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I have no academic (peer-reviewed) publications to my credit but close to 6 years of industry-based experience. I have just completed a PhD in sociology. Does my work in industry carry any weight in academia? My work in industry included activities such as developing codes and operational manuals in a particular field to be used by operators in that field (e.g., a health and safety manual). |
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Weight in academia is carried mostly by peer-reviewed research publications, published in academically reputable venues such as research journals, conferences, books with reputable publishers, reputable preprint servers, ... If you get these publications from industry research, you get academic weight. A famous example for prominent research in electrical engineering done in industry are the Bell laboratories. Codes and operational manuals are not academic publications, and typically carry little weight. In order to get that, you have to publish academic papers about the codes and manuals, or publish papers about research results obtained with them. |
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Does industry research carry any weight in academia? It varies. It varies by subject, by institution, by the individuals doing the hiring. Are there subjects, places, people where industry research can get you a post even with no journal papers? Yes. Are such appointments common? Not anywhere I know of. A good employer (those are the ones you want, right?) will be able to look past the traditional indicators of a good researcher (PhD, journal papers, career in academia), and look at other, non-traditional ones. But that takes time and effort, and hiring can be a drain on those as it is, so you'd need to give a potential employer some really good reasons up front why they should put the effort in to establishing your abilities. A personal recommendation from a senior academic, or from a retired senior academic - one who's already trusted and respected by the employer you're targetting - is the sort of thing that can help open doors for you. |
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The problem here is with your use of the phrase "industry research". Writing codes and manuals isn't actually research. Research is research: if it is good research, it counts and definitely carries weight in academia. Research is evaluated by its merit (e.g., intellectual depth, correctness, importance) and its impact (how has it changed practice? how has it changed the course of research done by other researchers?). The names or affiliations of who did the research is irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether the work was done in a university or in a company. It doesn't matter whether the affiliation on the title is a university or a company. What matters is the content of the paper. If it's good research, it carries weight with academia. It also carries weight with industry research labs. However, writing health and safety manuals is not research. You shouldn't call it "industry research". You should call it "writing health and safety manuals". And if it's not research, it doesn't count towards your research record and doesn't carry weight. A good indicator of research is that it is (a) novel, and (b) published in a highly regarded, (c) peer-reviewed forum. (The question gets more interesting if we are talking about people who do novel, scientific research that could have been published in a peer-reviewed forum, but isn't, because the company wants to keep the results secret. This kind of research is harder for academics to evaluate, and thus might not carry as much weight with academia, because it isn't published. In that case, it's not that the research was performed in industry so much as that the research was never published. In any case, it sounds like that's relevant to you, based upon what you've told us here. Writing health and safety manuals is most likely not something that could have been published in a peer-reviewed conference or journal.) |
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