Trends and patterns of medical and health research at Moi University, Kenya, between 2002 and 2014: an informetrics study

Abstract

Research productivity and visibility are becoming increasingly important in the individual researcher's pursuit to build his or her research reputation, be promoted to the next academic rank within an institution and gain national and international recognition among peers. This paper analyses the research trends and patterns of the academic staff of the College of Health Sciences (CHS) at Moi University in Kenya between 2002 and2014 Conceptual settingResearch productivity and visibility is increasingly becoming important in the researcher's pursuit to build his or her research reputation, be promoted to the next academic rank within an institution, and gain recognition among peers nationally and internationally (Ocholla, Mostert and Rotich, 2016, Thomson Reuters 2008). Thomson Reuters (2008 notes that universities conduct an evaluation of their research performance in order to decide what research should be supported and what should not, or which research projects and researchers should receive more support than others, especially in areas where research funding is limited. Garfield (1996) has stressed the need for the assessment of researchers' productivity and impact amid dwindling research funds by stating that "in several countries where research funding is often highly political, many of the most deserving researchers receive a small fraction of research funds in contrast to parasites who hadn't published a paper for a decade or more". When measuring productivity and visibility, the global rankings count papers published in journals that are indexed in the main global indices -such as the Science Citation Index, Web of Science or Scopus, or their equivalents for other disciplines. Thomson Reuters (2008) states that the evaluation of research performance may help university leaders "understand the institution's position relative to global and domestic standards of research production: how much research is conducted? What is its impact? How many of the faculty members' articles are published in first-class journals? Is that number of publications increasing or decreasing?" Several authors (for example, Lancaster 1991, Jacobs 2002) have observed that evaluating individual or institutional research productivity and visibility involves the analysis of the number of publications produced, assessing the extent of collaboration, and determining the quality of research being conducted.Research productivity in academia has therefore generally been regarded in terms of the number of publications produced and published in peer-refereed journals per researcher. Publication in high-status, refereed journals, for the most part published in English, has become an important route to academic success in the competitive environment of global higher education (Altbach 2014). Nicholas and Ritchie (1978) and Hertzel (1987) refer to the studies that assess the productivity of researchers as descriptive bibliometrics (sometimes called productivity count studies), where a description of the characteristics or features of a litera...

A 20-year evaluation of PLAAS research outputs: Impact on the scholarly domain and in social media

“…Their senior rankings (Professor and South African Research Chair, Associate Professor and Professor, respectively) in the university hierarchy and extensive periods of tenure at PLAAS (20, 13 and 20 years, respectively) are likely contributing factors to their high productivity and associated metrics. This finding is consistent with other studies in the literature 7,27 which have found that seniority is a reliable predictor of high metrics.…”

“…It is apparent that all the authors produced almost the same proportion of each kind of output, scholarly and grey literature, the greatest difference being in Hall's outputs which were 44% grey and 56% scholarly literature. has been shown to apply in studies such as that of Rotich and Onyancha 27 . Similarly, in our study, there is evidence in the patterns of author productivity that Lotka's law applies.…”

“…Along with the total outputs picked up by Altmetric.com, Figure 4 displays the AASs for authors found in Altmetric Explorer, showing that the majority of authors had a total score of less than 10. Those that scored an AAS higher than 10 were Matose (11), Hara (27) and Hall (99). The notes given in Altmetric.com alongside the AAS (not shown here) are useful as they indicate ranking according to the score e.g.…”

Socio-demographic factors of fashion purchase. A case of apparel consumption among kenyan university students

“…The study targeted 20 universities in Nairobi County (4 publics and 16 private) with a total of 237,593 undergraduate students (Rotich & Onyancha, 2016) . Deng et al, (2009) fisher-based formula was adopted to obtain 534 respondents as sample.…”

Publishing Patterns of Health Informatics in Africa: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Related studies in health and the medical field, specifically focused on bibliometric analysis, has been carried out by Sullivan (2001), Onyancha and Ocholla (2009), Glover and Bowen (2004), Rotich and Onyancha (2016), Chuang, Chuang, Ho and Ho (2011) and Macías-Chapula and Mijangos-Nolasco ( 2002); however, none of these considered HIs as a related field of study. The quantity apportioned to publication of articles in a particular field varies in context, subject and phenomenon.…”