INVISIBLE WORK IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION TEACHING PROFESSION
TRABAJO INVISIBLE EN LA PROFESIÓN DOCENTE DE EDUCACIÓN SUPERIOR
Reinaldo Requeiro-Almeida1
E-mail: ralmeida@ucf.edu.cu
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8609-5554
Yumila Pupo-Cejas2
E-mail: ypupoc@udg.co.cu
ORCID: 8https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6459-3728
Orlando Gualberto Rodríguez del Rey-Piña1
E-mail: ogrodriguez@ucf.edu.cu
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6895-4458
1 Universidad de Cienfuegos “Carlos Rafael Rodríguez”. Cuba.
2 Universidad de Granma. Cuba.
ABSTRACT
In this article, the biased vision of university work is analyzed, an evident magnification of the publication of scientific results is discovered, in relation to the other missions: training and extension work. Two well-defined work areas can be distinguished: a visible work area in which the publication is located and another invisible work area, work that is forgotten and which, however, comprises the bulk of the institutional work. A fair evaluation of the investigation is advocated, articulated with the other missions, the negative effect of the absence of national registers of researchers is valued, which mechanism of comparison, energize and facilitation of aid to the investigative processes; Likewise, the present and future of scientific journals are analyzed according to the global changes that are taking place in their conception, the observance of ethics in publication. We reflect on the importance of carrying out a much more inclusive, objective and fair process for the evaluation of research, so that other results measurement indices are taken into account, in an institutional context of support for research and promotion of inter-academic cooperation, in order to make teaching work a healthy professional exercise with the identification and prevention of the causes that mean the congruence between work, stress and its effects on the desertion of teachers, situations that make it advisable to meditate on the need to correct the current university labor order.
Keywords:
Invisible work, teaching profession, Higher Education, self-efficacy, stress, labor desertion.
RESUMEN
En el presente artículo se analiza la visión sesgada del quehacer universitario, se revela una evidente magnificación de la publicación de resultados científicos, con relación a las restantes misiones: la formación y la labor extensionista. Se distinguen dos áreas de trabajo bien delimitadas: un área de trabajo visible en la que se ubica la publicación y otra área de trabajo invisible, trabajo que se olvida y que, sin embargo, comprende el grueso del quehacer institucional. Se aboga por una valoración justa de la investigación, articulada con las demás misiones, se valora el negativo efecto de la ausencia de registros nacionales de investigadores, cuál mecanismo de comparación, dinamización y facilitación de ayuda a los procesos investigativos; así mismo se analiza el presente y futuro de las revistas científicas de acuerdo con los cambios globales que se están produciendo en su concepción, la observancia de la ética en la publicación. Reflexionamos sobre la importancia de llevar a cabo un proceso mucho más integrador, objetivo y justo para la evaluación de la investigación, de modo que sean tomados en cuenta otros índices de medición de resultados, en un contexto institucional de apoyo a la investigación y promoción de la cooperación interacadémica, a fin de hacer del trabajo docente un sano ejercicio profesional con la identificación y prevención de las causas que significan la congruencia entre trabajo, estrés y sus efectos en la deserción de los docentes, situaciones que hacen recomendable meditar en torno a la necesidad de perfeccionar el orden laboral universitario actual.
Palabras clave:
Trabajo invisible, profesión docente, Educación Superior, autoeficacia, estrés, deserción laboral.
INTRODUCTION
The tendency to recognize the quality of work, based only on the number of academic publications that individuals or groups of individuals working in higher education are able to show in indexed sources of knowledge, has become part of the ideology of quality in the profession and is present in evaluation practices.
Consequently, the visibility of professors is exalted by virtue of what they publish in Academic Journals, and the more recognition these journals have, the better; thus, everything else that is worked on in Higher Education, even if it is published in Social Networks or other media, since it is not peer-reviewed and does not appear in indexed sources of knowledge that score in the H Index, is destined to be invisible work.
This means that there is much more time devoted to invisible but necessary work, which obviously cannot be found by specialized search engines such as Google Scholar, connected in turn with the H-index and with the identifier: ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID).
It is therefore worth asking: Why align ourselves uncritically with these metrics? Who imposed them? Do they fully satisfy the visibility of universities in accordance with their social mission? Why just publication? What is the status of formative accompaniment? Where does extension work end up, for some time now known as the third university mission?
When the causes of such a phenomenon are considered, publication is praised as the result of research and its praiseworthy articulation with other tasks, such as teaching and extension; that is to say, in the administrative imaginary there is a latent will for this procedure to be accepted and well established among the groups of professionals.
