Are great researchers terrible teachers? How research and teaching performance relate at U.S. Universities

University professors engage in a variety of tasks in the domains of research, teaching, and service. There exists an abundance of research exploring a professor's performance in any one of these domains, yet few have explored how they affect each other. To explore the relationship between a scholar's research and teaching performance, we merged a dataset provided by the company Academic Analytics, which provides research performance data to U.S. universities, with another dataset collected from the popular teacher-evaluation website Rate My Professor. Using these data, we find that, controlling for all other variables, gender, discipline, age, and class difficulty were strong and significant predictors of professor rating. Differences are found by gender and by discipline, with women with the highest teaching evaluations tending to have the lowest research performance. The average quality scores of men are higher across all the broad disciplinary areas, with a wide gap in Engineering but the smallest in the Medical Sciences. Male professors are also rated as having more difficult classes, except in the humanities. This research is only the beginning of what large-scale quantitative analysis promises to contribute to the understanding of research and teaching performance.