The index was developed by Lawrence B, Martin and Anthony Olejnizak and is based on Statistical algorithms. The index measures the impact of faculty scholarly work in different domains on an annual basis.

These areas include:

The total number of journal articles published and whether the faculty is involved in their publication. If the faculty is involved, at what proportion? The index also takes into account publication of books and the faculty’s involvement in their publication.

Whether these journal publications and books are being referred to in subsequent work? If such is the case, who is citing to these journal articles.

Are there any projects that have earned sufficient value to merit federal research funding? If they have received funding, what was its level? Federal dollars are given a lot of weight in this regard.

Awards and honors are also being given priority since they are very obvious indicators of scholarly excellence and innovation in thought. Awards and honors have always impacted the discipline over the past few years.

With the help of academic field study, the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index (FSPI) arrives at a statistical score and ranking based on collective scoring of the program’s faculty quantitatively comparing with national standards within the same discipline.

These individual scores pertaining to different programs are finally combined to arrive at the scholarly achievements of the whole university. The information is obtained for two hundred thousand faculty members who represent around one hundred and eighteen disciplines in more than seven thousand Ph.D programs in three hundred and fifty universities of the United States of America.

Contrary to the survey conducted by other annual college ranking services e.g. U.S. News and World report, Forbes Magazine and Washington monthly, the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index (FSPI) uses an approach that is defined by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher education. It also takes inspiration from the approach used by the United States National Research council which published a ranking of American graduate programs, each decade.

This system that evaluates university programs and that is the basis of Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index (FSPI) rating was developed by Anthony Olejniczak and Lawrence Martin who belonged to the Stony Brook University.

Lawrence Martin was working on this since 1995. He created a series of specific regression models and then tested them to valuate their accuracy and feasibility for finding out the academic image of the staff members of PhD level programs. As a basis for this experiment, he took the data from the National research Council’s 1995 publication. This is how Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index was developed.

Unfortunately, like any statistical data FSPI also has its flaws.

Despite its flaws and criticisms, the index is used in various universities and colleges.