Assessing Academic Careers: The Peer Review of Professorial Candidates
AbstractThe reputation of an academic is dependent on their recognition among a wider community of peers, which means that the research field, rather than the institution, is the venue where careers are valued. This chapter looks at discipline specific practices for evaluating publications oeuvres in three fields; biomedicine, economics and history. The material consists of reports, written by independent referees, commissioned by Swedish universities when hiring for new professors. The approach is to study how ‘value’ is enacted with special attention to the kind of tools—judgements, indicators and metrics—that are used. The chapter concludes by relating the findings to a broader context of how academics are assessed, and the implications that such practices may have for knowledge production and careers are discussed.