Assessing Academic Careers: The Peer Review of Professorial Candidates

The 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.

Reflection on Contradictory Learning Methods and Identity Formation in a New Academic Life Setting

Lecturers new to the academic life setting normally face similar types of challenges. These challenges were intensified for new lecturers starting their careers in the academic setting during the COVID-19 pandemic, when classes were conducted online. Student-centered learning has been the focus in engineering education recently, but many of the current lecturers have never experienced this method of learning as students, resulting in unfamiliarity and inexperience in conducting classes using this method of teaching. Our experiences as two new lecturers starting our academic careers during the pandemic using both the student-centered learning method and teacher-centered learning method in different classes are reported through collaborative autoethnographic methods. Both of our reflections revealed that stark differences can be seen as an effect of the teaching method, concluding that the student-centered learning method is superior to the traditional teacher-centered learning method. However, applying the former method also has some challenges. To overcome these challenges faced by new lecturers, some action plans have been listed for future improvement, which could be very meaningful and useful to other new lecturers as well as educators new to applying the student-centered learning method.

Reconstructing the University

The ‘modern university’—research-based, in which teaching and research are pursued by academic specialists organised departmentally—was created in the United States in the later nineteenth century in a productive misunderstanding of the organisation of knowledge and teaching in contemporary German universities. While the latter enjoyed international recognition, academic careers remained in thrall to an apprenticeship structure in which senior staff represented their entire discipline, supported by their juniors. The American structure, fostered by endowments and grants, presumed that departments would be composed of specialists who advanced their careers by developing their specialism. This was decisive for the disciplinary development of universities around the world. In London, the university was a federal, administrative body whose degree courses could be followed both within Britain and in the wider Empire. As a component part of this structure, the London School of Economics shared in this reach, and so came to dominate the teaching of the social sciences in Britain and the Empire.

Membership of the editorial boards of journals published by the predatory publisher OMICS: willing and unwilling participation

Introduction. OMICS is the largest and most successful predatory publisher, with numerous subsidiaries. In 2019 it was convicted of unethical publishing practices. Method. A numerical tally of OMICS's editorial listings was compiled across 131 nations. Names and affiliations were recorded for seven nations. A sample was surveyed to estimate the proportions of those aware and unaware of their listing, and of OMICS’s conviction. Analysis. Excel enabled compilation, absolute and proportional tallies and random selection. Results. OMICS has twenty subsidiaries and 26,772 editor (and editorial board) listings, 11,361 from just seven nations. Proportional to population, Greeks were most frequently represented on OMICS's editorial boards, followed by Americans, Singaporeans and Italians. In absolute terms, Americans were the most numerous. The survey found that more than half of the respondents were either unaware of their listing or were unwilling to be listed, and 26% were unaware of OMICS’s conviction. Conclusion. OMICS's editorial boards do not function as they do for respectable publishers, hence the information published in OMICS journals is unreliable. Academic alliances with OMICS are potentially damaging to academic careers and institutional reputations. Universities should develop policies dealing with predatory publishers in general and OMICS in particular.

Positive Prospect in Non-Academic Careers

The article's abstract is not available.

Facets of Specialization and Its Relation to Career Success: An Analysis of U.S. Sociology, 1980 to 2015

We investigate how sociology students garner recognition from niche field audiences through specialization. Our dataset comprises over 80,000 sociology-related dissertations completed at U.S. universities, as well as data on graduates’ pursuant publications. We analyze different facets of how students specialize—topic choice, focus, novelty, and consistency. To measure specialization types within a consistent methodological frame, we utilize structural topic modeling. These measures capture specialization strategies used at an early career stage. We connect them to a crucial long-term outcome in academia: becoming an advisor. Event-history models reveal that specific topic choices and novel combinations exhibit a positive influence, whereas focused theses make no substantial difference. In particular, theses related to the cultural turn, methods, or race are tied to academic careers that lead to mentorship. Thematic consistency of students’ publication track also has a strong positive effect on the chances of becoming an advisor. Yet, there are diminishing returns to consistency for highly productive scholars, adding important nuance to the well-known imperative of publish or perish in academic careers.