Life course productivity model to analyze academic research issues: a longitudinal analysis at one Taiwanese university

Research productivity has been a critical issue in terms of academic development in higher education. In this study, we adopt a life-course perspective to examine the personal factors, mostly age-related, affecting research productivity in a Taiwanese research-oriented university. Covering a time series of 20 years, our dataset includes individual research performance of faculty and other relevant covariates over their life course. The growth curve model designed for multilevel modeling of repeated measures is applied to capture the age effect. Our analysis contributes to the thread of this literature in several dimensions. First, the faculty’s early academic achievement is positively associated with their later performance providing support for the cumulative advantage theory. Unlike the prediction of the utility maximizing theory, faculty with an administrative position leads to higher productivity. Finally, reinforcement still plays a critical role in regulating the productivity for non-early promising faculty.