It is often argued that what it is published should be a corollary, never an unsociable competitor for the time of dedication with the other missions. This research analyzes this phenomenon and its prevalence in Higher Education
METHODOLOGY
For the development of the present work, a methodology of Critical Bibliographic Review of 31 publications was assumed, 30 of which were published during the years 2018 to 2024, in order to find in the theory different results that accredit the perceptual state of the obligation to publish, competes university teachers in an invisible field of work in the teaching profession of Higher Education and its connections with stress and abandonment of the profession.
DEVELOPMENT
Partialized vision of university work
There is a variety of information on professional performance that does not appear anywhere or that appears in a superficial or transitory way, in other cases it is not integrated to a more complete vision of professional performance, so that in this way society never gets to know how teachers work, how they fulfill their social role, even though people have the right to know in a truthful and systemic way, not having access to a partialized vision and under these metrics that show only one side of the performance.
The vision of university quality based only on publication results is not fair, nor does it contribute to show a professional work based on the social commitment that involves the multifaceted education of the new generations, in the preparation of the workforce of the future that will be responsible for carrying out social transformations.
Every day more and more metrics and rankings are a sign of the qualification of universities, to this effect, a ranking of institutions is usually disclosed, which, more than anything else, weighs the results achieved by their researchers and on this basis, parents, families, the community and students raise their preferences to decide their enrollment in one or another university.
It is known that the university that does not manage to appear in the publication rankings, that does not guarantee a growing and reliable position in these rankings, is a university that is condemned to fail, in the same way this affects university professors individually.
Understanding the importance of research
While on the one hand the elitism of publication has led to overshadow the other university missions, it is no less true that within Higher Education centers, not infrequently prevails an incomprehensible criterion of the importance of research and by extension the publication of its results.
It is essential to work in this direction from the formative stage of undergraduate and graduate studies, in order to achieve a better understanding of the importance of research for professional learning processes and its correct articulation with the different areas of university work.
On this issue, Peiser et al. (2022) found that the opinions of student teachers on the importance of research are strongly influenced by personal epistemologies and at the same time these epistemologies are influenced by socialization.
In this regard, it cannot be ignored that in medical sciences, research is beneficial for the development of skills that facilitate adequate decision-making based on high-quality clinical evidence, in order to ensure timely attention to the needs of patients and to avoid errors in practice to a greater extent (Lozada-Martinez et al., 2022).
Baumann's study (2022), provides that there are considerable differences between professors within the sector and can be grouped into only two distinct profile groups of similar size, one of these groups exhibits values for the variables analyzed that suggest that research has a low priority, the other is composed of productive, competent and motivated researchers.
In concrete terms of publication performance, Sasvari et al. (2022) found that in the field of HASS (Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences), quite different characteristics can be observed. Among these authors, the publication of articles is insignificant or irrelevant, while the writing of books dominates.
Based on the above, it is useful to refer to Baumann (2022), who takes up the established view that not all academic personnel can be researchers and that many teachers will never become significantly involved in research activity.
This underscores the importance of a reflexive curricular planning and framework to make the research as participatory as possible, especially for students who come from disciplines that are very different from the field of education (Peiser et al., 2022).
Teachers' interest in research is related to competence and task, but also includes demographic and motivational aspects, thus making it advisable to concentrate funds and resources on those who are research-oriented, which would help to economize resources based on the outcome (Baumann, 2022).
Institutional and global requirements not only lead to the need for academics to advance in the understanding of the importance of publishing, but also to disseminate the science written in English and not only in their own language, which contributes to a better visibility of the results (Olmos-Lopez et al., 2022).
In this regard Diego Rosselli (2018) has insisted that the transition of publications in scientific journals inexorably will have to adopt English to publish their articles, as it is an imperative need, in the short or medium term.
A significant part of teachers today express disagreement with the partial use of global metrics, which provide the visibility of work centered on publication as a preponderant requirement, even though there is no lack of those who affirm that publication is the high point of educational teaching work in its entirety.
In this way, teaching would be aligned with research and conceived from the research project, and would then lead to the publication of a scientific result, which would be equally developmental, in a cycle of constant improvement and from there, advance to the extension work through community interventions and contributing to social transformation.
Registering researchers in a single site
With the registration of researchers in a single site at the national level, one could aspire to a more comprehensive visibility of the universities, not only the part of the scientific production and academic work that has been placed in the various authoritative sources of knowledge. Institutional web sites generally offer administrative information of the university, the results and news of the more general events that occur in university life, but in the end there is a lack of metrics that allow to treasure in the historical memory of the institution other forms of academic results, which go beyond the scientific publication.
There has been a discussion about the stimulating function that could be fulfilled by the visibility of a hierarchy of performance, by showing the results of all researchers working in a given country, a kind of National Register of Researchers that, in addition to providing visibility of the results, would channel inter-academic cooperation, as well as research contributions, among others.
To show the importance of registering researchers in a single place Fry et al. (2023) studied the introduction of a national ranking system for researchers in Indonesia, Science and Technology Index (SINTA), this unique system ranked all researchers in the country according to a formula based on publications and its effects meant that, within three years, the country went from being the second worst to the leading producer of scientific journal articles in Southeast Asia.
