The Structural Factors Affecting the Scholarly Communication and Scientfic Products in Iran's Universities

Scholarly communication is one of the basic notions in knowledge and information science which has had a great appeal in academic circles and plays a major role in scientific programs. It includes a broad range and it is affected by different factors which are worth studying. The present study was an attempt to investigate the structural factors affecting the communication and scientific production of faculty members of Iranian universities. The research method is an applied analytical one. The statistical population included the faculty members working in all universities of Iran. The population was sampled based on Krejcie and Morgan Table using stratified sampling. After administering the researcher-made questionnaires, 378 participants were selected. Before developing the scale, the content validly of the sale was established by 25 Ph.D. holders expert in the field. Some items were modified based on the factor analysis. The Cronbach Alpha results for the variable of scholarly communication was .804 and for the structural factor .819 indicating the acceptable reliability of the instrument. The data were analyzed based on multiple regression analysis using Amos and SPSS 21. Pearson correlation indicted that there is no significant relationship between the financial system variable and the reward system; however, there is a significant relationship between organizational structure and strategy, scientific committee, and technological system. The multiple regression analysis showed that the structural factors, the scientific society, and the organizational structure can statistically explain the variance of scholarly communication. However, the variables of budgeting systems, reward systems, organizational strategy and technology were not statistically significant. Furthermore, findings showed that there is a significant relationship between the scholarly communication as the intervening variable and the scientific products as the criterion variable. In addition, the scholarly communication can explain the variance of the scientific production. The present study investigated the structural factors affecting the scholarly communication and scientific production of faculty members of Iranian universities. The findings suggest that to have a successful implementation of scholarly communication in the country various indexes should be taken into consideration. Accordingly, the participation of the scientific community needs specific communication.