The Directorate of Research, Innovation and Consultancy (DRIC) has held Research Excellence for staff and students of the University at the School of Graduate Studies Auditorium.
The guest speaker, Prof. Isaac Luginaah, a distinguished professor and an alumnus of University of Cape Coast and Western University, Canada spoke on the topic “Building Research Excellence Career/Institutions in the 21st Century: The Importance of Quality and Benchmarking.”
Prof. Luginaah who has made field-defining theoretical and methodological contributions, addressing impacts of environmental hazards and vulnerabilities in population health, led the participants through the principles and importance of benchmarking, as well as some emerging contemporary issues.
Quoting Hammer and Stranton 1995, he explained that “benchmarking is the systemic process of searching for best practices, innovative ideas and highly effective operating procedures that lead to superior performance”.
“Benchmarking enables the identification of processes needing improvement, improvement of didactic, research, financial and administrative processes and a better adaptation of didactics and research to market demand. Benchmarking is the secret to success,” he added.
Professor Luginaah, raised concerns on the scholarly focus on impact factor rankings of journals rather than focusing on research findings.
Prof. Luginaah delivering a lecture
He criticised journal impact factors of been skewed adding that they could be manipulated and lack transparency.
However, the distinguished professor admitted that in recent times, impact factor had become one of the gold standards of measuring research quality.
He noted that there was a pressing need to improve the ways in which the output of scientific research was evaluated by funding agencies, academic institutions, and other parties.
Prof. Luginaah recommended that institutions should be explicit about their hiring criteria and that assessments should be based on scientific content rather than on only publication metrics.
He further encouraged the individual scholars to set their own quality and benchmarks which were based on practice and contextually relevant.
To that end, he challenged universities in Ghana to re-think the high in-breeding thus recruiting their own products as faculty and staff since it could stifle creativity and innovation.
Prof. Luginaah mentioned direct emulation and inappropriate context as some of the risk of benchmarking.
According to Prof. Luginaah despite the challenges of benchmarking, if done right, could advance scientific knowledge, nurture intellectual curiosity, foster collaboration and networking, cause cross-pollination of ideas, build supportive networks and facilities and facilitate continuous improvement and innovations.
Prof. Doku giving his closing remarks.
The Director of DRIC, Prof. David Teye Doku, remarked that benchmarking would help in monitoring quality and increase productivity.
He emphasised that the University coyld increase productivity by paying attention to benchmarking.
Participants of the lecture