The purpose of this study is to examine the problem of research quality in higher education defined by academics. Recent policies of quality in higher education stirred debates on quality of research as well as teaching. Regarding the issue, the question that arose was how to assess and define quality of research. Furlong and Oancea (2005) identified four dimensions of research evaluation, which were epistemic, technical, capacity building and economic. Moreover, another issue debated was what good research was. Many criteria to define scientific research were put forward by many researchers and institutions including NRC (Ed. Shavelson and Towne, 2001), which suggests that research should have important questions, link research to theory, use suitable and a wide range of methods, have a coherent chain of reasoning, replicate and generalize across studies and disclose research to professional scrutiny and critique. Research, as the main source of knowledge, has to meet certain criteria to contribute to learning. Keeping up with new approaches and tendencies in research, learning new research methods and developing one’s research skills are essential to be able to produce valuable research. Other than these, examining research in terms of its quality, in other words, taking quality of research prior to quantity serves a key function in improving research. Taking these factors into consideration, in our reserch the main question we tried to find an answer to was how academics and postgraduate students perceive research quality and what they identify as the main problems that make it difficult to achieve quality in research. Accordingly, our main objective was to reveal the main problems about the quality issue and develop various solutions to them.

Data were collected through interviews using a semi-structured interview schedule with 32 academics and postgraduate students. The questions aimed to probe academics’ and post-graduate students’ opinions on what quality research is, what are the main barriers making it difficult to achieve quality in research, what the main components of quality research are, how research is benefited in practice, the effect of organizational support on research efficiency and quality, how academic promotion criteria affect research quality and the main problems regarding research ethics. The interviews took about one hour on avarage and the data collected were analysed through content analysis.

Main findings of the study have appeared as that the main problems regarding research quality were identified as shortcomings related to methodology and originality, that universities did not have an organizational culture supporting research, that research function of the university was not regarded as important as teaching function and that academic promotion criteria put excessive pressure on academics, which affects the quality of research they do negatively. Some reccomendations related to academics and research students were made to develop research quality.