Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index

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The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index (FSPI), a product of Academic Analytics, is a metric designed to create benchmark standards for the measurement of academic and scholarly quality within and among United States research universities.

The index is based on a set of statistical algorithms developed by Lawrence B. Martin and Anthony Olejniczak. It measures the annual amount and impact of faculty scholarly work in several areas, including:

• Publications (how many books and peer-reviewed journal articles have been published and what proportion of the faculty is involved in publication activity?)
• Citations of journal publications (who is referring to those journal articles in subsequent work?)
• Federal research funding (what and how many projects have been deemed of sufficient value to merit federal dollars, and at what level of funding?)
• Awards and honors (a key indicator of innovative thinking and/or scholarly excellence that has impacted the discipline over a period)

The FSPI analysis creates, by academic field of study, a statistical score and a ranking based on the cumulative scoring of a program's faculty using these quantitative measures compared against national standards within the particular discipline. Individual program scores can then be combined to demonstrate the quality of the scholarly work of the entire university. This information is gathered for over 230,000 faculty members representing 118 academic disciplines in roughly 7,300 Ph.D. programs throughout more than 350 universities in the United States.