What are typical examples of "scholarly work"?

Question

I am looking into applying to a teaching position at a liberal-arts institution. The application page asks for an example of scholarly work. What are good examples of scholarly work? For the sciences, is this like published articles?

Answer 1

“Scholarly work” in academia generally refers to papers and books, with potentially other forms of formally released output (e.g., patents, or source code on a public repository) being included. In the sciences this expression is slightly quaint and not often used, but can be useful when one wants to speak not just about one’s published papers but about a broader body of work that includes other things.

It’s also possible that some people would count other forms of written, but informal or less polished work (like a blog post, or your own highly prolific physics.se contributions), as “scholarly work”, but personally I wouldn’t, and generally I would be very careful about describing anything as scholarly work that I wasn’t sure the person I’m addressing would accept as such, particularly in a job application. (With that being said, your physics.se writing is really nice and says good things about you, so you should probably mention it somewhere, for example in your teaching statement).

Answer 2

For sciences, scholarly work means peer-reviewed publications. Conference papers count if they are peer reviewed.

In other disciplines, it can mean different things.

Answer 3

I had a colleague (UK Lecturer in Computer Science) recently define scholarly work as academic work not involving any new ideas, but new presentations and synthesis of established knowledge.

In particular, I believe they included:

• (text)books
• survey / overview / white papers on particular application domains, tools or research directions
• (to a lesser extent) reviewing for journals

I actually can't remember if they included things such as editorial duties for journals in this or not, but this short list should give a good idea on what kinds of things they considered under "scholarly work".

This is very similar to Dan Romnik's answer but with "standard" papers explicitly excluded. To elaborate a bit more, my colleague placed scholarly work as an activity (with the outputs as listed above) falling between teaching (where the outputs are graduate students*) and research (where the outputs are peer-reviewed publications, newly developed technologies, etc.).

_{^{*I am not very fond of "graduate students" being called the output of teaching activities, however the general feeling one gets from UK University policies is that they are product and profit-oriented businesses (with tuitions as inputs and students with diplomas as an expected output), and less and less as charitable educational institutions which they are on paper.}}

Answer 4

I just wrote an answer to a related question, from the point of view of a professor at a small liberal arts college (SLAC). I explained that, at a SLAC, "scholarly work" can be interpreted more broadly than in the answer by Anonymous Physicist. For sure, peer reviewed journal articles count as scholarly works. But, at my SLAC, the following also "count" (perhaps to a slightly lesser extent):

• Unfunded grant proposals
• Scholarship of teaching and learning (e.g., papers in PRIMUS)
• Peer-reviewed expository writing
• Textbooks for undergraduate courses
• Other peer-reviewed teaching materials, like labs you could use to teach calculus using Sage, if it was part of an NSF grant and had to be hosted on a webpage somewhere.

I'm aware of other SLACs where the following count:

• Blog posts
• Appearances in/on media
• Activism that uses your professional expertise
• Non-peer-reviewed expository writing
• Public service
• Serving in the AMS or MAA (these are mathematical professional organizations)
• Serving as an external reviewer for a department, a tenure case, a PhD thesis, etc.

I think Dan Romik is right that you should feel free to include patents, source code on public repositories like GitHub, and even contributions to StackExchange, as "scholarly activities." But if an application is asking "for an example of scholarly work" then it's best to give them a peer-reviewed, published research article in a good journal. The hiring committee is trying to assess if your scholarly program is strong enough to get tenure, so it's best to rely on the gold standard of a publication.

Answer 5

The best example is some sort of research. In many such institutions the best research is something that undergraduates can participate in. In some fields such as math this is easier, requiring less in the way of equipment. In others it may be impossible other than by, say taking a leave to go to CERN for particle physics. But the research should result in some sort of writing, even if not up to the standards of top journals.

But at the other end of the scale is just "keeping up with the field" through reading and attendance (maybe with participation) at conferences. It can vary widely. In CS there are a number of regional conferences at which people participate. Most of the work done for these is about the teaching itself and how to do it effectively. They are very valuable as the field changes and grows.

At a somewhat higher level is participation in an internet based study group that works on some set of problems in the field collaboratively and may produce occasional papers. But the collaboration itself is valuable for people at such colleges as it gives you access to a wider range of ideas that you can bring back to the classroom, which is, likely, your most important task.

Running a study group on some topic with a couple of faculty and a few more advanced students is a good example. Read and discuss a few recent papers (or classic papers) and show the students how to approach learning about the arcana of the field.

In some fields even non-scholarly writing may be "scholarly". If you teach writing, then writing novels will probably do.

Becoming a popularizer of science and becoming known for it is usually recognized. Textbook writing - even workbook writing may be enough.

In the best case, you get to set the terms yourself by proposing a course of development to the administration and then following it.