Overview of Statistics as a Scientific Discipline and Practical Implications for the Evaluation of Faculty Excellence

This document is an official position by the Board of Directors of the American Statistical Association on matters affecting the statistical profession.

Executive Summary

Statistics is at the same time a dynamic, stand-alone science with its own core research agenda and an inherently collaborative discipline, developing in response to scientific needs. In this sense, statistics fundamentally differs from many other domain-specific disciplines in science. This difference poses unique challenges for defining the standards by which faculty excellence is evaluated across the teaching, research, and service components.

This document strives to provide a conceptual framework and practical guidelines to facilitate such evaluations. To that end, the intended audience includes all participants in the evaluation process—provosts and deans with faculty members in statistics positions; chairs and heads of statistics, biostatistics, and non-statistics departments; and the promotion and tenure evaluation committees in academic institutions. Furthermore, this document seeks to assist statistical scientists in the negotiation of faculty positions and the articulation of their collaborative role with the subject-matter sciences.

Highlights of interest to decision makers such as chairs, heads, deans, provosts, and members of promotion and tenure evaluation committees include the following:

• For faculty members with a focus in statistics, excellence in research scholarship can be a mixture of publications in subject-matter journals resulting from collaborative research and publications in statistics-centric journals.

• In publications arising from collaborative research, statistics faculty members should not be expected to be first author, senior author, or, obviously, single author.

• For faculty members with a focus in statistics, successful extramural funding in the role of co-principal investigator (or other key senior roles) is evidence of a meaningful role as an essential partner in the research endeavor.

• For faculty members with a focus in statistics, mentoring of graduate students and service on research supervisory committees is evidence of important research activity.

Also of interest to chairs and heads, it is critical that the departmental culture (including faculty, students, and staff) reinforces the breadth of active statistical research and emphasizes an appreciation for the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of many types of statistical research.

Highlights of interest to statistical scientists pursuing academic careers actively engaged in interdisciplinary collaboration with subject-matter scientists include the following:

• It is recommended that the letter of offer and position description include collaborative research specifically as an expectation and as a primary component of evaluation for rank promotion and tenure.

• It is important that terms be negotiated, articulated, and specified in writing in the letter of offer and position description. These terms may be discussed during yearly evaluations, as involvement in collaboration can change over a career. This is particularly relevant for faculty members who transition into increasing involvement in collaborative activities.