Scholarship Criteria for Promotion in the Age of Diverse Faculty Roles and Digital Media

Background and Objectives: In academic medical centers, scholarship is essential to advancing scientific knowledge, clinical care, and teaching and is a requirement for faculty promotion. Traditional evidence of scholarship, such as publications in peer-reviewed academic journals, remains applicable to the promotions of physician and nonphysician researchers. Often, however, the same evidence does not fit the scholarly work and output of clinician-educators, whose scholarship is often disseminated through digital communications and social media. This difference challenges promotion and tenure committees to evaluate the scholarship of all faculty fairly and consistently. This study aimed to generate a list of the features that a faculty product should demonstrate to be considered scholarship, regardless of how it is disseminated. Methods: The full professors of one academic department of family medicine engaged in a mini-Delphi deliberative process to identify criteria to assess whether a scholarly product put forth by faculty in the promotion process is indeed scholarship. Results: The full professors identified seven criteria to evaluate a faculty product to assess whether it represents scholarship—specifically its demonstration of faculty expertise, faculty contribution, originality, peer review, quality, relative permanence, and impact. Conclusions: These criteria may help promotion committees more easily and consistently assess the full scope of a faculty member’s scholarly work within today’s changing approaches to its dissemination.