Hidden Scholarship: Achievements Academics Don’t Report

Have you ever thought of all the really important effort and work we do as academics that we actually never get an opportunity to report on as achievements?

Here are a few such forms of hidden scholarship, and I’ve given them names, if we were to place them on a CV or Annual Faculty report:

• Scholarly Resilience (or Persistence): measured by the number of times you recover from journal rejections to one of your articles, get up again, revise and resubmit to another journal. It takes a lot of energy and self-belief to pick oneself up after a stinging rejection. It helps if it’s a co-authored piece and you have colleagues to spur you on. Leonardo Di Caprio won an Oscar after 6 nominations – hopefully every article stands a chance at getting published after 6 submissions… hopefully… My university asks us to report on grants we applied for even if they did not go through; I believe the same should be done for scholarly articles we write that don’t get published immediately.

• Standing Up for Your Beliefs-ness: this is when you go back and forth with a journal editor to convince them of something that goes against their journal policy because you truly believe in your reasons for doing so. For example, I have fought to keep some of my articles in firstperson even though the journals had policies against firstperson accounts; I have fought to keep editors from colonizing my writing style, and insisted on maintaining my own voice.

• Breaking Out of the Mold: this is when you have the courage to submit radical ideas to more conventional journals; for example, it was a bigger achievement for me to publish advocating for open peer review in a double-blind journal than it would have been to publish on open peer review in a journal that does open peer review, like Hybrid Pedagogy.

• Impressive Collaboration: it is incredibly disappointing that in much of academia, single authored works are more valued than multi-authored work – because multi-authored work demonstrates so much more skill in working with others and can produce so much more valuable knowledge. Collaborations are all the more impressive, I believe, when they are unfunded and between people in different parts of the world.

• Peer Review: Sure, there is a space somewhere where you can write that you conduct peer review for journals or conferences; but it is not something prominent. I am so glad that Hybrid Pedagogy writes the names of the peer reviewers on articles they publish, because I am often so proud of articles I review. I wish that were the case for all journals. I wish someone reviewed the reviewers – don’t we as reviewers need to get feedback on how well we are reviewing other people’s work? I feel that peer review is not only a service I give to the field, but also professional development for myself, as I read some of the latest in my area of interest, and I maintain a critical stance while reading it. It’s also an exercise in providing constructive feedback to others.

• Overcoming Bias: A peer reviewer once said in their feedback that reviewing my article had been really difficult for them because they disagreed with almost everything in it; I really respected this reviewer because they actually managed to give me a fair review and recommended my article for publication despite their disagreements with it.

• Informal Support: How many times have we informally read someone else’s work to give them feedback or help them brainstorm? This kind of peer mentoring is essential for early career researchers, and even beyond. It is a learning experience for both, and yet not valued in the sense that for example supervising a thesis is (difference in scale notwithstanding)

I am mentioning all of these things not to really suggest they should be placed on our CVs or annual faculty reports, not to suggest they need to be quantified, but to highlight that they are valuable aspects of our scholarship that often hidden from view.

Can you think of other aspects of your scholarship that you find valuable but that are not normally valued? Tell us in the comments

flickr photo by shonk shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license