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Updates From The Dean - Issue 25
Research Outcomes Clarifications for Research Intensive Faculty
Based on many years of conducting faculty annual evaluations, tenure & promotion reviews, post-tenure & mid-tenure reviews, and sustained performance evaluations, this document serves to provide insight into how various items are seen in the review processes. The goal of the document is to promote a dialogue between faculty and evaluators (chairs, committees, & dean) to help make the review processes more transparent as well as move COSM forward with achieving the goals Soaring to Research Excellence.
Table 1.
Evaluation Areas
Teaching
Research
Service
Grants & Contracts
Publications
Introduction: As COSM moves forward with an increasing focus on research, there are areas where clarification is needed for our collective understanding of some vital issues. It is critical for tenured and tenure track faculty members to establish a clear research agenda that will be the main thrust for their research efforts and establish them as an independent scholar and researcher. In this area, it should be obvious to your peers that you are the creative engine driving the outcomes (papers, grants, etc). Collaborative efforts are a significant aspect of the scientific landscape in today’s STEM world; however, faculty members must be able to effectively communicate their (your) individual intellectual contribution to these projects. It is the responsibility of the faculty member to articulate how the research activities conducted during the evaluation period satisfy the evaluation criteria.
In considering the materials for tenure and promotion, it is imperative to recognize that the T&P and post-tenure requirements generally have two parts: acceptable annual evaluations AND departmental requirements for publications and/or grants & contracts. These requirements are found in the departmental bylaws, which is the standard applied by the chair and all external reviewers. Strong annual evaluations represent summative feedback about faculty performance during that evaluation period. Positive annual evaluations cannot be construed as a guarantee of either tenure or promotion, especially when progress does not materialize into outcomes.
Grants & contracts and publications can be generated by activities from any of the workload areas - teaching, research or service, see Table 1 for a visual. For example, the development of a new chemistry laboratory experiment for a junior level chemistry course that was published in a chemical education journal is a teaching activity. Additionally, the paper should count toward satisfying the publication requirement in evaluations. Similarly, not all grants & are research related activities. It is critical that all departments clearly articulate in the bylaws how grants & contracts as well as publications developed from teaching and service activities count in the evaluation processes. At a minimum, 50% of the publications should be developed from research related activities. Research-intensive units should require a higher percentage of research related publications. Publications: It is common in scientific and technical publishing for material to be presented at various developmental stages, such as presenting early ideas in a workshop, more developed work in a conference, and fully developed contributions as journal articles. The College supports this publishing philosophy. To reach the COSM research goals, peer-reviewed journal publications must be the ultimate target of research activities – the gold standard.
Conference presentations represent an important part of the development process for publishing research work. There are differing levels of value associated with the presentations based: nature of the conference (local, regional, national, international, etc.), invited presentations versus contributed presentations, keynote addresses, etc. It is important that faculty articulate the impact of these presentations in their evaluations materials so that they are properly valued in the evaluation outcome.
There is a significant difference in the impact of the publication outcome based on where in this evolutionary publishing paradigm the “paper” lies. Thus, papers in peer-reviewed journals and transactions should be given a higher level of significance than other forms of papers – trade magazines, conference proceedings, professional magazines, technical reports, etc. An accomplished researcher will likely have journal publications as the core of the researcher’s body of work, with additional conference proceedings and other types of publications documenting lower-level production. Faculty members that rely heavily on conference proceedings as the sole product of their research or that are unable to document the impact of, and peer-review process associated with, such proceedings will likely experience issues during the evaluation process.
High quality conference proceedings must meet the following criteria:
Undergo a rigorous peer-review process for acceptance; review by the conference organizing committee for presentation at the conference does not satisfy this requirement
Accessible by the general scientific community via a mechanism outside of the conference itself
Published as a complete paper, not just an abstract
Citable as an acceptable reference in other scholarly products (Papers, books, etc.)