On the other hand, Rodriguez Felipe et al. (2023), report that in Latin America and the Caribbean there is a significant growth in scientific production; the countries with the highest results in the region are Brazil, Cuba and Colombia. To date only Brazil has a unique site as a repository of results, the Cadastro Nacional dos Pesquisadores.
Although on the one hand the National Researcher Registries facilitate the quantification and classification of scientific production, to this is added the possibility of discerning its positioning independently of global metrics, which, according to Asaolu et al. (2022), are considered defective due to their vulnerability to manipulations.
Authors such as Palavesm & Joorel (2022), highlight the need to have their own tools in each university to gather metadata related to research in one place and provide more analysis and metrics to measure faculty members and the research contribution to the organization.
This element could help researchers to become more active, so it is also advisable to emphasize, as recommended by Sasvari et al. (2022), a preparation for the production of publications from doctoral courses.
Another alternative is provided by Nikkanen & Puuska (2022), who point out the existence of an online service that allows searching for specific information on research in Finland (Research.fi), which satisfactorily facilitates the evaluation and the visibility of researchers as well.
De acuerdo con Fry et al. (2023), el hecho de contar con una plataforma visible de resultados investigativos a nivel nacional, puede contribuir a mejoras generales en la capacidad científica, más aun en aquellos casos de países con ingresos medios y bajos.
According to Fry et al. (2023), having a visible platform of research results at the national level can contribute to overall improvements in scientific capacity, even more so in the case of middle- and low-income countries.
There are also national CRIS systems (Current Research Information Systems), which collect and disseminate all the information related to the research activities of an institution, that is, who their authors are, publications, patents and data sets they have generated, research projects they have obtained, among others (Nikkanen & Puuska, 2022).
Although this is not a unique site, but with similar usefulness Lozada-Martinez et al. (2022), refer to the website of the Ministry of Science of Colombia, which collects data on the scientific production of academic surgeons, where they find that one fifth of these professionals who have published, at least have submitted 8 articles.
Linked to this is the use of researchers' data in services such as OpenAIRE, which is a technological infrastructure and services of the European Union, to support the implementation of open access policies to scientific publications.
As stated by Palavesm & Joorel (2022), through the platform (IRINS) The Indian Research Information Network System, in addition to supporting academics to obtain grants for their research, this platform is also responsible for collecting, processing and displaying scholarly communication activities. In addition (IRINS) provides sufficient inputs for preparing research evaluation reports and increases the revealing and visibility of researchers.
It can be summarized that nowadays, entries that are responsible for recording and evidencing scientific results are also growing, which in advance means competition for academic journals, Sci-hub or Research Gate are examples of this Diego Rosselli (2018), thereby managing both the visibility and the research in a better way.
Knowing in advance that the fundamental means to which academics turn to disseminate their works are the scientific journals, it is necessary to be attentive to the paths posed by the evolution of these.
Present and future of scientific journals
Every day there are more and more accredited scientific journals that advance towards the repositories of high recognition, a goal is to reach the top of the advertising pyramid of Science and once there, to be located in a better quartile, this competitive mentality makes demand more and more and better works to be published.
It is evident the accelerated growth of the number of scientific journals, therefore the levels of competition among them is equally increasing, it is justified and accepted by the editors of these publications of dissemination of knowledge, the existence of mechanisms that allow measuring the quality of each journal, however there is disagreement regarding how to make such measurement (Diego Rosselli, 2018).
In this aspect, the demand for scientific articles posed by the advertising ecosystems of science is above production and, consequently, it is frequent that academics receive more and more, through their emails, invitations to publish their work, especially from the newest journals.
The publication of good papers is also becoming, for journals, a matter of life or death, so it is urgent to readapt, for example: extending publication deadlines, reducing the number of journal issues in a year, more thoroughness in the selection of accepted papers (Cope Bill & Phillip Angus, 2014).
Based on this it is appropriate to turn to Crosthwaite et al. (2022), who report a global change that reflects the increase of research in languages other than English, journals that accept articles in several languages or journals that focus on varieties of languages at the same time, which broadens the possibilities of receiving papers.
It is evident the competition between journals that coexist in the same area of knowledge, which drives to provide new hybrid products to exceed the usual areas, such as international congresses with publications, special issues, books, among others (Cope Bill & Phillip Angus, 2014).
With the emergence of hybrid products in new areas of knowledge, authors can find space to publish innovative scientific results, without the journals moving completely away from their traditional advertising places, improvements in the construction of knowledge become a product of active and dynamic interactions in all areas of academia, which now, increasingly, have a common denominator of linguistics (Crosthwaite et al., 2022).
