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Do hiring committees care about scholarly impact/citation numbers?

In our January “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:

Do hiring committees care about scholarly impact (number of citations, etc.)? I would imagine for senior hires maybe this matters, but what about junior hires? I’m just a few years post-Ph.D. but some of my papers have already been cited several times, sometimes in prestigious venues. Do hiring committees care about this? If so, what’s the best way to communicate/make visible one’s scholarly impact to a hiring committee?

What do readers think? Any helpful tips?

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6 responses to “Do hiring committees care about scholarly impact/citation numbers?”

  1. Anonymous

    I don’t think anyone is going to look up how many times a candidate is cited. Nor will they likely care much if such number is communicated to them. Moreover, I suspect telling others about one’s citation numbers (i) comes off the wrong way, and/or (ii) backfires, as philosophy is a low citation discipline and some on a committee may have fewer citations than you.

    In general, I think impact/citations is a figure for you, qua author, to reflect on. What is more important for committees, I think, is whether or not your research is interesting, something that can be discussed in the hallways, et cetera.

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  2. Anonymous

    I would not mention it. I have never heard citations come up in hiring decisions except when I raised the issue. And for early career people there is a lot of noise in citation data. They have a function but this is not it. (and keep in mind if the people on the hiring committee are NOT cited often they will think YOU are an ass … go figure)

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  3. Anonymous

    I always looked up citation numbers (via google scholar) when thinking about candidates. Citations can provide weak evidence how about well received a scholar’s work is. And they tend to provide better evidence than an advisor gushing in a letter about the scholar’s work. They rarely made or break a candidate. But for candidates that were similarly qualified, citation numbers were an easy tie-breaker for me.

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  4. Sam Elgin

    I think that there are two questions that are important to distinguish. As stated, there’s a question about raw citation count. If I’m being honest, I don’t think that hiring committees generally care about that. Many citations are ‘throwaways’ – something that someone puts in a footnote without engaging with – simply in order to communicate to reviewers that they’re aware of the background literature. I’ve had some crazy citations myself – I once was cited in a footnote after ‘some define epistemology as the study of knowledge’ (or something along these lines – I don’t remember the exact quote). These types of citations are basically meaningless as a reflection of your scholarly impact, and hiring committees generally don’t care about them. However, they DO care if your paper has generated a literature or research program. If there are papers (perhaps even numerous papers) that don’t merely cite you – but build upon your ideas – or if yours was the first paper in a new area and is always cited as the start of it – that is something that hiring committees take very seriously. So I don’t think you should report a citation count, but if there is evidence that you are foundational in a field (beyond a citation count) it may well be worth mentioning in a research statement.

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  5. Charles Pigden

    Citations show that people are taking an interest in your work and they provide some evidence that your work is worth taking an interest in. However NOT having citations is not an indication that your papers are NOT worth taking an interest in, since for all sorts of reasons a deserving paper may fail to make its mark or may make its mark only after several years. (I have papers with citations running into the hundreds and others that – in my opinion– were equally good which have fallen almost deadborn from the press or which have gone unnoticed for years , only to start accumulating citations a decade or more after their original date of publication) So numerous citations are a good sign and worth boasting about even though the lack thereof is not a bad one. However the accent here is on the ‘numerous’. Several citations are not enough and boasting about them will make you look like a try-hard. .However, if you have got a paper with (say) ten citations one year out from publication or twenty after two, then I think that would be worth mentioning.

    Though it has been a VERY long time since I was on the market, I certainly brag about my citations when applying for promotions or progressions.

    Reply
  6. Christopher Hitchcock

    One option would be to include a link to your Google Scholar page on your CV. (I’ve seen CVs that list Google Scholar pages and/or PhilPeople pages along with personal or institutional websites.) Then anyone who cares can look at it, and anyone who doesn’t care won’t have it shoved upon them.

    Reply

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