Scholarship is about expanding the boundaries of knowledge. Such boundaries can be expanded through research grants, journal articles, textbooks, conference papers, guiding graduate student research, etc. What is significant is assessing scholarship- is it journal articles, dollars generated, etc. Also, what weight would you assign each category. Thanks.
Nice question Amir, and I believe this is a question on the mind of every department chair / head around the world when it comes time for faculty evaluation.
As usual for this kind of question, there is no clear-cut answer. I've seen many different strategies even within my own university:
- Simply count the number of publications.
- Maintain a list of "acceptable" journals. Publications there count, all others do not count.
- Focus only on total grant money.
Obviously, all of these naive strategies fail to truly assess "scholarship" but they all have one advantage in common, they are easy metrics to calculate. Many assessors resort to simple measures like these because any more accurate measure would be difficult to compute.
There is no clear answer that can be applied to every department. In general, I would recommend developing a weighted rubric that fits your department. For example, since most biology or physics research is heavily dependent on grant funding, the weight (importance) of grants would probably be higher than other measures. On the other hand, since grant money is scarce, extremely competitive and perhaps less critical for successful pure mathematics research, the weight of grants should probably be relatively lower.
Such a rubric should probably include: grant money, number of papers, number of books, total impact factor of papers, citations, invited presentations, and I'm sure I'm missing other indicators.
Ultimately, it is up to each department to decide on appropriate weights and develop a rubric that at least most can agree on. Only an expert in the particular field can truly judge the quality of research.
Thanks Colton For your thoughtful comments and suggestions. The problem of simply counting numbers without assigning weight to each category may skew the evaluation process in favor of a faculty who publishes but not seek any external grants nor support and direct student research. I do agree this is a difficult problem to solve. Have a great new year. Amir
Yes exactly! One way around this (which my department actually uses) is to include "Application for external funding" as a trait in the rubric. Of course, it would get more credit if the grant is funded, but at least those who are trying can still get something.
Yes, weighting is important and the precise values of those weights should probably be a department decision (at least a committee of some sort) since it would become a factor in determining promotions, raises, renewals, or perhaps termination.
Directing student research could also count as Service, depending on the situation. In some cases, that might be more appropriate.
good idea to encourage external grants and like your idea of having Department input.
On the idea idea of giving service credit for guiding student research, diesn’t this mean that imply any Faculty can do it not just scholars?
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