Also with the birth of new journals, contradictions appear, for example: if the new journals do not publish recognized authors, who would be interested in them? Which recognized authors would be interested in a publication in less distinguished journals? When are these new journals going to be well positioned? Therefore, a lot of accompaniment and dedication goes into the birth of a new journal.
Ethics in publishing and self-citations
It cannot be ruled out that the pressures for publication induce the search for increasingly advanced technological alternatives, some of which are undergoing a not inconsiderable degree of questioning, such is the case of ChatGPT, which, namely, is capable of generating text writing by Artificial Intelligence, without any noticeable difference with the writing that a human can do.
Opinion on the use of ChatGPT is divided, and there is controversy as to whether it should be restricted or legislated, as explained by Dwivedi et al. (2023), considering the limitations, disruptions to practices, threats to privacy and security, and the consequences of biases, misuse and misinformation.
As a result of the evaluative exacerbation of publicity, it cannot be ruled out that an expeditious way to contribute to improving the results of research itself becomes self-citation, to which some authors frequently go.
Among the causes for self-citation Taşkın et al. (2021), recall what has been said by other authors and point to the following: as part of a strategy to become more visible in their scientific field; as a result of egoism; to correct previously reported results; to improve authority in their field.
To the effect, the h-index retains its appropriateness to constitute the digital identity that congregates in ORCID, but a greater understanding of how authors can enhance this index to achieve better visibility of their work is still demanded (Rodríguez Muñoz et al., 2021).
To date, the visible H-index in the researcher's profile in Google Scholar and ORCID, even with their limitations, show the performance of the professor, but only in one area, that of publication. The existence of these metrics counteracts, to a great extent, the bad practices in the evaluation of the research that were once carried out with a not inconsiderable load of subjectivity.
For their part Basso & di Tollo (2022), indicate that the departmental h-index numerically expresses the citations of a department, however, as the department is usually composed by several researchers with different seniority its calculation is based on lifetime performance, rather than focusing on current performance, which could be more revealing.
Research evaluation
Although inter-academic cooperation is worthy in order to achieve superior results in the research process, it is no less true that collective achievements do not exonerate the individual evaluation process of the results, and Bornmann et al. (2022), (2022), take up the question of whether it is pertinent to use the h-index to compare all researchers in a department, or whether it is the citation cultures that should be taken into account.
Regarding the h-index for individual researchers, Hirsch (2005) assumed that a researcher publishes a constant number of articles per year, and that each article gains a constant number of new citations in each subsequent year, resulting in a linear model (Scimago & Citations, 2006).
In this model, the index increases linearly with time, and the slope of the linear function can be used to compare researchers of different seniority (Basso & di Tollo, 2022).
It is exposed in here that for an individual's symmetric distribution of citations the currently used h-index is approximately half the square root of the total number of citations, according to Hirsch's rule (Kaptay, 2020).
The indicator is very often used in evaluation practice, however, without considering the associated requirements. Only researchers with a similar academic age and who have published in similar periods can be reasonably compared (Bornmann et al., 2022).
A non-objective and expeditious evaluation by means of the h-index, far from being a useful and legitimate procedure, can result in injustice and thus trigger unrest among academics, to the effect Asaolu et al. (2022), have pointed out that although, productivity and having substantial citations are desirable attributes, both are insufficient to adequately quantify the result of an individual's research.
In this regard, Fonseca-Sosa (2022), has pointed out among the limitations of the h-index that it does not take into account the quality of the journals, even though there are notable differences between publications in terms of quality filters, and adds that this index is not adequate for comparing researchers from different scientific areas, which is explained by the different ways of the journals and citations according to the field.
In light of these elements, it is appropriate to consult results such as those of Taşkın et al. (2021), who point out that the impact factors used in evaluations of research performance should be used with more care, particularly when variables such as journal size, language of publication, country of publisher and subject area are correlated with self-citation rates.
On the other hand, Rodríguez Muñoz et al. (2021), point out that not only should the h-index be taken, but it should be contrasted with the scientific results that have been made known throughout the authors' careers, thus discerning the imprint that their publications have left on scientific and technological development.
According to Kaptay (2020), the best possible methods are needed to evaluate the scientific excellence of individuals and research groups in order to grant positions and distribute research grants more efficiently.
In an increasing number of countries, public funding of universities is now proportionate to research evaluation results, hence the importance for universities and departments to have appropriate methods for research evaluation (Basso & Di Tollo, 2022).
Proposal of other indexes
In view of this Patel et al. (2021), propose the evaluation of the Relative Citation Ratio (RCR), a new measure of productivity, however, this has received minimal understanding of its practical value in relation to already established metrics, such as the h-index.
It is necessary for universities to be prepared to assume a more careful vision when evaluating both scientific publications and professors, as new evaluative methods appear and are handled, both of publicity and of the concrete results that occur in daily professional practice in order to form a new comprehensive performance index.
