Criteria for academic promotion in medicine

Job promotion in academia is meant to reflect the quality of previous work and an expectation of continued success. With promotion come prestige, institutional responsibilities, and, in some schools, the promise of continued employment. In academic medicine, the journey from instructor to full professor and beyond affords the opportunity to educate generations of physicians and biomedical scientists. Rewards tend to influence behaviors. Given that, Rice and colleagues describe in a linked study (doi:10.1136/bmj.l5214) the promotion criteria used by medical schools and recommend broadening the criteria to encourage behaviors they believe will enhance the quality of science.1

Although accomplishment in research has long been the principal standard for promotion, medical schools have recently developed promotion criteria to reward excellence in medical education,2 clinical innovation,3 and other areas.4 We will focus on the promotion of faculty whose primary activity is research, although most also have responsibilities for teaching, clinical care if a clinician, and other academic service.

Rice and colleagues investigated criteria for promotion in an international sample of 170 institutions; 146 had faculties of biomedical sciences, with 92 having accessible criteria. They created two categories of criteria: “traditional” (importance of research as measured by number of publications, journal impact factors, place in …