Leadership practices and policy directive in revitalizing academia research publication at Ethiopian public university

The study explored leadership practices and policy directives in revitalizing academic research publications at Ethiopian public universities. An explanatory sequential mixed-method was adopted. A total of 378 academic staff and 142 leaders were selected through multistage sampling, alongside 18 academic leaders and 3 research publication experts chosen from MoE using purposive sampling from six Ethiopian Public universities. Qantatitative data were collected through questionnaires while qualitative data were collected through semi-strctured interviews. Multiple regressions and the thematic method of analysis were used. The study revealed that policy directives and leadership practices were strongly and positively correlated with academic research publications. With F (2,542) = 672.316, P <.001, the R2 value of 0.722 showed that 72.2% of the revitalization of academic research publications was attributed to policy directives and leadership practice consquatively.The findings showed that leadership and policy directives significantly contributed to the revitalization of research publications (B = 0.380, P <0.001), with both variables playing crucial roles, although policy directives had a slightly weaker effect (B = 0.270).Among leadership practice model the way emarged as strong pridictor with positive and significant effect (B = 0.505, P <0.001) revitalize academia research publication. However, enable the other to act (B = -0.049) and challenge the process (B = -0.128) exhibted negative and statistically insignificant which means challenged to translate this type of leadership behaviour to revitalize the academia research publication.The qualitative results highlighted the importance of funding, skill development, collaboration, incentives, equitable resource distribution, journal indexing.Furthermore,gap in implementation of research policies were identified in Ethiopian Public Universites.This study recommended organizing awareness workshops and training should provided to leaderships and policy makers.Additional recommendations were made to University leaderships and Policy makers in the area of the factors that require attention and action to improve academia research publication.