Lesson 13
Juan Pablo Alperin, Lesley A. Schimanski, Michelle La, Meredith T. Niles, and Erin C. McKiernan
Synopsis
Academics are regularly involved in a wide range of activities spanning research, teaching and service, and the breadth of necessary outputs for review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) in each category only continues to grow. In linguistics, for example, research increasingly relies on the creation and management of datasets and on research software used to process these data. How do faculty manage their academic careers in the face of such growing sets of demands? Although we know that discussions of research assessment across the academy, including in the linguistics community, are increasingly recognizing the need to value the creation of outputs beyond research published in peer-reviewed journals, it is not clear whether these discussions have made their way into formal assessment structures. By analyzing the extent to which non-traditional outputs, including data and software, are mentioned in the RPT documents of a representative set of 129 universities from the United States and Canada, this chapter offers empirical evidence from across many disciplines of which types of faculty work are recognized in the RPT processes, and which are not. We confirm that traditional outputs such as peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and monographs are mentioned almost universally, whereas data-related items such as datasets and databases are mentioned only by a fraction of institutions. We find that research-intensive institutions acknowledge more types of research outputs in general, whereas institutions that focus more on undergraduate and master’s degree programs tend to mention fewer forms of scholarship in their RPT guidelines. Within research-intensive institutions, units from the life sciences present a greater range of outputs in the guidelines offered to faculty, including the 15% that explicitly mention data-related outputs. In contrast, none of the academic units in mathematics and physical and social sciences in our sample recognize data-related outputs, and generally recognize fewer forms. Overall, we conclude that many current structures for faculty assessment do not explicitly recognize the increasing complexity and demands of faculty work.
Core concepts & keywords
Traditional Output: Formal and long-established forms of scholarly work such as books, journal articles, and presentations.
Conventional Output: Verbal or written work for an academic audience that does not fall into the traditional output category, includes book reviews, editorials, and posters.
Funding Output: Grants or funding.
Unspecified Output: Works addressed to an academic audience with an unspecified format, can include publications, outputs, papers, and manuscripts.
Activities
Exercises - Practice what you've learned
Read the Declaration on Research Assessments (DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics. How do they address the quantitative metrics discussed in this chapter?
Implement these practices in your career
Read the Review, Promotion, and Tenure (RPT) guidelines for your institution and your department. What types of output are mentioned? What about non-traditional outputs such as datasets?
The LSA (Linguistic Society of America) has published a Statement on Evaluation of Language Documentation for Hiring, Tenure, and Promotion, among other statements. Can you find statements put out by relevant professional societies that value outputs that apply to you? Note that when you prepare your promotion package, you can use such statements to encourage valuation of your own non-traditional outputs.
Quiz - Test yourself!
Relevant data management use cases
Data management practices in an ethnographic study of language and migration by Lynette Arnold
Managing data in a formal syntactic study of an under-investigated language (Uzbek) by Vera Gribanova
Managing data in TerraLing, a large-scale cross-linguistic database of morphological, syntactic, and semantic patterns by Hilda Koopman and Cristina Guardiano
Related readings
Schimanski, L. A., & Alperin, J. P. (2018). The evaluation of scholarship in academic promotion and tenure processes: Past, present, and future. F1000Research, 7, 1605. https://doi.org/10/gfkjmg
Alperin, J. P., Muñoz Nieves, C., Schimanski, L. A., Fischman, G. E., Niles, M. T., & McKiernan, E. C. (2019). How significant are the public dimensions of faculty work in review, promotion and tenure documents? ELife, 8, e42254. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.42254
McKiernan, E. C., Schimanski, L. A., Muñoz Nieves, C., Matthias, L., Niles, M. T., & Alperin, J. P. (2019). Use of the Journal Impact Factor in academic review, promotion, and tenure evaluations. ELife, 8, e47338. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.47338
Niles, M. T., Schimanski, L. A., McKiernan, E. C., & Alperin, J. P. (2020). Why we publish where we do: Faculty publishing values and their relationship to review, promotion and tenure expectations. PLOS ONE, 15(3), e0228914. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0228914
Rice D B, Raffoul H, Ioannidis J P A, Moher D. Academic criteria for promotion and tenure in biomedical sciences faculties: cross sectional analysis of international sample of universities BMJ 2020; 369 :m2081 doi:10.1136/bmj.m2081
Share your thoughts on this article or topic
Use #LingData #ResearchOutputs #ReviewPromotionAndTenure on your favorite social media platform!
About the authors:
Juan Pablo Alperin is an Assistant Professor at the School of Publishing, an Associate Director of Research of the Public Knowledge Project, and the co-director of the Scholarly Communications Lab, all at Simon Fraser University . He is a multi-disciplinary scholar, with training in computer science, geography and education who believes that research, especially when it is made freely available, has the potential to make meaningful and direct contributions to society.
Lesley A. Schimanski
Lesley A. Schimanski is a Psychology Instructor and Research Associate in the Scholarly Communications Lab at Simon Fraser University. She enjoys applying her research methodology expertise to interdisciplinary fields of study, and is passionate about helping others to access and understand scholarly works that can have a positive real-world impact.
Michelle La is a graduate student and fashionista in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, and a research assistant with the Scholarly Communications Lab. Her research investigates the consumptive and trading practices of Metro Vancouver streetwear and sneaker enthusiasts through the lens of affect. She is passionate about unconventional forms of research communication such as through memes.
Meredith T. Niles is an Assistant Professor of Food Systems and Policy at The University of Vermont. She studies food systems and the environment from the perspective of people, behaviors and policies. She is an advocate for open research and science through her work on the board of the Public Library of Science (PLOS), and through research exploring faculty perceptions and behaviors related to open science. She is passionate about making research more publicly available to maximize the benefits of science for society.
Erin McKiernan is a Professor in the Department of Physics, Biomedical Physics program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. She is a researcher in experimental and computational biophysics and neurophysiology, and an advocate for open access, open data, and open research. She is the founder of the "Why Open Research?" project (http://whyopenresearch.org/), an educational site for researchers to learn how to share their work. She can be found on Twitter at @emckiernan13.
Citations
Cite this chapter:
Alperin, Juan Pablo, Lesley A. Schimanski, Michelle La, Meredith T. Niles, and Erin C. McKiernan. 2022. The value of data and other non-traditional scholarly outputs in academic review, promotion, and tenure in Canada and the United States. In The Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management, edited by Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, Bradley McDonnell, Eve Koller, and Lauren B. Collister, 171-183. doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12200.003.0017. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Open.
Cite this online lesson:
Gabber, Shirley, Danielle Yarbrough, Andrea L. Berez-Kroeker, Bradley McDonnell, Eve Koller, Lauren B. Collister, Juan Pablo Alperin, Lesley A. Schimanski, Michelle La, Meredith T. Niles, and Erin C. McKiernan. 2022. "Lesson 13." Linguistic Data Management: Online companion course to The Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management. Website: https://sites.google.com/hawaii.edu/linguisticdatamanagement/course-lessons/13-the-value-of-data-and-other-non-traditional-scholarly-outputs-in-academ [Date accessed].