Chemistry Department Tenure and Promotion Guidelines

We support the scholarship portfolio of colleagues for tenure and/or promotion who have established themselves as successful and productive scholars within their field of chemistry. We understand that differences between the sub-disciplines in chemistry exist and that each faculty member must be allowed his/her own research style and methods. Consequently, for departmental support for tenure and/or promotion we are guided by the following prioritized components.

I.  Primary Scholarship Component: Publication of peer-reviewed journal articles

We expect faculty to establish an independent research program at Lafayette that results in the on-going publication of articles in peer-reviewed journals, and to demonstrate evidence that such productivity will continue into the future.  We especially value and expect scholarship that engages Lafayette students in meaningful research that commonly results in jointly-authored student-faculty papers presented in peer-reviewed journals.

We find value in research collaborations with colleagues across departments and institutions and therefore value collaborative publications. We require a candidate to explicitly address his/her contribution to any collaborative research projects in the personal statement. We also encourage our faculty to contribute to the scholarship of learning and teaching, and therefore peer-reviewed publications in this area are valued. However this should not constitute the sole form of scholarship that a candidate possesses during review for promotion.

When evaluating research productivity, both the quality and quantity of peer-reviewed publications will be considered by this department. Quality will be judged by external reviewers and by those faculty members of the department evaluating a candidate for tenure and/or promotion.

II. Complementary Scholarship Components

Although valued below the peer-reviewed publications of original research addressed above, we note that other forms of scholarship can also provide supporting evidence of a candidate’s productivity. While difficult to fully prioritize, below we group these forms of scholarship by order of value: Group A is generally more highly valued than group B, which is generally more valued than group C.  We require a candidate to describe and define their contributions to these complementary areas of scholarship. We emphasize that this list is not intended to be a check-list; there is no suggestion that a faculty member should undertake scholarship through any one or a set of these categories.

Group A

  • obtaining external grants for research and instrumentation
  • publishing review articles, book chapters, textbooks, content for textbooks, etc.
  • publishing collaborative papers where the candidate has played a minor role in the work presented.
  • publishing peer-reviewed papers in which the majority of the work was conducted prior to coming to Lafayette

Group B

  • presenting at professional meetings/conferences
  • editing books or professional journals
  • submitting external grant proposals for research and research instrumentation

Group C

  • publishing encyclopedia entries, book reviews, database entries, and other items that receive minimal peer review
  • presenting invited seminars at other colleges, universities, and other professional venues

 

June 2017