The University of Mauritius has a
rigorous system of peer-review when it comes to assessing applications from
academic staff for promotion purposes. The promotion criteria are divided into
three distinct categories namely teaching, research and service. Most staff is
promoted to higher grades based on their research marks. A quantitative marking
system allocates marks for publications and the conduct of funded research
projects. Every year academic staffs of the university are promoted from
lecturer to senior lecturer to associate professor until they reach the grade
of professor. This gives an indication that the performance of the university
in terms of research is a healthy one. On the other hand when we look at the
recent quality audit report we find that one of the faculties has had more than
a hundred research publications over one or two years. However, the report
including the recent visitor’s report highlight the main weakness of the
university to be research. Some have phrased it as meaningful research. Others
have highlighted the need for research in areas of national interests etc.
Where is the problem then?
We are very often confronted with
the term R&D when the theme of research is brought up either in the
industrial sector or in academia.
Research is basically a process of ‘free’ inquiry into areas or elements
about which we want to find logical answers to the questions that we have. We
might want to explain why something is the way it is, or what is the best
solution to a specific problem that we encounter, or how can we keep on
improving on things that are already working well. Research is a process that
takes time. As the name implies, research is about search and search again and
may be search until you find the answer or you give up. Hence the term,
re-search. It is a process that involves a methodical and or methodological
approach to inquiry and there is an outcome at the end. Whether it is about
collecting data and making sense out of them or pushing your brains to its
limits to reflect and try to explain things, research is about looking in some
depth at elements of interest or concern to the researcher or the research
community.
In developed countries it is
widely said and proven that research has been the driving force behind
innovation that leads to the socio-economic developments of the countries
through industrialisation, the design and development of new products and
services to the global markets. This is how the term research and development
has been coined, I believe. Research leads to the exploration of new ideas,
which in turn are developed into products and services that can be commercially
exploited or that can lead to significant improvement to the community (common
good). Naturally speaking, research and development activities often span over
years, even decades and in some cases more than that.
In contrast to the above, our
promotion system looks at the number of research publications of academics hence
I have coined the term research and publications. When people engage in
a rat race of research and publications we often end up with little or no
applications of the research. Researchers are driven by the mindset where after
a paper is successfully published in a peer-reviewed journal, then they move on
to undertake the next ‘research’ with a publishability prospect. The
other route many will take to distort the value of research is to fit
themselves into all possible situations where their name could figure out on a
published work to earn some marks. Hence we find ourselves being a bit the
jacks of all trades under the umbrella of ‘multidisciplinary research’.
Publications is a means to
disseminate the research findings and to provide others with a benchmark or
reference point on what is already available and what can be done. In the
earlier days we had no choice than to have recourse to paper-based publishers
and publishing and dissemination of one’s work was a tedious task. Only a ‘select’
category of persons could have access to those facilities. Nowadays with Web
2.0 where anyone can have his or her own site or blog dissemination of one’s
work is much easier than before. Publications through publishers is not the
only way to demonstrate scholarship as digital scholarship is gaining ground
extra fast as advocated by Prof Martin Weller of the Open University of UK.....
