Pillar II – Research Excellence

A comprehensive research university with significant emerging strength in applied research, the University of Arkansas relentlessly pursues its land grant mission by promoting knowledge creation, scientific inquiry and creative works. We seek to:

Strategic Plan Homepage
  • Attain a lasting reputation for deep faculty expertise, high quality education and research outputs.
  • Align the research enterprise with society’s needs, and the economy across the region, state, nation and world – including research commercialization, workforce training, and other economic and cultural development that advances all Arkansans.
  • Achieve a sustainable, shared research enterprise that adopts and develops best practices in: research administration; growing research facility size and support; faculty recruitment, retention, and success; graduate education; and undergraduate participation in the research enterprise.

Research Excellence Objectives:

  • Increase research expenditures, particularly in signature and federal priority areas
  • Increase scholarly productivity percentile, an algorithim that combines citations, books, chapters, patents, and trials among other measures relative to the size of the faculty
  • Regularly attain highly prestigious faculty awards
  • Increase patent production-to-expenditure ratio and technology transfer
  • Improve retention of faculty
  • Increase the number of graduate and doctoral students

We are among the top research universities in the nation with $184 million in research expenditures. Our research success is supported by our unprecedented investments in our research enterprise, with three leading-edge applied research facilities opening in the next 12-18 months – the Institute for Integrative and Innovative Research (I³R), the Multi-User Silicon Carbide Research and Fabrication Facility (MUSiC), and the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation.

In 2023, U of A faculty received 85 of the most prestigious international scholarly and academic awards.

Accelerating Technology Transfer

The U of A has significantly increased its technology transfer with 226 technologies licensed in the past five years.

U of A Invests More Than $136 Million in Applied Research Facilities

See the latest in a series of updates from the Division of Research and Innovation.

Research Excellence Metrics

As reported to Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) survey.

Students