Insight into research productivity: Conceptual, theoretical, meta reviews and research agenda

Abstract

The significance of research productivity (RP) of an academic staff cannot be underrated. RP is one of the major responsibilities of academic staff. It is central to rewards, advancement and prestige of an individual academic staff. Besides, RP by academic staff is a way of showing accountability to the stakeholders of higher education institutions. The significance of RP to higher education stakeholders suggest a need to enhance RP of academic staff. One way to achieve this need is to have a holistic understanding of the concept and determinants, of RP. The first objective in this paper is to review literature on the concept of RP in order to bring out how the concept of RP has been defined and measured by previous scholars and the gaps they left for future researchers. The second objective is to review a theory (Mantikayan & Abdulgani's, 2018) that suggests predictors of RP. The third objective is to do a meta review, that is, to review literature reviews on predictors of RP as suggested by the theory in order to isolate gaps and propose hypotheses for future researchers.