Is research knowledge scarce?

Take a university at random anywhere in the world and it is likely there will be a substantial portion of its staff conducting research. In fact, a substantial portion of that university’s budget will be spent on research, particularly when you take into account staff time. This annually would have to amount to tens of millions of dollars for the average university spent on research.

In the same university you would find people early in their research careers struggling to get papers published in journals, obtain research funding, and develop research profiles. As editor of a journal I receive many papers that are lacking in the fundamental attributes of a research paper. Clearly the academics submitting the paper do not lack effort or motivation but they lack the basic knowledge of what constitutes good research. And this is my point, universities are wasting tens of millions of dollars on research because they don’t have effective systems for training staff.

It gets worse. It is common to find people without research methodology books, conference budgets and so on. In other words, many don’t have the basic resources needed to conduct research. Yet, these universities continue to spend tens of millions of dollars on research. It seems foolish!

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