It takes a kampung...

I posted my findings on USM's faculty about a week back. Thanks for all your comments. I thought it would be useful to do a follow up by examining each faculty / school within USM (or any other public university) in greater detail. But such an undertaking is too vast for me or Tony to do by ourselves. Hence, I'm inviting our readers to join us in a little bit of 'investigative' blogging.

I'm asking our readers who are interested to do the following:

1) Pick a faculty or department or school e.g. Public Administration, Electrical Engineering, History, Chemistry, within a public university of which you are relatively familiar with (either in terms of the subject matter or the faculty or both)

2) Compile a list of full time teaching faculty within this department (for USM, go to this link, for other universities, you can visit that university's website)

3) Do a systematic search of the publication record of each of the teaching faculty in that department / school. This can get pretty complicated but I can think of a couple of ways to do this. If you have access to some sort of journal database (especially if you're currently in a university setting), you can search these journal databases for articles by these faculty members. One such example is Thomson's Web of Science or IEEE for electrical engineers. If you don't have access to such journal databases, you can use Google Scholar for a much less scientific / systematic way of finding articles by certain authors. (The advantage of google scholar is that it picks up books as well as articles)

4) Compile some sort of ranking system or calculation method of the articles or books published by these faculty members. For example, you might want to count the number of articles a faculty member has published in high impact journals. (For a litest of such journals, you might want to visit this link provided to us by "Your Fellow Anon", one of our readers. You woud also want to evaluate the impact / importance of books written by these faculty members. For example, a translated textbook (from English into Malay) might not have as high an impact as a book which is trying to show or prove a new hypothesis.

I can think of a number of reasons why something like this would come in handy. It would be a good judge of whether a professor or associate professor has a good publication record or if he or she has gotten that title based on other factors. It would be the basis for comparing across the public universities in Malaysia, if we have a large enough sample size. It would give us different methodologies by which to rank different departments. It would give us some indication of whether our younger faculty members are keeping up in the publishing 'contest', so to speak.

5) Whatever the methodology used, it should be one that is systematic and consistent. We're not trying to 'target' any particular faculty member. We're just trying to evaluate the quality of a department as a whole. If we find certain faculty members who have a publication record that is not commensurate with his or her position, we'll highlight this fact. But we won't do a publication search just for one or two people in a department because we don't happen to like them.

6) The reason why I need more people to get involved is because different people have different knowledge areas and hence, are in better positions to judge what a good publication record is in that knowledge area. For example, I would have no idea how to judge whether a professor in the computer science department has a good publication record or not.

So, if you're interested in joining this informal 'project', please email me at im_ok_man@yahoo.com. We'll post your findings (with complete attribution to you, of course, unless you wish to remain annonymous) on this blog.

P.S. In case some of you are wondering about the title, it's a spin-off from Hillary Clinton's book, "It Takes a Village". In our case, we need the 'kampung' which comprise of our readers to come together to collaborate on this 'project'.