Measuring Academic Leadership Using Research Performance

There is a ubiquitous question lurking over the researchers and academics: how can one effectively measure academic leadership? Should they be assessed based on how many lectures they deliver or whether they are popular among their students? Or should they be promoted based on the grants and funds they secure for their universities and research institutions? Over the past few decades, one single measure of academic leadership has crystalized, and that measure is the research performance based on the number of publications and citations in research journals that are indexed in prestigious academic databases. However, the question of what actually the “prestigious” academic database is, might differ from country to country. There is a plethora of academic databases (e.g., Scopus, Web of Science, Directory of Open Access Journals) and research metrics (e.g., SCImago journal ranking, impact factors, or h-index, just to name a few), yet large publishing companies and houses keep on introducing new metrics. Our paper focuses on the ways how academic leadership is measured through research performance that is based on publications and citations. We demonstrate that this measure is probably the best one invented so far and provide our arguments and reasoning for that. Moreover, we show how the influence of fraudulent academics driven by the unfair motives as well as mass media mercenaries might distort academic leadership. Our findings might be of a special importance for stakeholders who are preparing and implementing academic and research policies.