An Empirical Research On Research Performance Of PhD Andlts Impact Factors

Since1970s, more and more scholars pay attention to the research performance of states, colleges and individual researcher (Dundar and Lewis,1998). Related researches mainly focus on states,college and individual researcher, but only less focus on the doctoral students (Chung and Petrick,2011). And the domestic research are still on theoticaland qualitative level, which lack of the empirical research based on data, as result, the explaination of phenomenon, mechanism, reason and suggestion are inadequate. In China, the doctoral educationhas unique characteristic, so some foreign research achievements cannot fit the Chineseeducation system very well. Therefore, in order to fix up the gap, this thesis would collect relateddata and build a theoretical model to do empirical research, finally find out the key factors on how to improve doctoral student research performance (DRP).DRP refers to the research outcomes of doctoral students in a certain period, such as academic paper, research project and patent, which could reflect the individual research ability.The author concerns that DRP will directly reflected the quality of doctoral education effectively.Therefore, deeply exploring the influential factors of DRP could help us to identify the major problems on doctoral education, further, the key point and effective approach to improve the quality of doctoral education could be obtained. The research object of this thesis is the doctoral students of china, combined with the evaluation of existing performance measurement and the characteristics of the doctoral students of China, according to the SCIto categorize the academic papers, and set the weights of different categories. This method could avoid the difference of disciplines to a large extent, so this measurement could be used for comparative study between different disciplines.In order to enlarge existing education theory, this thesis made a great progress in the exploration of influence factors of DRP, at the same time, an relationship between social capital and management of DRP has been build. Take the conception of "guanxi" into consideration in the background of Chinese culture, whichis similar to the concept of social network in west (Gold et al.,2002). Most of scholars thought that "guanxi" is significant to one’s success in Chinese society. Therefore, in this thesis, in order to get the influence effect of "guanxi"on DRP,"social capital" would be taken into consideration. In Study2, the initial conclusion has proved that the relationship between doctoral students and their mentor have a significant positive effect on DRP. In Study3, based on social capital theory, the author expands the range of "guanxi", focus on the relations between doctoral students and mentors, and the relations between different doctoral students. Therefore, this thesis could build a bridge for using social theory to study the DRP.Some foreign scholars generally suggest that one should build some relationship with externals, and his social capital would play an important role in his innovation process(Amabile,1983; Amabile et al.,1996; Woodman et al.,1993). Based on social capital theory, in doctoral social network, mentor factor is s key node, and his research partners and classmates can be recognized as other nodes, so nodes together with eachother can be regarded as the social network of DRP. The research activitiesof doctoral student haveremarkablecharacteristics of innovation, therefore, we hypothesis that the social capital play an important role in DRP, then do an empirical research.This thesis build a research model of DRP, which include individual factor, mentor factor, social capital, and the situational variable (subjective attitude and organizational environment), to explore the influential factors of DRP. Dates can be collected from database and questionnaire, and three sub-studies will develop one by one.1)Study lwould initially explore the influence factors of DRP by secondary data.2)Based on the results of Study1, Study2would deeply research on the relationship between mentor factors and DRP by survey.3) Based on Study1and Study2, from the perspective of social capital, Study3would make a deep excavation in variables, further, we study on how the social capital (including mentor and classmate) influence DRP and the suggestion about how to improve the doctoral education could be obtained. Also, we analysis the moderating effects of the situational variables between social capital and DRP.The results show that,1) Compare with other students, the doctoral students who finish their undergraduate education in "985" universities have a higher research performance in their doctoral program.2) Mentor factor is the key factor in improving DRP.3) Relationships between mentor factors and DRP are significantly moderated by doctoral student’s research interest. 4) Social capital positively related to DRP.5) Relationships between social capital and DRP are significantly moderated by situational factors, including goal orientation and organizational environment as situational factors have a regulatory effect on the relationship between social capital and DRP.The results show that improvement ofDRP could not achieve in one day, individual, mentors and university should make efforts together, and the quality improvement should run through the whole process of doctoral education. This thesis make some theoretical contributions, meanwhile, it also provides guidance for doctoral students, mentors, university and education ministry.