| If practicing optometrists are to provide state-of-the-art vision care to patients, it is vital that optometric schools and colleges have excellent academic programs and clinical techniques based upon scholarly endeavors. It is difficult, however, to determine state-of-the-art optometric faculty practices when information on their scholarship activities has not been published. The purpose of this study was to determine the level of scholarship productivity, publication patterns, and nature of the publication effort of successfully tenured faculty and promoted full professors in U.S. schools and colleges of optometry; and to uncover which, if any, institutional factors are related to optometric faculty scholarship productivity. The dependent variable, optometric scholarship, was measured by journal article publications as reported in the curriculum vitae of faculty holding a Doctor of Optometry degree in 15 U.S. schools of optometry. These optometric educators were tenured or promoted to full professorship during the period 1986 to 1991. The independent variables, institutional characteristics, were measured by a specially designed facility survey. Results included determining the average number and type of faculty publications. The average publication per faculty member was 2.0 articles. Optometric faculty typically published in either one or both of clinical care and basic sciences. Of the 161 articles published by the 79 respondents, most were based upon the joint effort of two or more authors. In addition, two interesting phenomena, not anticipated in this study, were the large number of faculty with no publications and the existence of tenured part-time faculty. The publication patterns of the optometric faculty, in general, were scattered rather than clustered around a common standard. Two schools, however, had focused scholarship publication patterns. One school emphasized basic science, the other basic science and clinical care article production. Given the lack of a unified model for scholarship productivity; the construction of a paradigm for faculty scholarship and productivity is recommended. Suggestions are provided for future research. |
