The Effects of Research Assessment and Incentive Systems on Rent-Seeking Behaviors of Academics: An Exploratory Case Study

Abstract

Research assessment and incentive systems (RAIS) aim to measure the quality and the impact of scientific studies. For, the quality of research outputs increases not only the welfare of the people but also the socio-economic development and competitiveness of countries. Lately, the quality tends to get overlooked almost completely and the scientific works are assessed solely by the quantitative measures. Researchers are awarded based on some numbers such as numbers of publications or citations. Yet, RAIS based solely on numbers encourage researchers, in time, to develop rent-seeking behaviors. This exploratory case study investigates the effects of existing RAIS in Turkey on the rent-seeking behaviors of academics. It analyzes the changes in academic titles of authors who published papers in a journal with a very low impact factor as well as if they received monetary support from TÜBİTAK. Findings show that a significant portion of the authors was rent-seeking by taking advantage of the deficiencies of the existing systems; that some authors obtained academic titles with only one article published in this journal, which was later removed from the Web of Science (WoS) due to some ethical problems; and that they published articles with one or two authors at most at very high rates to benefit from TÜBİTAK’s support. Yet, they quickly stopped publishing in this journal once it was removed from WoS. Existing RAIS triggering rentseeking behaviors in academics should be discontinued, and, instead, the new ones highlighting the quality of research should be developed.