An index that provides a more complete vision of the knowledge of university talent, that offers a diversified position of the attributes that each academic has on a global scale, to make transparent aspects such as mobility, credibility, follow-ups, consultancies and other issues that make up the set of items that accredit the value of the university professor at the level of his own university and beyond.
University life is much more than publishing, however, in these times, the results of publication on the Internet are becoming more and more visible.
A reductionist vision of university work only centered on publicity indexes, besides being outrageous, is reductive of an integral vision of performance and does not contribute to mobilizing efforts in the direction of improving social life.
The longer it delays the correction of this order, the more damage will be done to the quality of life of university professors, and with it to the quality of their performance and results, therefore, also to the quality of the work that advances in favor of the integral education of the new generations and to the academic work in the different contexts of action that are consistent with the different missions.
Metrics are also moving in this sense, for instance, the practice of taking into account the number of downloads of published articles to evaluate their specific positioning according to the time of publication is now advancing.
In this sense, Xiong et al. (2023) point out that downloads have been considered complementary to citations, reflecting the impact of research activities and scientific production, but the motivations for downloading a specific publication have not been fully explored.
These authors maintain that unclear motivations could lead to difficulties in assessing the impact of scholarly literature, so they propose an extended technology acceptance model to corroborate the usefulness of publications to users and relevance as the main factors that induce downloading publications.
This component contributes a critical value when taking the h-index as an evaluative reference, since article downloads become a complement that can function in the evaluation process of academics and, consequently, greater justice could be aspired to.
The proposal of the k-index (Kaptay, 2020) could mean a step forward in achieving higher levels of comprehensiveness, this index is calculated from all independent citations of an author, since self-citations cannot be considered as an indication of excellence, the citation is independent if there is no overlapping in the lists of authors of the citing article and the cited one.
With similar line of thinking Asaolu et al. (2022), present the Universal Index (U-index or U) to resolve the controversy surrounding the indication of an entity's contributions to scholarly knowledge. The U-index is the weighted average ratio of citation rates per year of research papers in relation to the impact factor of the respective publication media. However, the definition of U is intuitive and stimulated by pragmatism; it has elements of subjectivity like any other metric based on citation analysis.
Returning to the findings of Patel et al. (2021), who suggest RCR as an effective measure of research performance; although this metric overcomes the limitations observed with the use of the h-index, it still exists an incomplete understanding for the purposes of generalization in the context of academic promotion.
Research support
While academics face, on the one hand, the inconsistencies caused by the lack of consensus as a consequence of not having established coherent and fair metrics to be evaluated; on the other hand, there is also the lack of institutional support that affects the development of research.
There are limitations faced by researchers, such as the insufficient budget allocated to invest in research, which is very low compared to developed countries (Lozada-Martinez et al., 2022).
In addition to the need for sufficient funds, expedited mechanisms are required to facilitate research support, such is the case of (IRINS), through this Network, faculty members are supported when approached for research grants (Palavesm & Joorel, 2022).
Research support also involves advance planning, negotiated and mutually accepted between the evaluator and the evaluated, so that results can be measured in reasonable periods of time, otherwise, the comparison between all academics in a department, or a university, on the basis of global metrics, could be inductive of bad practices.
In this case, there are technological solutions that, although they present opportunities, have ethical and legal challenges, since they have the potential to generate negative impacts for organizations, society and individuals (Dwivedi et al., 2023).
Also, teachers who set out to conduct research are faced with numerous procedural conflicts and do not always have appropriate support in this endeavor; they are confronted with many types of information sources to consider, so it cannot be inferred that the information sources preferred by researchers are also the best option to meet their particular information needs; it is necessary to help researchers choose the best option (Pulikowski & Matysek, 2021).
The findings of Olmos-Lopez et al. (2022), indicate that scholars face other challenges in the publication process, such as the language barrier, gender conventions and access to international publications, among others, this author adds that to overcome these challenges scholars establish research and publication networks and connect with literacy agents that support them during the process.
In this regard, the greater visibility of scientific publications in English should be emphasized, which could become an undeniable advantage for academics who present their texts in this language; however, the mastery of this language is another of the barriers faced today by a large number of non-native researchers.
In the case of Crosthwaite et al. (2022), they confirm the preponderance of English as the language of global scientific communication, even though there is a trend in the last 20 years that points to the advance of publications in other languages.
Three interesting pairs can be distinguished within the information sources examined; researchers prefer academic search engines to general ones to find the bibliography (Pulikowski & Matysek, 2021).
The above is corroborated according to Rodríguez Felipe et al. (2023), who refer that the production of a scientist can be quantified through easily measurable indicators: by the number of publications, number of patents, or by the judgment or opinion of a researcher by his colleagues, here journals play an important role in disseminating scientific results and achievements.
