Impact Analysis of Research-intensive University Development Program for Professors' Research Performance

In a knowledge society, global competition based on a market economy emphasizes research-intensive universities that focus on discovering new knowledge and nurturing the next generation of scholars. Therefore, policymakers in many have undertaken various projects to fund research at their universities to give their countries an edge in global competition. Since the end of the 20th century, countries that have adopted programs to foster research-intensive universities have greatly succeeded in rapidly increasing the research productivity of their supported universities. However, despite these achievements, little research has been conducted on evaluating these programs using empirical data. In this study, we conduct a time-series analysis of the research performances of BK21, Korea's long-running research- intensive university support program. Using interrupted Time Series Analysis, which assesses the impact of an event or policy intervention at a specific time, we analyzed differences in performance by participant group size and field across project phases. As a result, participation in the project positively impacted research outputs, but the project's effect varied depending on the type of participant group. This result gave some implications to determine the field of participating groups according to the project's purpose when planning future national R&D projects.