How faculty define quality, prestige, and impact in research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Despite the calls for change, there is significant consensus that when it comes to evaluating publications, review, promotion, and tenure processes should aim to reward research that is of high “quality,” has an “impact,” and is published in “prestigious” journals. Nevertheless, such terms are highly subjective and present challenges to ascertain precisely what such research looks like. Accordingly, this article responds to the question: how do faculty from universities in the United States and Canada define the terms quality, prestige, and impact? We address this question by surveying 338 faculty members from 55 different institutions. This study’s findings highlight that, despite their highly varied definitions, faculty often describe these terms in overlapping ways. Additionally, results shown that marked variance in definitions across faculty does not correspond to demographic characteristics. This study’s results highlight the need to more clearly implement evaluation regimes that do not rely on ill-defined concepts. Financial Disclosure Funding for this project was provided to JPA, MTN, ECM, and LAS from the OpenSociety Foundations (OR2017-39637). The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Related Materials Other publications related to this project, including a series of infographics summarizing findings, can be found at: https://www.scholcommlab.ca/research/rpt-project/ Survey responses can be found at the following publication: Niles, Meredith T.; Schimanski, Lesley A.; McKiernan, Erin C.; Alperin, Juan Pablo,2020, “Data for: Why we publish where we do”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/MRLHNO , Harvard Dataverse, V1 Data regarding RPT documents can be found at the following data publication: Alperin, Juan Pablo; Muñoz Nieves, Carol; Schimanski, Lesley; McKiernan, Erin C.;Niles, Meredith T., 2018, “Terms and Concepts found in Tenure and Promotion Guidelines from the US and Canada”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VY4TJE , Harvard Dataverse , V3, UNF:6:PQC7QoilolhDrokzDPxxyQ== [fileUNF]
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.074 | 0.257 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.015 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".