Relevance of First-Tier, Peer-Reviewed Journals in the Tenure and Promotion Process at Non-Doctoral Granting Engineering Institutions

Amanda S. Florio, Mark M. Budnik

The IEEE (formerly the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is the world's largest professional society dedicated to the advancement of technology. While it is indeed growing into multiple technology areas, the IEEE is still first an organization of electrical, electronics, and computer engineering professionals. It has over 400,000 members and publishes nearly 100, first-tier, peer-reviewed journals. As such a large purveyor of scholarly works, engineering faculty at almost all academic institutions (doctoral granting and non-doctoral granting) are familiar with the IEEE. For this reason, the IEEE makes an excellent case study for the relevance of first-tier, peer-reviewed journals in the tenure and promotion process at non-doctoral granting engineering institutions. In our work, we surveyed editors of the 97 IEEE journals. 93% of respondents indicated that 10% or less of their submissions were from non-academic institutions. None (0%) of the respondents believed that the number of non-doctoral granting institution submissions would be increasing over the next three years. In fact, a majority of the respondents (55%) see the number of non-doctoral granting institution submissions decreasing in the same time frame. To correlate this data, we examined a sample of 2,099 articles published in the first issue of each IEEE journal in 2009. 357 (17%) of these 2,099 articles were authored by individuals from academic institutions in the United States. Of the 357, only 35 were published by individuals from non-doctoral granting institutions (1.7%), with only 8 (0.38%) from institutions where a bachelor degree is the highest offered.

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