The KPI dilemma - towards Internationalisation?

Sunday September 26, 2010
The KPI dilemma
adapted stories from HARIATI AZIZAN, RICHARD LIM and JOSEPH LOH
sunday@thestar.com.my


1. The Professor is everything that an academic should be: popular on campus, well respected in the community, and of late, very active in research. The number of research papers he has published in the last three years is impressive, and he expects to notch a high “score” for his key performance indicator (KPI).
2. He/she is even one published in a journal with a reputation for selling publication space at RM2,000 each.
3. The professor also preoccupied with meeting his research publication KPI that he has spent more time on the phone dealing and wheeling with fellow academics to find partners for his “collaborative” research than lecturing or mentoring his students. The rest of the time is spent on his sole valid research, with the bulk of the work being completed by his two best students.
4. According to some local academics, the pressure to publish research papers – an important facet of the KPI in public universities – is creating an unhealthy intellectual culture.
5. “Many are not only just submitting papers in low quality journals but there are also those who are plagiarising work and demanding money for their papers or paying to get them published.”
6. “What is happening is that academics, especially the young, think their only role is to fulfil whatever KPI that has been set by the university in order to gain promotion.”As a professor of wildlife ecology and ecotoxicology

7. Professor Dr Ahmad Ismail from Universiti Putra Malaysia biology department is also of the opinion that academic excellence cannot be measured by publications alone.He strongly believes that other aspects of academia should be considered. “Publication alone is not enough. Teaching and supervising of students, attending conferences and seminars, extension and dissemination of knowledge and new findings to the public (among others) make an academician complete.” As a professor of wildlife ecology and ecotoxicology, his areas of expertise have few high impact journals to publish in and this make is very competitive. Most of the journals in these fields are low impact factor journals".
8. “We would like our papers to be published in reputable, high-impact journals – but we can’t because there are none,” he says. “What is important is what we can contri­bute to our own country – at a local level. If you just concentrate on writing, then you are just a writer.“A lecturer must develop areas of knowledge and then teach it to students, and not rely on textbooks alone.”
9. “Publishing research papers is crucial to upgrade our quality. If we fulfil this fundamental, we will improve the quality of our public universities and standings in the world.”
10. If the seniour academics miss the boat to conduct, they can contribute immensely in teaching and learning aspects.

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To be an internationally recognised university and world class university, publishing in high impact factor journals alone is not the only way. As I wrote before, our social, culture and biodiversity in our tropical forest can be an attractive subjects and focus research at international level. The problems are we never learned our lesson how to respect our own products, we do not provide enough funds for that kind of research, we do not put our priority right, we do not expose our academic towards that direction at international levels, we do not support our people who are in those filelds, our leaders think different ways of internationalisation, other staff/academics are not inline/understand on the internationalisation of the university.....many other reasons.