International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   Publishing is often the key to career advancement in academia. Both scholars who accept this measure of achievement and those who contest it are cognizant of the importance that academic institutions attach to publishing (e.g., Leonard 1999 ). Despite the importance of publishing, conversations with peers in different departments and institutions readily reveal the substantial variation in publication requirements for tenure and promotion that are employed in the international studies discipline. This makes it difficult to generalize: in international relations and political science departments where articles are valued most highly, the focus is sometimes simply on the quantity of work produced, but there are many departments that employ some measure of the “quality” of work produced. Most often, such measures of quality rely on commonly accepted perceptions of the “prestige” of certain journals. At other times, departments evaluate the ranking of the journals in which the work appears, using the various studies that have been conducted in this area ( Giles et al. 1989 ; Crewe and Norris 1991 ; Nisonger 1993 ; Garand and Giles 2003 ), or even general indicators such as a journal's audience (e.g., general versus niche journals). In departments where book publishing is valued, it often matters that the book is published with a prestigious university ... log in or subscribe to read full text