Ghana’s public universities are churning out thousands of academic papers annually for promotion purposes, but with little to no impact on society, industry or policy, a review of research outputs has revealed.
The concern was raised by academics themselves during recent promotions, where the University of Ghana, KNUST and UCC announced the promotion of over 80 senior lecturers to Associate Professor and Full Professor grades within the last academic year alone.
In Ghana, promotion to Associate Professor requires a minimum of 10-15 peer-reviewed publications, while Full Professor requires up to 25 publications in so-called reputable journals indexed in Scopus or Web of Science.
But stakeholders say the numbers do not translate into solutions.
“We are producing papers for promotion, not for society,” a senior lecturer at KNUST told this reporter on condition of anonymity. “The question we never ask is Question 6: Who is reading these publications? Is the society or academic community benefiting from it, or is it just waste-packed unproductive paper?”
Checks by this paper on Google Scholar show that many promotion papers published by Ghanaian lecturers have zero to two citations, with most citations coming from the author or his/her own students.
Some of the titles include highly localized studies with no follow-up or extension to farmers, industries or policymakers.
One policy analyst, said Ghana has over 100,000 theses and dissertations gathering dust in university libraries, many eaten by termites, while the country continues to import solutions to problems already researched.
“Our gari still has stones, our tomatoes rot at Pwalugu every year, our drains choke when it rains in Accra, yet we have thousands of agriculture and engineering papers sitting on shelves. Where is the linkage?” he quizzed.
He added that Ghana’s tomato rot, galamsey menace, BECE failures and MoMo fraud persist despite numerous academic papers on them, because there is no system to translate research into policy or product.
The National Council for Tertiary Education has in the past hinted at reviewing promotion criteria to include community impact, patents and industry uptake, but the publish-or-perish system remains.
Academics are now calling for a new model where 50% of promotion should be based on demonstrated community and industry impact, with patents and products weighted higher than journal papers.
“Until we link promotion to real impact, we will continue to have Professors on paper but empty on the ground,” the KNUST lecturer said.
Alexander Afriyie, supervising editor, ghanacrimereport.com and ghanatalk.com