Acceptance rate for conference should be comparable to rigorous peer-reviewed journals
Grants: In the grant arena, there are a few areas of ambiguity where some additional discussion is needed. It is important that faculty acquire the resources needed for their research, and there is a variety of sources available for the acquisition of these resources, including internal University awards, external competitive grants, and external contracts (both competitive and noncompetitive). Faculty should pursue all of them. However, there are clear differences in the competitive nature associated with these sources, and the quality of the project required to obtain funds from the various agencies (i.e., application or proposal). As such, there should be acknowledgment of differences in the impact of successful funding acquisition based on the source and the competitive nature of the grant award. In the end, each faculty member should be able to articulate the impact of the grant and its impact on her/his research agenda, the department, and/or the University. Of course, there are non-competitive grants or contracts that have a tremendous impact and that are deserving of significant weight in evaluations (annual, T&P and/or post-tenure review). It is imperative that each faculty member effectively communicate and document the outcomes and impact, so that her/his peers understand the true scope.
Internal grants are a great resource to obtain equipment, money for students & supplies, and travel money to present at conferences. Internal grants are an investment by the University in you as a researcher, colleague, and faculty member or in your department and program. Success with acquiring internal grants shows that the University believes in your ideas and in you. However, internal grants will not strengthen your dossier for T&P or post-tenure reviews. In-kind grants of equipment, facilities usage, or other donations can be valuable tools for acquiring the resources needed to teach and conduct research; however, they should not be viewed as equivalent to traditional competitive external grants from state, federal or industry sponsors. In these cases, it will be essential to document the impact of the in-kind grant so that evaluators can accurately assess their significance in the evaluation processes. Without the documented impact, in-kind grants will likely not strengthen your dossier for T&P or sustained performance reviews.
Student training and programmatic grants are a critical component of how COSM will meet the research goals for providing resources for the high-quality educational experiences required for STEM students to be successful after graduation. These are valuable grants, but they are often not research grants. Grants of this type will satisfy the requirements outlined in the department’s bylaws for the various performance evaluations. In some instances, the department bylaws may require “research” grants as part of the evaluation criteria. If so, training grants may not satisfy this requirement for a research grant. In many instances, the training grant will satisfy the requirement for a grant in the evaluation criteria, but the actual work conducted under the grant fits under teaching or service activities.
Collaborative Projects: In the era of modern science, collaborative research has become a critical aspect of the STEM landscape. However, collaborative projects create challenges in performances reviews and evaluations. How many faculty members should get an exemplary annual rating from a single collaborative journal publication or grant? Two? Three? More? What about the impact of collaborative projects on tenure and/or promotion? Without discouraging collaborative research, we must establish a mechanism to address these ambiguities.
A faculty member with a clear research agenda creates projects and assembles the team of collaborators needed to execute the project. This is the expectation for tenure and promotion and a successful faculty member will be able to document her/his role in leading such collaborative efforts, both internal and external. To provide clarity for collaborative grants and publications, the role of the faculty member should be clearly labeled with lead author, corresponding author, presenting author, PI, co-PI, etc. In addition, each researcher must be able to articulate her/his role on the project and the impact of their contribution in such a way that all collaborators agree. Without a demonstration of the nature in which a faculty member is leading a collaborative effort, it will likely be impossible to accurately assess the impact of the grant or publication in the performance review. In such cases, those grants or papers might not have a significant impact on the evaluation.
Successful researchers will likely have body of work that includes outcomes where they have played a variety of roles (lead PI, co-PI, senior contributor, etc.). Faculty with a body of work without outcomes as the creator of the project and organizer of the research team will likely encounter issues during the tenure and/or promotion reviews.
Graduate programs versus undergraduate only programs: A graduate program comes with additional resources that should allow for a higher level of productivity in research, mainly graduate students. The availability of graduate students provide access to researchers with a higher level of training and education. With thesis and dissertation programs, this is especially true because these graduate students are REQUIRED to conduct high-level research for their thesis and dissertation projects. As such, it is typical to expect faculty in departments with graduate programs to produce research outcomes at a higher-level (quality and/or rate) than faculty in departments only offering undergraduate degrees.
Research Evaluation Standards
Evaluation of the individual outcomes will be determined by the chair based on the materials provided by the faculty member during the review process. It is incumbent on the faculty to provide the needed materials to evaluate the research products. Failure to provide the supporting materials will likely result in a reduced significance placed on the research product.
Table 2 provides examples of activities with the anticipated impact of those activities in an evaluation review. It is not a comprehensive list of research related grants and publications.
