Assessing the research performance of scientific board of Research Institute of Forests and Rangelands and the affiliated centers using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)

Assessment of research performance of scientific board in research institutes is considered as a key topic to monitor the process of knowledge production. This research was aimed to assess the performance of scientific board to adopt appropriate strategies to increase the quantitative and qualitative level of scientific products in the field of natural resources research. The DEA method was applied to assess the performance of research units. In total 872 scientific outputs of the scientific board in 11 administrative units and 27 provincial units of RIFR were investigated in a time span between 2007 and 2010. Our results showed that the average technical efficiency was lower than 0.623, while scale efficiency was relatively high. During the period of the study, research divisions of biotechnology, medicinal plants, gene bank, wood and paper, rangeland and forest showed the highest levels of technical efficiency, whereas other research divisions revealed a lower level of technical performance. The results also indicated a positive relationship between academic ranks and research productivity. By assuming constant and variable return to scale, comparing the average scale and management efficiencies of each research units showed a lesser scale efficiency than management efficiency for 28 research units during the study period. Therefore, scale efficiency was concluded to have the highest impact on technical inefficiency based on the assumption of constant return to scale. That is, the importance of optimal production scale is not taken into account by the majority of research units.