NON-H INDEX-BASED EMERGENT RESEARCH FUNDING ALLOCATION IN THE PHILIPPINE CONTEXT

Abstract

This paper identifies the consequences of research funding allocation based on Hirsch-Indices in the Philippines. It uses a descriptive design utilizing the data from the Google Scholar Rankings as of December 2016 for the top (51) members of the National Academy of Science and Technology of the Philippines (NAST) as well as the Editorial Boards of the Commission on Higher Educations’ (CHED) accredited journals. To simulate what actually happens when the H-index is used as a funding criterion, the top 51 H-indices from NAST rooster of scientists were merged with the H-indices of randomly selected Filipino Editorial Board Members of Journal evaluated under the Journal Incubation Program (JIP) of the Commission on Higher Education. The results reveal that the use of H-index as a surrogate measure to determine an academician’s capability to undertake a meaningful research study and thereby, judge his/her worth on this account may have some unintended negative consequences to higher education research productivity such as monopoly in research grants and production of mediocre research. Thus, a new allocation scheme is suggested as an appropriate intervention of the research-granting government agencies to increase the number of qualified researchers in the Philippines resulting to the production of high quality research outputs. The suggested allocation scheme utilizes the principle of Self-Organizing Funding Allocation (SOFA) of Europe but replaces the H-index as a criterion for the grant with either of two new measures of trust and influence T(A) and T(adj) of a researcher.