visits and highly cited publications on international journals, reflecting that more
international communications lead to more high quality research products.
6.1.2.4 University Reputation
A mainstream explanation for why reputation helps to improve research efficiency
of university is that, university with higher reputation is much more capable to
recruit and maintain excellent researchers. For example, in Porter and
Toutkoushian’s study (2006), they used the university ranking scores of US News
and World Report to measure the reputation of universities, and examined the
impacts of university reputation on its research efficiency. Theirfindings confirmed
that the more prestigious a university is, the higher research efficiency would be. In
particular, a 1% rise one university’s reputation score would rise its research effi-
ciency by 80%. A preliminary explanation for thisfinding is that prestigious uni-
versity is much more attractive to excellent researchers.
In a much earlier study, Long ( 1978 ) found the reason why high-level univer-
sities could motivate their staff and thus improve their research efficiency lies in the
reputation of the institution, especially the academic reputation. Volumes of similar
studies confirm that university reputation has a multiplier effect on research pro-
ductions. First, universities with higher reputation are more attractive tofirst-class
researchers. Researchers usually need advices and constructive criticisms from their
peers, and close communication with outstanding scholars would help to produce
new ideas, and to improve their research efficiency. Second, prestigious universities
put more rigorous academic requirements on regulating faculty members’promo-
tion and remuneration, which gives more credits on the quality of research outputs.
Third, researchers in prestigious universities usually pay more attention to the
respect and admiration from their peers with high profile (Zuckerman 1967 ), and
thus have higher motivation to improve their research level and innovation
capacities.
6.1.3 Internal Factors at Micro Level......................
6.1.3.1 Demographic Characteristics
There are many demographic factors can impact university research efficiency.
From the perspective of demographic features of the whole university staff, their
age and gender composition has certain impacts on university research efficiency.
A note should be made here is that, when reviewing related literature on the
association between demographic features and research productivities, we don’t
distinguish the studies at the university level or at the individual level, but comb
through all these studies.
6.1 Analytic Framework of Factors Impacting... 267