Impact should be included in promotion and tenure criteria

As many have noted, a lot of academic research in the social sciences, while carefully done, lacks relevance. And while new editors of journals issue manifestos encouraging researchers to break out of their small, circular conversations and engage with government, business and civil society leaders, change is slow.

Editorial practices, tenure standards and social norms combine to discourage most academics from attempting the boldest work – and certainly from considering impact as part of their jobs. While some research has had great impact on practice, this sometimes occurs despite – rather than because of – standard academic procedure.

As someone who oversaw the tenure and promotion standards at one elite business school and who chairs the promotions process at my current institution, I strongly sympathise with these observations. And in the spirit of moving the discussion forward, I would like to share an experiment and a concrete proposal that begins with a simple premise: if we want to encourage relevant, timely research that has impact, we need first to unearth it. Then we need to begin to measure it, for we treasure what we measure.

Tenure and promotion packets sent out by universities for review routinely include instruction letters, statements by the candidate and a set of papers and/or books they have written. Impact, if mentioned at all, often comes as a footnote in a candidate’s statement, along the lines of: “Oh, and, by the way, the US Supreme Court cited my paper.” As an experiment, in a recent promotion round at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, we sent out novel additional evidence for a candidate for tenure.

In addition to supplying the customary materials, we asked the candidate to write a document providing evidence of the impact that their work had on practice, including testimonials linking it to subsequent changes. Reviewers were asked to opine on the statement as they would on an article.

The referees’ reaction was mixed. They seemed intrigued and impressed, but they claimed never to have been asked to review a document of this sort before, so didn’t know the standards to judge it by, and were generally confused. Nevertheless, our commitment to impact is such that we have now revised our promotion standards to allow candidates to offer evidence of their work’s impact as part of their review.

Allowing and encouraging candidates to include formal “impact evidence” in tenure review cases is within our gift. If it is voluntary, no candidate is made worse off. Yet if candidates see that practical impact is a viable component of a path to academic success, they will respond to these incentives.

Since journal editors are also reviewers, existing journals – or perhaps even new ones – may in time begin to devote pages specifically to the documentation of impact, broadening our understanding of the ways in which it occurs. We can also encourage researchers to expound on the impact of their work in the concluding section of standard papers, replacing the often highly standardised repetition of research conclusions. What was the path of diffusion for this innovation? In what ways did practice change as a result of this research?

Just as we have come to learn how excellent research is conducted through the sharing and reviewing of papers, more sharing of impact will promote a better understanding of how it can be promoted, allowing senior faculty and reviewers to develop the intellectual muscle to evaluate it rigorously.

In the UK, we already produce this type of evidence for the impact case studies submitted to the research excellence framework. The data are used to evaluate whole academic organisations, but the case studies represent the impact of research conducted by individual faculty members, so it would be a relatively small step to use a form of impact documentation to evaluate individuals, too.

As our tenure and promotion committees resume their important work this academic year, surely it is time to discuss how we evaluate our junior colleagues. In short order, we could break apart the monolith of traditional practice to promote a more multifaceted view of excellence that allows impact to shine.

Peter Tufano is Peter Moores dean of Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.