A Publication Activity Model for Finnish Universities

This paper presents a publication activity model that calculates a research aggregate for the study fields of Finnish universities. The aggregate is expressed in terms of full-time equivalent research years conditional to the actual number of publications in each publication category. The key problem of the model is estimating the effort coefficients for each field and category. We use a nonparametric estimator that combines information from the KOTA dataset on FTE research years, the number of publications, and responses to our questionnaire on research effort, which was targeted to all researchers in all Finnish universities. Given our results, it appears that a reliable quantitative valuation of research work cannot be based on international journal articles alone or on any common subset of categories for all the fields. Some of the fields are rather concentrated, with only one or two publication categories, but in the fields of the humanities and social sciences all the categories count. In the fields of law and education, the humanities, theology and social sciences, national categories are also important. The resulting research aggregate is useful as a measure of research output in total productivity calculations.