D.10 Selecting External Reviewers

Each promotion dossier must include at least five letters from external reviewers that meet the qualifications summarized in this section.

• The dean must approve the final list of external reviewers for each candidate.
  
• Most of the external letters in the dossier must be from reviewers nominated by the department or college/school.

(a) Qualifications of External Reviewers

External reviewers must understand the academic setting and the standards expected for discipline-specific benchmarks in terms of research excellence with respect to productivity, impact, and trajectory.

In addition, external reviewers must satisfy the following criteria:

• • • Tenured full professors and recognized experts serving at peer or aspirational peer institutions who are knowledgeable about the scholarly expectations for promotion at an R1 doctoral university
    • Reviewers must have no real or potential conflict of interest related to the candidate (e.g., spouse, partner, PhD advisor, postdoctoral mentor, etc.)
    • Reviewers must not be close collaborators with the candidate. Ideally all reviewers will be “arm’s length.”
      • However, the department chair and/or dean have some latitude to select external reviewer(s) with whom the candidate had a minor collaboration as co-authors or co-PIs
    • Reviewers should be selected from different institutions.

Any deviations from these considerations (e.g., reviewer from a non-peer institution or emeritus professor) must be thoroughly justified in the Summary of External Reviewers subsection [G.10(a)].

The department chair and/or dean must address the selection of co-authors and/or co-PIs as external reviewers.

In some situations, the BC/EC may decide that they would like feedback from an external reviewer who does not satisfy the qualifications listed above (e.g., a close collaborator of the candidate, or an expert in the candidate’s field from industry or other non-academic setting).

• • • Letters may be solicited from these external reviewers, but the letters do not count toward the minimum number of letters.
      

(b) Process for Selecting External Reviewers

Early in the dossier development process, the dean/department chair must solicit separate lists of possible reviewers from the candidate and the BC/EC.

The dean/department chair is responsible for preparing a short list of possible reviewers that is compiled from the two independent lists.

The candidate must be given at least two business days to review the short list of reviewers.

If a candidate objects to the selection of an external reviewer, the department chair/dean must consider their concerns before finalizing the list of external reviewers.