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Most of my career has been with teaching (or student?) centric institutions in social sciences and business. Most have a "purported" interest in and incentives for research and publication. They often do not have the funding to allow full-time focus on research activities.

A way to stay relevant in the research field is to work with groups of faculty ("consortia"), who can share the load. There is a coordination overhead in this that must be factored into the equation.

I also recommend to my HEI clients in this area that they adopt a faculty research and scholarship policy fashioned after Boyer's Model. Unless you are in the physical sciences and performing fundamental research, most faculty research will be the scholarship of application or integration. We also need more scholarship of teaching and learning but it is sadly neglected.

I am increasingly not impressed with institutions that go down the rabbit hole of ranked journals rather than discovering and acting on the research needs of institutional stakeholders.

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Thanks for these comments, Doug! I've heard similar things from a few colleagues at institutions that are trying to elevate their research profiles. They seem to start by raising the evaluation criteria for faculty without giving corresponding course releases, sabbaticals, or other support to allow the faculty to actually do the research. Increasing expectations without increasing support is not the answer!

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