Timeline for How to assess research "impact" for tenure/promotion committees
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 9, 2012 at 0:20 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by S. Carnahan♦ | ||
| Apr 8, 2012 at 12:21 | comment | added | Deane Yang | Jeremy, many thanks for your comment. Any chance you could say more about how you answer your first two questions? And what do you do if you don't trust them? | |
| Apr 7, 2012 at 15:58 | comment | added | Bill Johnson | If you must use citations, you should use Google Scholar in addition to Mathscinet because it captures citations missed by Mathscinet (vice versa also occasionally happens). | |
| Apr 7, 2012 at 15:36 | comment | added | Jeremy Teitelbaum | Speaking from the point of view of a dean, I rely on my evaluation of the credibility of the departmental committee and the department head. Do I believe that they have real standards? Can I see evidence that the department knows what it's doing? When the department reviews candidates, are they realistic about the strengths AND weaknesses of cases? Do they get letters from high-profile people and read those letters carefully? I am much more comfortable taking the advice of people who I trust than I am in any citation ranking system. | |
| Apr 7, 2012 at 13:49 | vote | accept | Jeanne Clelland | ||
| Apr 7, 2012 at 18:36 | |||||
| Apr 7, 2012 at 13:49 | comment | added | Jeanne Clelland | And of course, the problem at hand is that issues such as how typical citation counts vary across fields of mathematics are too subtle for university-level committees; they just want one standard for "mathematics." Attempts to explain that candidate X works in a field where publication rates (and hence citations) are typically on the low side tend to be met with skepticism, even if that statement is backed up by the external letter-writers. | |
| Apr 7, 2012 at 13:10 | comment | added | Henry Cohn | Another danger of focusing on Mathscinet citations is that they don't count citations appearing in the CS or physics literature, so this can substantially undercount citations for work near the interface between mathematics and other fields. | |
| Apr 7, 2012 at 12:48 | comment | added | Alex B. | Also, some work just doesn't get cited at all, even if it is used by thousands of mathematicians. For example people who work on efficient algorithms for computing software are at a huge disadvantage, whenever publications and citations are used to asses faculty: they do serious mathematical work, their results are often more widely used in the mathematical community than the most brilliant publications; yet, they are almost never personally acknowledged in the papers that use the software and they often do not publish in high profile journals. | |
| Apr 7, 2012 at 9:45 | history | answered | Deane Yang | CC BY-SA 3.0 |