I don’t know much about tenure or impact factors and journals. I don’t really know much about how academic journals get rated for prestige, influence, and coolness. But I’ve been thinking about new sorts of ratings for academic publications—especially those DIY publications. I’ve been thinking about those self-published pieces that don’t go through a journal but are published online ready to be experienced. There are some outstanding pieces out there that may not have a home in a journal but are important and need some support and academic cred. I’ve also been thinking about all the work comp and rhet teachers do online. I mean often they are blogging about rhetoric, vlogging about rhetoric, youtubing about composition, facebooking composition and, in general, engaging in academic activities through social media platforms that they never get credit for. So I wonder about liking and +1ng. And I ask ya these questions:
1. Should there be some sort of calculation (impact factor type) for articles, books, and websites based on likes and +1s and tweets ?
2. Could academic prestige be equated to social media numbers?
3. Should social media presence help with tenure?
If the answer is yes to any of the above then ya gotta ask the next questions:
1. Would a like from Villanueva mean more than a like from Muhlhauser?
2. Would a +1 from Yancey be rated higher than a +1 from Brad Pitt?
What would a university look like if tenure were based on social media presence?
Please like, +1, and tweet this post. I’m preparing for the future.
later
Provocative post, especially if we consider how tenure committee’s would digest online circulation. In 2006 the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion released a set of survey statistics seems to reveal an *inverse* relationship between readership/circulation and credibility.
The numbers from the MLA report illustrate how English departments feel about writing for anyone other than specialist peers: Books “oriented to classroom practices” were deemed “not important” by 41.5% of institutions that grant Doctoral degrees. Textbooks fair only slightly better, ranked “not important” by 39.7%; Bibliographic scholarship was rated “not important” by more than a 1/3 of these departments.
The least valued form of publishing? “The item that the highest percentage of responding departments rated ‘not important,’” according to the report, “was articles for a general audience (54.8%),” with books for a general audience right behind it. To put it mildly, scholarship produced for these audiences is perceived as significantly less valuable.