Reinforcing Scholarship of Teaching: Inconsistencies in the Predominant Use of Bibliometrics in Promotion and Tenure

Abstract

Educational institutions have been evaluating scholarship of frontier research as the key factor for decades to acknowledge academic merit and reward faculty with promotion and tenure. While this has created a substantial degree of pressure towards publication of research, it has tragically de-emphasized the role of teaching and scholarship of reflective inquiry. There is a perceived lack of recognition and reward for teaching in institutions of higher learning, and an almost exclusive predominance of use of bibliometrics for evaluating scholarship of teaching. There is a pressing need to address the imbalance between weightage in teaching and research, the competing activities of clinical work, research and administration. This necessitates the development of a structured pathway to teaching competence, an increase in the support systems that permit its implementation and continued use, a profession-wide change in attitudes towards teaching, and practical opportunities that provide more time for teaching (Doctors As Teachers, 2006). We provide an in-depth review of existing literature on the inconsistencies regarding the evaluation of scholarship and academic merit in relation to promotion and tenure, and the debatable and egregious use of  the Impact factor (IF) and citation analysis in context. While identifying key documented inconsistencies related to the exclusive use of bibliometrics of IF and Citation analysis for evaluation of faculty performance in institutions of higher education, we feel that there is urgent need to restore pre-eminence of teaching in universities and the incorporation and application of appropriate metrics for evaluating scholarship of teaching and academic merit, and to reinforce its use as the major determinant for granting promotion and tenure.

Keywords: Teaching, Research, Academic merit, Tenure, Promotion, Bibliometrics, Impact factor