When studied by Pulikowski & Matysek (2021), the most appropriate sources of information for exploratory research were discovered in terms of effectiveness and content coverage in the search for Library and Information Science (LIS) scholarly publications on a specific topic.
Interacademic Cooperation
It is interesting to note that authors active in international publications prefer to work in smaller or larger groups, in this sense the medical and health sciences are the largest (with groups of up to 9 authors) (Sasvari et al., 2022).
In this regard, Rodríguez Muñoz et al. (2021) add that scientific and technological systems in the different areas of science can be strengthened by the exchanges that take place between academics according to their ORCID and their h-index.
The forms of cooperation are related to a higher level of productivity that scientists can contribute both individually and in concerning of national production; however, it has been described that the research development capacity of low- and middle-income countries, such as those in Latin America, is still inefficient and fragmented (Lozada-Martinez et al., 2022).
On this issue Liu et al. (2023), based on the natural process of symbiosis, propose how to interpret the development and evolution trajectories of scientific collaboration, using a multi-field data set to show the evolution of collaborative networks that are often established between
Co-authorships, as forms of inter-scholarly collaboration, are also the subject of performance evaluation and, consequently, different entities use arbitrary weights to rate them; however, with the model of Asaolu et al. (2022), a prescription of simple formulas for general weights is fairly addressed.
According to Liu et al. (2023), the mechanism of preferential connection among scholars in collaborative networks suggests the unequal positions of participants in the process of scientific cooperation and argues that such a phenomenon is very similar to the symbiosis functioning in the natural world: based on the symbiosis theory.
The theory of symbiosis also clarifies aspects that characterize the work in teams, adjusted to a structural and balanced research project conceived in accordance with the competences and possibilities for collective cooperation of the participating academics. One principle is the observance of teamwork, but never work for the team.
In the work of Liu et al. (2023), long-term collaborative relationships are examined in terms of their academic and economic scope; to this end, the authors also consider the symbiotic relationship between two researchers, although more individuals may join as a group as long as each has something to offer.
From this point of view it is appropriate to turn to Gomez et al. (2020), who established some basic descriptive statistics on the global migration of scientists, providing a way forward in understanding the phenomena that tend to occur in this field.
However, the knowledge base on these issues has the unfortunate tendency to take the nature of international migration for granted. Regional migration, then, may represent less a "brain drain" than a knowledge transfer circuit for the countries involved (Gomez et al., 2020).
As Pulikowski & Matysek (2021) point out, the process of research and its continuity in publication tends to be better achieved when it is carried out on the basis of cooperation among academics, constituting collaborative networks from which tasks can be shared.
In this regard, Gomez et al. (2020) point out that, although mobility between countries has remained stagnant since the 1980s, compared to mobility within countries, scientists who move abroad do so more frequently, but increasingly within the same region and over shorter distances.
Also in the case of academic mobility, both within and outside the countries, the renewing effect of ICTs cannot be ignored; the use of ICTs reduces the need for face-to-face attendance both in teaching and in scientific events, the latter functioning as facilitators par excellence for new
Congruence between university work and stress
Assuming that the set of work demands to which the university professor is increasingly subjected, with emphasis on obtaining publication results, it is considered appropriate to inquire about the repercussion of such work style on his emotional well-being.
In relation to this issue Daumiller & Dresel (2020), set out to elucidate the degree of congruence of objectives between teaching and research, as well as how these relate to stress and job satisfaction of university academics, according to the core tasks of teachers. These authors add that both teaching and research constitute explicit achievement contexts in which academics are required to deliver high quality results, perform successfully under observation, and constantly learn and improve.
In any case, scientific publication by itself is not capable of engendering the problems of job dissatisfaction that teachers are facing throughout their training cycle; it is a general conception of university teaching work that has become very competitive, even before obtaining a doctorate.
Regarding this issue, Sasvari et al. (2022), point out that before becoming PhDs, academics are already imbued with the metrics of publication, however, there are differences between academics from different fields, for example, there is a predominance of researchers in medical and health sciences who write articles that soon classify as Q1.
Beyond this perspective, Ferreira (2022), points out that research in particular and university teaching work in general, are victims of modern digital tools that operate according to an infinite network prepared to receive, process and respond to endless flows of information, without to date having sufficiently assessed their impact on mental health and quality of work.
Long working hours beyond the scheduled working time induce stress in teachers and the acceptance of a questioning of self-efficacy, the belief of incapacity and productive handicap.
This phenomenon has been the subject of attention by Yin et al. (2020), who explored the relationships between university teachers' perceived stress and their self-efficacy beliefs, as well as differences in the relationships among teachers.
Achievement goal theory to describe the motivations of university academics, allows for distinguishing research and practical implications, while demonstrating the value of differentiating the separability, associations, differences, and interaction of academic goals for teaching and research (Daumiller & Dresel, 2020).
