Faculty research behaviour and career incentives: The case of Taiwan

This paper aims at exploring how faculty research behaviour changes before, during, and after promotion. Testing research hypotheses generated from behavioral reinforcement theory and an alternative claim on the learning effect of familiarity with publishing norms, the study collects career history data and longitudinal records on faculty research performance to fill literature gaps. The main findings include: (1) behavioral reinforcement theory receives support; (2) among different field groups, the research behaviour change curve of the natural sciences and engineering faculty best fits the theory; (3) different levels of anticipated promotion rewards have different effects for motivating subjects to publish.