10

I’m currently preparing a tenure packet. I have reviewed a few papers for journals in the last few years. I am wondering how I should include this activity.

Certainly I will be including evidence of this professional activity (e-mails with the editors acknowledging the receipt of the report, etc.), but I presume that it would not be standard practice to include the reports themselves. It already feels a little odd to quasi-publicly acknowledge that I was an anonymous referee for some papers that didn’t get published (Hmm, I wonder what my report was like), but this seems like the right way to go.

|improve this question
  • 5
    I'm voting to close because this is really a matter of the specific regulations at your university and does not generalize from one university to another. When I prepared my tenure packet, I listed the journals I had refereed for (and how often) in the CV I submitted, but no evidence was included, because no one really wants to go through pages of evidence for points that (1) make very little difference and (2) you're very unlikely to lie about. Certainly if someone asked I could provide such evidence. – Alexander Woo Aug 30 '17 at 1:27
  • 2
    I agree with Alexander. Furthermore, journal reviewing is counted very little in terms of tenure 'points'. If a monograph or journal article in a major journal is +10 fictive tenure points, then doing a peer-review would be +0.1 points. Not nothing but very little. – RoboKaren Aug 30 '17 at 15:59
20

Absolutely not. Referee reports are confidential, especially for papers that were rejected. Including them in your tenure packet would violate that confidentiality.

|improve this answer
14

Back when I still needed to pad my CV, I included doing peer-reviews in the "Academic Service" portion of my cv:

  • Anonymous peer reviewer for Journal of Slack Exchanges (2015, 2017)
  • Anonymous peer reviewer for International Journal of Critical Yoyoing (2015)

but I did not have to provide any evidence per se. However, with anything tenure related, you should speak to your chair as well as recently tenured colleagues at your university and follow their advice -- as each university has its own particular way of doing things.

|improve this answer
  • I agree with this answer, but the exact format isn't crucial. To give another example of how you might do it, I put a list of journals that I'd refereed for (without years) on my service statement. – Noah Snyder Aug 30 '17 at 12:29
11

If the requirements do not include actually including the reviews, then I would not do so. I would instead just resort to including the email exchanges acknowledging that the reviews have been received.

|improve this answer
  • 1
    This is true if the university requires some evidence of this. Otherwise, providing the email exchanges (which often have the title of the paper) would be violating the confidentiality of the process. – RoboKaren Aug 30 '17 at 15:58
  • 1
    I was assuming that the OP had to provide some sort of documentation. Of course, it is also possible to redact the titles of the articles and the names of the authors before submitting the email acknowledgment. – aeismail Aug 30 '17 at 18:18

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.