Office of the Provost

Professional Guidelines for Evaluating Public and Digital Scholarship

Below is some general advice on working with candidates for tenure, developed in consultation with the Tenured Promotions Committee.

If you have any questions or additional resources to suggest, please contact Joel Christensen.

• From hiring through reappointment and tenure, expectations about scholarly outputs (e.g., digital media, public scholarship) and evaluative criteria should be made clear to the candidate and members of the department
• Public and digital scholarship should be experienced and evaluated in the media for which it is created (e.g., online articles read online, not in .pdf)
• Candidates should be invited to frame and characterize their work in annual reports, at reappointment and in tenure application statements
• Candidates should specify and characterize the nature of collaborative/co-authored work
• Departments should work with candidates and disciplinary standards to frame their colleagues' work for outsiders (specifying how the field is changing, how their modes of scholarly output relate to those changes, and a broad understanding about evaluative criteria to be used in considering tenure and promotion).
• External evaluators should include scholars who have expertise both in the content and form of the work candidates are producing, framing their work both in terms of impact in the specific discipline and value to the general public
• Prompts to external evaluators should specify the expectations of the department and the discipline and formulate questions that establish the importance of new models

Guidelines and parameters established by professional organizations

• MLA
  • Evaluating Digital Humanities
  • Public Scholarship and Humanities
  • Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion
• AAA
  • Academic Tenure and Promotion Resources
• ASA
  • Evaluating Public Communication in Tenure and Promotion
• AHA
  • Broadening the Definition of Historical Scholarship
  • Evaluating Digital Scholarship
  • Tenure, Promotion, and the Publicly Engaged Academic Historian
• AAR
  • Evaluating Digital Scholarship
• CAA
  • Digital Scholarship in Art and Architectural History
  • Digital Scholarship in Studio Art

Additional Resources

• University of North Texas Library Guides
• How to Evaluate Digital Scholarship, The Journal of Digital Humanities
• Report on Recognizing Community-Engaged Scholarship in Academic Personnel Review, UCLA
• Assessment of Community-Engaged Scholarship, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• Support for Community-Engaged Scholarship, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities & ACLS

Note

• Per the Faculty Handbook, the term “department” denotes the academic administrative unit(s) to which the candidate is being appointed.