Communications of the ACM
Quality vs. Quantity in Faculty Publications
Credit: iStockPhoto.com
As a former computer science department chair, I have long felt the system for evaluating and promoting faculty is far too dependent on quantity and fails to account adequately for quality. So I applaud the Computing Research Association best practices memo Moshe Y. Vardi mentioned in his Editor's Letter "Incentivizing Quality and Impact in Computing Research" (May 2015). However, more specific guidelines are needed for this initiative to be effective. I would urge all computing departments to inform candidates for assistant-professor positions their submitted CVs should list no more than three publications. Candidates must also be the primary author of at least two of them, meaning they were responsible for at least 50% of the intellectual content and at least 50% of the writing. On any other publication, the candidate would be considered a secondary author; yes, some papers may have no primary author.
I would go further. Faculty being considered for tenure should be permitted to list at most 15 publications and be a secondary author on at most five of them. Full-professor candidates should be permitted to list at most 25 and be a secondary author on at most 10. Also, in either case, candidates should be required to list three recent papers for which they are primary authors and on which they are to be explicitly evaluated.
No entries found