Academic Research as Nexus for National Development and Global Competitiveness University of Calabar Experience

Four purposes were pursued in this study, basically to assess how research outcomes from the University of Calabar contribute to inform policy formulation for national development and global competitiveness. Expost facto and survey inferential research designs were adopted for this study. Using the multi-stage random sampling techniques, a sample of 600 academic staffs were selected from about one thousand, five hundred and ninety eight (1,598) staffs from ten faculties, institutes and centers in the University of Calabar (Unical). Two instruments were used for data collection, the web of science harvesters with bibliographic indicators and a structured questionnaire. The harvesting of academic staff research papers published online was carried out between January, 2010 – June, 2017 from 6 databases. Result of the web of science harvester showed that a total of 2449 publications came out from the ten faculties, institutes and centers, out of which only 217 representing 8.9% were cited by scholars and are found in the citation index for Unical. The Pearson Product Moment Correlation analysis shows there is a significant relationship between research outcomes from Unical and national development, but unfortunately, most researches from Unical are not visible to the global academic communities for other researches to inform policy formulation for national development. 79% of the papers published in Unical, are published in local journals which are neither online nor indexed in any databases, hence, their visibility were impaired. The regression analysis on factors influencing research activities in Unical also shows only four factors to be significant, while the other ten were statistically not significant. Based on these results, the authors concluded that researches from Unical can influence policy formulation for national development, but their invisibility to the global academic community is a major crux that most research outcomes are hardly used for national development. The authors further concluded that despite all these shortcomings, the few visible publications online are used in other countries to influence policy formulation for national development. It was therefore recommended among others that research grants should be provided to research universities to enable scholars carryout ground breaking researches for their outcome to be used for policy formulation in order to achieve national development, while guaranteeing global competitiveness.