Measuring the quality-based efficiency of research publications in logistics departments of private universities in Korea

초록

Similar to the other fields of studies, in the logistics area also the research publication plays a vital role in the knowledge production process and university spin-offs resulting from industry-university research projects. Recently, research publication output has been employed to measure and evaluate the university’s performance. However, most of the prior studies instead of including quality attributes mainly focused on quantitative variables such as the number of publications. We hypothesized that only using the quantitative indicators of publication would overestimate and bias the results of publication performance in some observations, however, quality-adjusted variables for research outputs are necessary to be employed in the process of performance assessment of research centers, as well. Therefore, to solve this gap, using the two-stage network data envelopment analysis, in addition to the quantitative factors, this study attempts to concentrate on quality attributes such as publication citation to maintain the appropriate and reliable empirical results. Our dataset covers the sample of 32 research-active, logistics departments of South Korean private universities from 2010?2019. The empirical findings indicate that including the quality attribute in an appropriate production model in efficiency measurement produces results more accurately and reliably. Moreover, in comparison with the black-box conventional DEA models, employing the two-stage network DEA enables us to observe the difference in empirical results between the quantity and quality stages of logistics research publications.