4 ms·
The problem is that hiring committees are busy, have imperfect information and therefore rely on easy metrics, i.e. prestige of candidate's university and journ
by nextos 4y ago
The problem is that hiring committees are busy, have imperfect information and therefore rely on easy metrics, i.e. prestige of candidate's university and journals where he has published.
Many universities are now signatories of the SF Declaration, where they promise to value research based on ideas, not on prestige of journals: https://sfdora.org https://sfdora.org
I have noted e.g. UMass goes one step further and asks tenure-track applicants to remove affiliation and journal names on their CVs to avoid bias. So that someone who comes from e.g. Oxford and has published in Nature is not judged to be better a priori than someone who comes from Exeter and has published in JCI.
I think this is a great initiative.
- woooooo 4y agoHow does that work if anyone actually reads the publications? They'll have the journal name and probably current institution of the authors, right? Am I being naive with the question? Is reading the publications unusual?
- sdenton4 4y agoPretty easy to ignore the publication journal of you download all your papers from the arxiv...
- neffy 4y agoIt would be very interesting to have that studied... but my general impressions (as somebody who does read the publications) is that the answer is usually no.
- nextos 4y agoIt's a bit more complicated, you are asked to submit a CV, a research proposal and some summaries of your publications, all anonymized. Then, an external committee theoretically does look only at that, and preselects candidates. At that stage, they tell applicants and their internal committee begins looking at all non-anonymized materials.