into the scholarly productivity of academic SIOP members. Not surprisingly, we found that the five indices of productivity were positively related to each other, that those employed in doctoral programs had higher levels of scholarly productivity than those employed in nondoctoral programs, and that Fellows had higher scholarly productivity than non-Fellows.
We also reported normative productivity data across different career stages and ranks. These data were reported separately for doctoral and non-doctoral programs. We believe that these data will be of special interest to many SIOP members. First, they can provide a basis for goal setting and career development. Second, they can assist in the development of standards used to judge the productivity of I-O researchers.
Finally, we found that business school faculty on average had higher scholarly productivity than psychology faculty. Although this difference was unexpected, we would encourage future researchers to examine its cause. Specifically, it would be beneficial to determine whether the difference was due to specific practices or procedures that differed across types of programs. Alternatively, it could reflect the possibility that business schools are more effective at recruiting productive faculty than are psychology departments.
Limitations
We should note a few limitations of the current research. First, our approach did not take into account the impact of participants’ publications. It is certainly the case that not all articles make an equal contribution to the field. Future research, therefore, could include citation counts as productivity indices.
Second, our focus on scholarly productivity was limited to work published in peer-reviewed journals. Of course other performance indices may be important to academic SIOP members, including teaching and service. One could further argue that the extent to which one publishes in peer-reviewed journals is a deficient measure of research performance and that other indices, such as writing and editing books and book chapters, presenting at academic conferences, and acquiring grant funding are also important. Despite this, past research has generally used peer-reviewed publication counts as scholarly productivity indices (Joy, 2006).
Finally, we should note that our method of searching for publications may have resulted in underestimates of number of publications. First, name changes and the inconsistent use of names (e.g., John Smith vs. John A. Smith vs. Jack Smith) can make it difficult to establish a complete publication count for some researchers. This in turn could artificially lower the obtained estimates of scholarly productivity. Furthermore, PsycINFO may not include every peer-reviewed journal in which SIOP members might publish their work. We should note, however, that PsycINFO does cover all of the primary outlets for I-O research, which is evident in the fact that each of the top 23 journals identified by Zickar and Highhouse (2001) are included by PsycINFO. Furthermore, the current estimates of scholarly productivity are similar to those found in previous studies employing different methods (Judge et al., 2004; Vancouver et al., 2008).
References
Byrnes, J. P., &McNamara, C. C. (2001). Evaluating doctoral programs in the developmental sciences. Developmental Review, 21, 326–354.
Fennell, K., & Kohout, J. (2002). Characteristics of graduate departments of psychology: 1999–2000. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Joy, S. (2006). What should I be doing, and where are they doing it? Scholarly productivity of academic psychologists. Perspective on Psychological Science, 1, 346–364.
Judge, T. A., Kammeyer-Mueller, J., & Bretz, R. D. (2004). A longitudinal model of sponsorship and career success: A study of industrial-organizational psychologists. Personnel Psychology, 57, 271–303.
Pasework, R. A., Fitzgerald, B. J., & Sawyer, R. N. (1975). Psychology of the scientists: Research activities of clinical, experimental, and physiological psychologists. Psychological Reports, 36, 671–674.
Royalty, G. M., & Magoon, T. M. (1985). Correlates of scholarly productivity among counseling psychologists. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 32, 458–461.
Vancouver, J. B., Yoder, R. J., & More, K. M. (2008). What makes a productive I-O faculty member: A predictive validity study. Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 48, 27–36.
Zickar, M. J., & Highhouse, S. (2001). Measuring prestige of journals in industrial-organizational psychology. Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, 38, 29–36.