Not distant from these analyses Wiklund Gustin et al. (2020), point out that work-related stress among university nursing professors leads to other health problems as well as low job satisfaction.
On this issue, the work of Yin et al. (2020), revealed significant differences in the relationships between perceived stress and self-efficacy beliefs experienced by university teachers, corroborating that these beliefs are reported according to the degree of perceived stress.
Faced with these problems, knowledge and understanding of psychological processes become facilitators of recovery, but the experience of recovery goes beyond coping strategies. Rather, recovery is associated with a sense of finding oneself and one's place in the world through experiences of relating to others, a more caring and compassionate attitude towards oneself (Wiklund Gustin et al., 2020).
It should be added, however, that the time dedicated to work, by doing activities in function of it, makes one neglect the time dedicated to oneself, and the professional gradually neglects the attention required by his own being, in order to be able to function efficiently in the face of the high demands that arise in the exercise of the profession.
It should be added, however, that the time dedicated to work, by doing activities in function of it, makes one neglect the time dedicated to oneself, and the professional gradually neglects the attention required by his own being, in order to be able to function efficiently in the face of the high demands that arise in the exercise of the profession.
Teacher attrition
From the analyses followed up to this point, it can be argued that more institutional support is required as a form of specific action aimed at strengthening the professional satisfaction of researchers, their retention in university work and the early identification of predictors related to attrition (Monroy-Peña et al., 2023).
According to Schmiedehaus et al. (2023), the increase of resignations in education has followed an upward trend and by developing a comprehensive investigation of the key predictors and motivations for leaving academia, it was found that, associated factors such as: low organizational support, high burnout and low compassion satisfaction.
In this case, the question inexorably arises: Why are university professors leaving their jobs? As a global trend there is an exodus of professors from university life to the business sector, there is also the case of professors who prefer to have part-time work activities in the university institution and then develop most of the working time of their lives in the business area, where they get better salaries and have better working conditions, not infrequently as well.
Schmiedehaus et al. (2023) conducted a study in which a comprehensive occupational health model was used to better understand the key factors associated with higher education teachers' intentions to leave of university teachers, distinguishing among other environmental causes such as work-life conflict, organizational support, stress and burnout.
The need to correct the current university work order
Although, on the one hand, the preparation and constant learning of academics can be ostensibly favored through the use of digital tools, it is no less true that they generate instantaneous communications among academic staff, which interrupts the deep work required to participate in research and teaching (Ferreira, 2022).
According to Yin et al. (2020), in university professors, stress due to organizational insufficiency and new challenges are usually negatively associated with self-efficacy, while stress due to financial insufficiency and the undesirable quality of students are positively related to self-efficacy.
On the other hand Wiklund Gustin et al. (2020), report on the validity of a Group Relational Cognitive Program, aimed at the recovery process for the reduction of work stress in nursing professors, in this sense, a qualitative content analysis was effective and provided knowledge about the value of ontological aspects, health and recovery.
In keeping with Daumiller & Dresel (2020), investigated university academics' achievement goals for teaching and research, specifically, the domain specificity of achievement goals by examining their separability and associations, as well as differences in goal pursuit between teaching and research.
Several interventions have been developed to address work-related stress, however, less attention has been paid to how teachers can learn to recover from work-related stress before it has serious health consequences (Wiklund Gustin et al., 2020).
In attention to these problems Rodriguez Felipe et al. (2023), identified factors to improve the levels of scientific productivity, which can contribute to raise the indicators and have an impact on the quality of the teaching-learning process.
The demands placed on higher education institutions are ever increasing, and with this, greater demands are also placed on those who are in charge of carrying out the work, that is, the professors, in this case, teaching, research and the institutional link with the community.
In response to the demands, there is an internal struggle for the appropriate distribution of working time, which is never enough to fulfill everything, however, the commination is clear, publish (Vs.) die, Fonseca-Sosa (2022), expresses his disagreement with such a command
The professor with such a disorder of tasks, has been placed in a particularly frustrating situation, in this aspect in Schmiedehaus et al. (2023) point out that environmental factors, such as the conflict between work and personal life, organizational support, stress and exhaustion contribute to produce frustrations, which could be mitigated and, incidentally, contribute to reduce the labor exodus.
The set of activities that have traditionally engaged the university professor and are now increasing, has become invisible and no one wants to work in invisibility, which is the next anguish resulting from this work.
There are many forms of demands on the intellect in terms of social transformation, direct interaction with the actors who assign the content of work, in this regard the professor instead of concentrating on the indicators that are demanded in the work, what he does is to flee from them and place himself under the light, i.e. in the visible work area.
To ensure the fulfillment of their goals, it is necessary to achieve an appropriate management of attention and the ability to concentrate; this is a crucial skill for the profession, the enduring human impulse to do a job well on its own (Ferreira, 2022).
