Abstract
Review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) processes significantly affect how faculty direct their own career and scholarly progression. Although RPT practices vary between and within institutions, and affect various disciplines, ranks, institution types, genders, and ethnicity in different ways, some consistent themes emerge when investigating what faculty would like to change about RPT. For instance, over the last few decades, RPT processes have generally increased the value placed on research, at the expense of teaching and service, which often results in an incongruity between how faculty actually spend their time vs. what is considered in their evaluation. Another issue relates to publication practices: most agree RPT requirements should encourage peer-reviewed works of high quality, but in practice, the value of publications is often assessed using shortcuts such as the prestige of the publication venue, rather than on the quality and rigor of peer review of each individual item. Open access and online publishing have made these issues even murkier due to misconceptions about peer review practices and concerns about predatory online publishers, which leaves traditional publishing formats the most desired despite their restricted circulation. And, efforts to replace journal-level measures such as the impact factor with more precise article-level metrics (e.g., citation counts and altmetrics) have been slow to integrate with the RPT process. Questions remain as to whether, or how, RPT practices should be changed to better reflect faculty work patterns and reduce pressure to publish in only the most prestigious traditional formats. To determine the most useful way to change RPT, we need to assess further the needs and perceptions of faculty and administrators, and gain a better understanding of the level of influence of written RPT guidelines and policy in an often vague process that is meant to allow for flexibility in assessing individuals.
Highlights
To aid in this understanding, this paper offers a synthesis of the literature on review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) practices in the United States and Canada
External reviewers don’t always have a direct connection with the candidate and may evaluate based on the apparent prestige of their publication record and how well known they are in their field (Harley et al, 2010). These factors suggest that evaluation of applications for promotion or tenure is a realm in which faculty may be over-stretched, which encourages use of the impact factor to gauge the quality of research publications as a way to ease workload
In recent years there has been an effort to help the pendulum swing back the other way by allowing for consideration of more varied measures of performance, but these efforts have not been entirely successful in offsetting oversimplified approaches such as points schemes based on journal impact factors
Summary
Perhaps the fact that OA has come from a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches seems to have created a lot of uncertainty in this space, and an apparent tension between developments in publishing and career advancement, is worth noting here too As this does highlight the importance for this study. ○ I think at some point it needs to be noted that the focus on peer reviewed scholarly research articles as primary outputs for assessment is a ridiculously discriminatory process; for example, against data collectors/managers, software engineers, lab technicians (etc.) that are critical for the process, but can often be excluded from final publication author lists. ○ I wonder if it is worth further commenting on the fact that the use of the IF in such a manner is a profoundly non-scientific practice, has little basis in reason, and yet seems to be one of the defining features in governing modern academic culture. ○ Has anyone besides Estabrook and Warner (2003) ever conducted a study into the relationship between RPT guidelines and the actual practices of those involved in the process? Is this a major gap in our understanding here?
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