Prepared by Morten Schlütter, Lois Geist, and Cori Peek-Asa. 
Ver. 01/15/19

Preamble:

It is widely acknowledged that Internationalization is becoming increasingly crucial for large research universities to survive and prosper in the global market place of ideas and education during the coming decades. The UI Strategic Plan 2016-2021 has as a major goal to “Create a university ecosystem that enables UI to be an international leader in confronting the grand challenges of the 21st Century”. 

Internationalization at the UI benefits everyone; a number of studies show that international co-authorship has a higher impact than domestic co-authorship, and data shows that publications with international collaboration are more frequently cited. NSF reports that international collaboration rates in US institutions rose 10 percentage points to 35% between 2002 and 2012.

The University of Iowa has made great strides in becoming a truly international institution, which was recognized when the university received the 2017 Senator Paul Simon Award for Comprehensive Internationalization. 

However, it is clearly important for the UI to continue the process of internationalization, and an essential part of this is to increase UI faculty’s participation in international and globalized research.

To meet the objective of higher international engagement among UI faculty, it is crucial that faculty be given proper credit for international scholarship and that there be a general understanding in UI departments that international and globalized research will be considered an asset in evaluations for Promotion and Tenure (P&T). 

The UI Operations Manual already requires “unmistakable evidence that the candidate is a nationally and, where applicable, internationally recognized scholar or creative artist in the chosen field” for advancement to full professor (https://policy.uiowa.edu/human-resources/faculty#FacultyAppointments). However, recognition of international engagement is especially crucial in cases of promotion to associate professor with tenure. Furthermore, while maintaining high standards of excellence, P&T committees should examine and weigh international research activities differently than domestic activities due to their greater complexity.

Many departments are already implementing procedures in evaluations for Promotion and Tenure that take the special effort and challenges of doing international and globalized research into account. However, not all faculty engaged in this kind of research at the UI feel that it is fully understood or valued by their departments.

In the following we therefore provide a number of points that we believe can serve as a basis for “best practices,” which departments should take into consideration when evaluating the portfolio of a faculty member for promotion, whether the faculty member primarily does international work or only occasionally is engaged in international and globalized research.*

Best practices:

1. It should be recognized that research that requires knowledge of languages other than English, especially non-European languages, often requires more resources and more time than research conducted in English, even if the research is mainly carried out in the US.
2. Research conducted abroad usually takes longer and requires more effort than the same research conducted in the US. Evaluation should consider the additional time it takes to develop and implement projects, and the time it takes to produce publications or presentations from the work.
3. Research done in collaboration with non-US scholars and institutions often requires strong international partnerships, considerable knowledge of the partner country culture, and the ability to negotiate foreign compliance and agreement infrastructures. A faculty member serving as a project lead or principal investigator of such a project should be given considerable credit. Those in consulting roles lending their expertise to a project should also receive credit. Faculty helping to host visiting scholars to the UI to facilitate collaboration should also be recognized.
4. When examining research portfolios that include international research with associated funding, standard metrics used in the US may not be applicable. Funding sources for international research often differ from US national or local sources. For example, there are fewer international opportunities for peer-reviewed and investigator-initiated grants. Some sources of federal funding are restricted from international use, although other mechanisms, such as competitive bids with international NGO’s, fund primarily international research and can be equally competitive. Foreign granting agencies may use contract mechanisms more frequently than grants.
5. Faculty should be recognized for giving presentations internationally – when such presentations signal involvement in international and global research. Invited presentations at international institutions especially demonstrate that the faculty member has an international reputation, although research presentations through an abstract submission process at international conferences presenting international research should also be recognized.
6. Publication in international journals should be encouraged and rewarded, as it demonstrates that the researcher is an active member of an international scholarly community. However, it can be difficult to determine the quality of international journals, as the range of international journals is considerable and many of these journals are not indexed in indexes that are commonly used in the US. Google Scholar’s citation counts do pick up some non-US publications, but is rather disorganized. The organization COPE promotes international standards for editors and publishers; if a journal or publisher is listed here it is a good indication of quality, however, not being listed does not necessarily indicate low quality. The same goes for the European Reference Index for the Humanities that can also be very helpful.
7. Departments should ensure that in cases of Promotion and Tenure at least some of the external reviewers are familiar with the exigencies and challenges of international research, including being able to speak to the quality and status of the international journals or academic presses in which the candidate’s work has appeared, as well as to other aspects of the candidate’s international scholarship.
8. Teaching in international settings requires adjustment of the teaching style, content, and delivery, as well as language in some cases. Faculty members who teach abroad should get credit for these efforts and for the ties to institutions outside the US that they create.
9. Departments should make sure that junior faculty who take on international research are counseled to clearly explain and document their roles in an international research project, including their role in authoring any proposals for funding, whether successful or not, and the status of the journals or other venues where the work is or will be disseminated. 

*This committee would like to note that research within the US with underserved populations, as well as rarely studied populations and cultures, will have some of the same time demands as international research. We encourage departments to consider these extra demands and also the important contributions in working with these populations when reviewing dossiers for promotion and tenure.