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Oct 22, 2015 - objective of this opinion letter is to make a plea for the importance of the post- auditing and quantitative assessment of the selection criteria.
Sci Eng Ethics DOI 10.1007/s11948-015-9711-8 LETTER

Recruitment Processes in Academia: Does the Emperor Have Any Clothes? Behzad Ataie-Ashtiani1,2

Received: 30 September 2015 / Accepted: 14 October 2015  Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Abstract The final outcome of promotion and recruitment processes in universities should be conventional and plausible by the members of the relevant scientific community, to affirm that the processes have been competitive and fair. The objective of this opinion letter is to make a plea for the importance of the postauditing and quantitative assessment of the selection criteria. It is shown that for an example case the outcome of the post-audit does not look reasonable from an external point of view, at least regarding the research competency. Keywords Australia

Promotion  Recruitment  Equal opportunities  Civil Engineering 

Academic institutions compel appointments policies, which commonly include fair and equal opportunity guidelines, for recruitment and promotion of academic staff. The selection principles have several components, which are difficult to be quantified fully and there is always room for qualitative judgements. In my opinion, the final outcome of these processes should be conventional and plausible, when judged by the members of the relevant scientific community, to affirm that the processes have been competitive and fair. The objective of this opinion letter is to make the case for the importance of a post-auditing and quantitative assessment of the relevance selection criteria for the universities’ recruiting and promoting processes of academic staff. I understand that the opinion can be provocative, but at

& Behzad Ataie-Ashtiani [email protected] 1

Department of Civil Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, PO Box 11155-9313, Tehran, Iran

2

National Centre for Groundwater Research & Training and School of the Environment, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Australia 5001, Australia

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University

University of Melbourne

University of Queensland

University of Western Australia

Monash University

University of New South Wales

University of Sydney

University of Adelaide

Curtin University

University of Wollongong

Flinders University

Griffith University

Swinburne University of Technology

University of Newcastle

Queensland University of Technology

S. no.

1

2

123

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

School of Civil Engineering and the Built Environment

Discipline of Civil, Surveying and Environmental Engineering

Department of Civil and Construction Engineering

Civil Engineering Discipline

Civil Engineering Discipline

School of Civil, Mining and Environmental Engineering

Department of Civil Engineering

The School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering

School of Civil Engineering

The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Department of Civil Engineering

School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering

The School of Civil Engineering

Department of Infrastructure Engineering

Civil eng. related school/department/ discipline

Table 1 Research metrics for head of civil engineering disciplines of the Australian universities

Professor

Professor

Professor

Professor

Professor

Associate Professor

Senior Lecturer

Professor

Professor

Professor

Professor

Professor

Professor

Professor

HoD rank

4—45—14

23—2055—155

13—649—163

12—488—70

5—224—10

14—503—75

2—14—14

21—1426—133

22—1900—230

14—663—101

31—3692—174

16—731—106

23—1633—175

13—486—68

Scopus h-index— NoC—NoD

9—361—82

28—2750—295







19—1313—164



27—2781—282





39—6738—419

23—2179—216



28—3621—341

Google Scholar h-index—NoC—NoD

B. Ataie-Ashtiani

Recruitment Processes in Academia: Does the Emperor Have Any…

the same time it is important to signal, particularly to the newcomers and younger researchers, that the processes are unbiased and credible. The major criteria and requirements for selection are generally focused on a commitment to quality teaching and supervision of undergraduate and post-graduate students, having active track record of high quality research outputs, successful grant applications and the ability to attract future funding, and an ability to provide academic and administrative leadership within the discipline. The quantitative indicators for most of the mentioned criteria, including the teaching quality assessment or grant applications successes, are not accessible and verifiable by an external observer who has not been engaged in the assessment process. Among the stated criteria, only the research competency component can be quantified based on publication records. To justify this letter and to provide an example, a number of Australian universities are considered here. The considered universities are among the top twenty universities based on the ARWU Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities Australian Rankings (2015). The universities that have a Civil Engineering School/Department/Discipline are considered. The publication indexes for the Head of the School/Department/Discipline (HoD) of Civil Engineering in each university are determined. Table 1 provides the information for each of the HoD based on Scopus and Google Scholar including: h-index, number of citations (NoC), and number of documents (NoD). The information is openly available on the universities’ web sites, Scopus database (2015) and Google Scholar (2015). As expected, the publication metric values are within a wide range. There is no definite check or minimum threshold for the values taken from the table of metrics. For the sake of comparison, the citation analysis of four general engineering fields for the Australian group of eight universities (2015) that was provided by Forbes (2014), based on Google Scholar, is considered. Based on Forbes’ study, approximately 96 % of civil engineering professors have an h-index above 15. Table 1 shows in some cases the metrics seem low for a Professor and a HoD (e.g., rows 10 and 14 of Table 1 with an h-index below 10). It shall be noted that the head of department has a position that may function as a role model for academic staff and research students in some aspects. The recruitment or promotion processes may comply with the universities’ policies, however, the outcomes of the present post-audit does not look reasonable from an external point of view, at least regarding the strong research competency. It can be more disturbing when the process of recruitment is not open. Apparently the processes cannot by fully quantitative and transparent, nevertheless this issue requires further considerations with a broader scope of universities, disciplines, and teaching quality and grant success metric values in order to acquire a resolution between quantitative and qualitative aspects to ensure equity and transparency. I cannot claim, ‘‘The emperor has no clothes’’, but it is reasonable to question, ‘‘Does the emperor have any clothes?’’ Compliance with Ethical Standards Conflict of interest The author declares no competing financial interest.

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B. Ataie-Ashtiani

References ARWU. (2015). (online) (cited: September 12, 2015). http://www.shanghairanking.com/World-UniversityRankings-2015/Australia.html. Forbes, G. (2014). Eng-citation. (online) (cited: September 18, 2015). http://eng-citation.com/. Google Scholar. (2015). (online) (cited: September 18, 2015). https://scholar.google.com/. Group of Eight. (2015). (online) (cited: September 18, 2015). https://go8.edu.au/. Scopus. (2015). (online) (cited: September 13, 2015). http://www.scopus.com/.

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