Reward academic researchers for quality results

Let us imagine that cooking stands as one of your key passions in life. You love the experimentation, preparation, and presentation of all things related to food. As part of your journey, suppose you enter a food preparation competition on NTV.

If the goal of the cooking contest entails developing a new approach or taste in Kenyan cuisine, then which of the following would you attempt in your competition entries: prepare ugali the same way 30 times or prepare a dozen unique combinations of ingredients in order to come up with something phenomenal to charm the judges and perhaps change what restaurants serve across the country?

The choice seems obvious to any observer: innovative quality overrules senseless quantity. However, in Kenya’s higher education landscape, academic researchers get rewarded for quantity instead of quality. International rankings of universities detail whether research output provides impacts on society and changes lives, jobs, economies, or health outcomes. But here in Kenya, a researcher can get promoted to full professor status under Commission for Higher Education(CHE) guidelines merely by researching and publishing things that have already been discovered by other people by just repeating the experiments, surveys, or interviews.

One can become a high ranking academic by literally repeating the same recipe of ugali over and over again with no innovation or usefulness in one’s research.

In so doing, academia does not have to create new knowledge. Testing an existing idea in business research in new industry or culture contexts can often be useful to social science, but it does not push the boundaries of knowledge. Even worse is retesting the same cause and effect relationships in the same industries in the same countries already done over and over again which is like repeating ugali preparation with no creativity: it fills you up but provides nothing useful to the broader society.

In comparison, the British, American, South African, and Singaporean models of higher education each champion and reward academic research for top quality, cutting-edge, and life changing results. One innovative research publication in a top journal can catapult someone up the professorial ranks. But in Kenya, only quantity matters.

However, readers of Business Talk know the problems in the research publication space. The international publishing cartels remain heavily biased towards the highest ranked universities. Institutions rated at the top of the Times Higher Education ranking hold a much better chance of getting into top publications.

Check the top 200 universities found here: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2019/world-ranking.

So, the world remains tragically unaware of our Kenyan studies, even the cutting-edge research. Many good Kenyan researchers still must co-publish with famous foreign authors in order to get quality publishing.

We need to combat bias with outstanding quality. Champion open-source publishing so the whole world can see our capabilities and contributions. Then reward quality over baseless quantity and turn Kenya into the world-leading research hub we are destined to become.