It is necessary to go back to what is currently accepted, because in the present order of evaluation the university professor on the exclusive basis of publicity is not contributing to guarantee the fulfillment per se, of the different university missions.
In other words, the professor is being forced to obtain a greater amount of time in order to be able to dedicate himself to advertising activity, not scientific publication, but advertising activity that is also a competitor and guarantees visibility and that is in favor of individual promotion, not in favor of integral professional development. The WhatsApp groups of teaching departments, faculties and others are an example of labor publication that is not scientific publication and therefore will also be, in time, forgotten work. An extreme concentration on publicity subtracts time from other areas of work.
It happens that the teaching work in many countries is not standardized, that is to say, the amount of time that should be used as a rule for the fulfillment of the different tasks that are conceived within the university missions is not determined, for example: How much time does the professor need to prepare a conference? How much time does the university professor need to write a scientific article? How much time does the university professor need to prepare a presentation for an international scientific event? How much time does the university professor need to grade the exams of his students?
As can be seen, these examples are diverse and, in no case can an answer be offered for each professor equally, that is to say, the time of dedication in the different professors will always be different, also because each professor has an individual condition of professional preparation, with which the time necessary to fulfill each one of their tasks can be made shorter or longer.
There is also no an explicit interest in standardizing the time that should correspond to each of the different university tasks. This would mean that, once this time has been defined, there could be tasks that remain to be assigned, those indescribable tasks that appear in daily life and that, given their unforeseen nature, department heads and deans cannot find someone to entrust them to.
It would be like a definitive budget to restrict the time allocated to educational work because the time devoted to university work is always much more than the time that is paid, it would be necessary to review the budget of the 8-hour working day.
In order to understand this issue, Ferreira (2022), regarding the concept of deep work in relation to the academy, could be useful, according to which a work based on instant digital communication tools has a hidden cost in the ability of teachers to manage their attention.
It is not unknown that being a professor in these times, involves sacrifice as it has always happened in the development of such a demanding profession, so it is no longer enough with the usual stress that produces the university teaching work, it is now added the stress associated with the demands of visibility, which is justified in a logic of publication results presented as scientific publications.
There is a social belief in which the performance is diversified with a large number of items, which become unmanageable, it is known in advance by the majority of the community, however, the people of the union accept it in a compliant way, they continue to walk in the day to day without paying much attention to it, but at the same time being affected and are not so concerned about the existence of the great demands of professional work.
It is a question of offering attention in a regular and inconclusive way to each one of the activities and, consequently, to go surviving in a social environment as immobilizing as outrageous, without achieving with them the true fulfillment and with justified usefulness of all the tasks that appear.
This implies that the social responsibility of fulfilling in a healthy and orderly manner all the demands of university work, according to project an image before the students and the community, well-ordered of the work results and knowledge so that they are worthy and desired to be imitated by others, particularly by the students and the community.
It should not be underestimated that negative coping strategies in the face of stress and other related health problems have an impact on the teaching-learning experiences of both teachers and students (Wiklund Gustin et al., 2020).
In any case, it is a matter of doing what can be done and putting away a lot of work, the mortality of university creative work, the mortality of innovation that remains to be done tomorrow and that are never done and can never be rescued, in this case, scientific publication will continue to be devoured by emerging tasks or those that demand high attendance but that in the end constitute invisible work, consequently, they constitute expeditious affectations to their good state of mental and spiritual health.
The truth is that due attention is not paid to the state of satisfaction of university professors, it is not known that the greater the satisfaction, the better the result of the work and its quality, therefore, the greater the benefits received by students and co-workers, who will be less likely to become the target of discomfort.
CONCLUSIONS
According to the theoretical review carried out, it is corroborated the existence of a partialized vision of university work, as a consequence of the magnification of the publication of scientific results, in relation to the remaining university missions, that is to say: training and extension work.
The supremacy of scientific publication in relation to the other missions leads to distinguish two areas of work in the work of professors: a visible area of work under which is found scientific publication and another invisible area of work, which becomes forgotten work and corresponds to the work that corresponds to training and extension.
It is necessary to continue working for the achievement of a fair understanding of the importance of research as the culminating result of the research work, the correction of the inaccuracies that are responsible for the evaluation of the results.
It is necessary to pay attention to the future of scientific journals in accordance with the global changes that are taking place in scientific publication and, together with this, the observance of ethics in publication in view of the use of alternative technological tools that question the authenticity of the results.
It is advisable to review the current teaching work order, which is leading to an unhealthy professional practice that does not favor the avoidance of the causes that induce stress and its triggering in teacher desertion from the profession.
Limitations of the study
The research is strictly theoretical in nature; consequently, empirical support is required to complement the behavior in reality of the probable indicators that have been enunciated in the study.
Conflicts of interest
The authors of this study do not recognize the existence of conflicts of interest.
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