Research productivity and impact of professors in Canadian undergraduate psychology programmes

Professors in small departments do carry out research, and they can serve an important role in inspiring and preparing undergraduate students for graduate school. Although normative data of research productivity and impact of professors in Canadian psychology graduate departments have been reported, no normative data are available for professors in departments that offer undergraduate programmes only. Such normative data would provide a fuller picture of research productivity in academic psychology in Canada and help students in small departments identify mentors. In the present study, normative data of research productivity and impact for 165 professors in 14 Canadian psychology departments that offer only undergraduate programmes were provided through an analysis of data from publicly available databases. The results show that these professors (excluding 5 outliers) had a mean of 11.74 career-to-date peer-reviewed journal articles (M_d = 9), 268 citations (M_d = 130), and an h-index of 6.30 (M_d = 5), and there were great variations on all measures. Most significant was that research field had significant effects on number of career-to-date publications and h-index, but research field was no longer a significant factor for the number of publications at their current institutions. As expected, there was a significant main effect of academic rank (p < .05) but no significant differences in productivity and impact between men and women. Limitations of using such archival data and implications of the findings for professors and students in undergraduate programmes are discussed.