Research and Scholarly Activity Outputs
AAU believes that institutional reputation among research universities and research productivity are tied together. Research productivity is very crucial for the hiring and promotion of faculty members. To enhance research productivity, AAU regularly evaluates the output of its research and scholarly activities at the university level as well as the college level. Each college submits a summary report for all publications (research paper, books, conferences) conducted by faculty members at the end of each semester and at the end of the academic year to the university top management and the DSRGS. Moreover, each college submits an up-to-date list of publications in Scopus-Indexed journal at the beginning of each month of the academic year. Such evaluations should help the university management to take necessary actions to develop and enhance the quality of its research and scholarship. It is worth mentioning that the number of annual scientific journal papers published in journals indexed in Scopus has increased during the last three years. The overall increase in volume can be attributed to the incentives system for scientific publishing adopted by the university. The incentive system was revised to strengthen this leap towards achieving one of the strategic goals of the university to increase the percentage of faculty members who publish in high quality journals indexed in Scopus and other reputable journals.
AAU recognizes the role of students’ research in promoting the research ambitions of the university and the importance of integrating students more effectively into the research culture of the institution. AAU encourages students to be involved in research that has an impact on the social development of the community, supports the national goals and contribute to the development and revision of curricula. Student research activity should be under the supervision of a faculty member in AAU to ensure the quality of the submitted work (See Students Involvement in Research Policy).
AAU believes that the demand for increased research productivity is attended by the challenge of effectively measuring its scholarly output. To do this, AAU considers a variety of factors in several different ways since measurements of progress and success must change as institutions develop. AAU considers many factors to measure its research productivity such as:
- Number of externally-funded research projects.
- Number of publications in reputable journals.
- Number of publications in Scopus-Indexed journals.
- Number of presentations in high reputable conferences and forums.
- The average number of refereed published research per each faculty member per year.
- The value of the grant and regularity of being “PI” on a research grant.
In measuring publications, various metrics are being used to assess the quality as well as the quantity of a researcher’s output. Such measures include the quality of the journal and the number of citations (The number of times other researchers cite a publication).