Evaluating top faculty researchers and the incentives that motivate them

We survey tenure-track faculty members employed in three fields in colleges of agriculture at land-grant universities—agricultural economics, agronomy, and food science—to evaluate the effects of different employment structures and incentives on research productivity. These evaluations include conducting statistical tests to assess any effects of different academic appointments and developing a regression model to measure the effects of these and other attributes on individual research productivity, as defined by the number of publications in the Thomson ISI Web of Science. We find faculty who hold larger teaching and extension appointments produce fewer publications; we also find positive effects on the number of publications for grants and university funding, multi-institutional research collaboration, and number of graduate students advised.