the focus of the society’s concerns. Recently, some problems such as misman-
agement of research funds, serious waste of research resources, coexistence of low
effectiveness and efficiency, are all becoming extremely concerned by all aspects of
society (Ding and Zeng 2015 ; Zhang et al. 2016 ), which poses greater and stronger
request for universities to optimize internal resource allocation and maximize the
utilization of research resources. Besides, from the view of practices in evaluating
university research, most of the evaluation methods are output-oriented, with no
emphasis on the effectiveness and efficiency of research activities, resulting into the
impatience and fickleness among university researchers, and much frequent
occurrence of academic misconducts such as academic cheating and plagiarizing.
Meanwhile, cases on over-construction of disciplines and waste of research
resources appear more frequently and seriously over time. A few experts and
university administrators suggest that universities should redirect their research
from the time-consuming basic research to highly profitable and efficient applied
research, although obviously, this would twist the substance of pure research in
university.
Adequate funding is essential to the development of university research activi-
ties, which means that investment in research is rigid to some extent, thus sustained
increase in research investment is very crucial to enhance research strength in
China. However, given the increase of funds, there is equal importance to
emphasize research efficiency and productivity. To ensure the sustainable devel-
opment of university research, it’s a necessity to address the issue of solely
emphasizing research outputs in existing research evaluations. Instead, it’s worth
introducing the dimension of input in evaluation, and directing universities to the
path of intensified development in research activities, so as to achieve the trans-
formation from pursuing quantity of output to pursuing quality of output. To apply
an input dimension into research evaluation, is to introduce input-output approach
of economic production, and also to build models of efficiency and productivity to
assess universities’research activities, and facilitate universities to enhance cost
accounting on research production and improve the utilization and effectiveness of
research funds. Meanwhile, this evaluation can give some suggestions for HEIs to
improve research management system inside universities, and provide scientific and
effective references for research decision-making administrations to enhance the
research productivity in universities, and make their research production more
sustainable and stable.
This chapter willfirst clarify the concepts of effectiveness and productivity, then
review the recent empirical studies and summarize their main features by thor-
oughly hackling the recent development in methods of evaluating efficiency and
productivity, so as to point out issues that deserve further exploration and studies of
production efficiency and productivity in Chinese universities. As the end, this
chapter will present the research hypotheses and approaches of this book.
12 2 Evaluation on University Research Efficiency and Productivity...