Understanding Faculty Collaboration and Productivity: A Case Study

Research productivity has been always an important part of every academic’s job, since it has a profound effect on faculty promotion and tenure decisions. In addition, some scholars believe that co-authorship between faculty members has a great impact on their academic life and faculty advancement. Since 2005, the Ministry of Education of Taiwan (MOE) has developed two university programs and evaluation policies for improving the competitiveness and internationalization of Taiwan universities, and has clearly stated that there is a strong relationship between faculty promotion and research performance. However, none of them has used social network analysis (SNA) to examine research productivity and co-authorship under two university programs and evaluation policies from MOE in Taiwan. Therefore, in this study, we first uses SNA to analyze the research productivity, collaboration patterns, and publication strategies of faculty members in a Management Information Systems (MIS) department at a national university in Taiwan. Then, we used D3, a well-known drawing tool to create data visualization using JavaScript libraries, to visualize and discuss how these two university programs and evaluation policies from the MOE affected these patterns and strategies. We hope that our study not only provides beneficial information to the MIS department, but can be treated as an important source for MOE committees in their future adjustment of university programs and policies.