tl/dr: Research statements should demonstrate that you have made or will make an impact through effective, clear storytelling about what you have done and how it connects to your research community. Careful organization and clear evidence of impact can help you make this case to the many different kinds of people who will read your statement.

Writing a Research Statement (for a Tenure Package)

One of the main docs you write as part of the tenure process is a research statement, and before revising mine, I wanted to spend some time thinking about what makes for an effective statement. We also write these during the job search and various other times during the career, so hopefully this post will have broad appeal. The thoughts below are based on my own thinking, talking with other professors, and looking at my own and other people’s past research statements for tenure [0].

We’ll start with a few key points up front. First, in line with the typical tenure and promotion criteria at research universities [1], a main goal of the statement is to demonstrate that your work has had, and will continue to have, an impact on your research community. So a glorified annotated bibliography of your work is not going to cut it. You need to talk about how your work fits into the broader conversation, why it’s interesting and exciting and important.

Second, as stated by Mor Naaman in a comment on my original tenure post, not everyone who reads your statement (or your dossier [2]) is going to be an expert in your field. So, a glorified annotated bibliography of your work is not going to cut it. Not only do you need to position your work in your community, you need to do this in a way that letter writers, your dean, and faculty across the university will appreciate.

Third, even for those who are experts, they’re not likely to be experts on you, meaning that your research statement has real impact on how and when people think about you [3]. So, a glorified… well, you get the picture, but the key insight here is that the research statement is telling a story about you just as much as it is about the research [4].

So, how do research statement writers go about accomplishing these goals? For the most part, what I saw was a lot of work around organizing the story and showing current impact in ways that was broadly accessible, but less on the questions of ‘so what’ and ‘what next’.

Organizing the story

Based on the statements I looked at, the general approach was to focus on some small number of broad topical themes that represent research questions or areas that people claim to make key contributors to. The work itself is used to illustrate the contributions, possibly with some sub-themes inside the area to help readers group the individual papers. Then, an overall story ties the areas together with some kind of bigger picture and/or longer-term research goals.

How broad the goals, themes, and sub-sections are depends in part on how long you’ve been in the game and how broad your interests are–which implies that your research statement will continue to evolve over time [5]. For instance, my fall 2007 job hunt statement  and spring 2011 third year review statements  are organized quite differently because I had another 3.5 years of deepening and broadening my work and thinking both on specific projects and on how the different strands tied together [6]. (I wrote a bit about this evolution in “The Incredible Evolving Research Statement“, which is a reasonable companion to this post.)

Most of the statements were broadly chronological, especially within areas. I think this on balance was used to show the accumulation, evolution, and deepening of one’s own work in an area. Some (including mine), but not all, were also chronological across the areas, which as a reader I saw as illustrating the person’s career arc. None was comprehensive, and some work was left out; instead, the statements focused on telling a more or less coherent story [7].

There are other ways to tell the story of your research besides chronology plus research areas. For instance, I could imagine talking about my own work as a grid where levels of analysis (individual, dyad, group/community) are on one axis and major research area/question (recommendation, user modeling, system-building, reflection) is on the other [8], then positioning work in the grid cells. This would be particularly useful for showing breadth across a couple of intersecting areas, maybe for highlighting interdisciplinarity. If I wanted to emphasize my techy/system-building bits, I could imagine organizing the statement around the systems that I’ve built, supervised, and studies along the way, with research questions emerging as themes that repeatedly occur across the systems [9]. But the overall story plus themes and chronological evolution model feels both fairly common and effective, and I do like the 2011 version a lot — so I’m likely to do an update but not rework of it for the tenure package.

Showing (current) impact

Much of the discourse on this side focused on various forms of evidence that other people, mostly in the academic community, cared about the work.

Most folks worked in some mention of support for their work, notably grant funding. Funding is direct evidence that people think you and your work are interesting enough to spend money on [10]. Yes, this is in your CV, but so are many other things you’ll talk about in the statements, and yes, done to excess or done badly it could feel a little off-putting. But it is honest and valuable to acknowledge support and it is pretty easy to make it part of the story (e.g., “I received an NSF grant to help answer my questions around X”).

Likewise, everyone talked about collaborators and students they’ve worked with. Much as with grants, collaboration says people think you and your work are interesting enough to spend time on [11]. Further, to some extent we’re known by the company that we keep, and collaborating with good people reflects well on you. Again, done as an exercise in name-dropping this could be tedious, but again, it’s easy to work naturally into the conversation–and again, it’s a worthy and honest thing to point out that you had help along the way.

People also mentioned how the work connected to and through groups or workshops they organized, led, and contributed to that are directly related to their research [11a]. To some extent, this overlaps with the service statement, but as with direct collaboration, if people are willing to band together with you it shows that people value the kinds of work that you do and see you as a positive influence.

Some folks talked about citations, h-indices, and other citation metrics. Citations are a proxy for attention, interest, and quality in your work, both the particular work being cited and in your reputation more generally (because well-known and -regarded people are more likely to come to mind). There are some problems with quantitative metrics of scholarly impact: differing practices and sizes across fields affects numbers; not all citations are positive; to do it right you’d probably need to compare to peers’ citation activity; etc. But citations have some value as an indicator of impact [12]. It’s a little harder to weave this in naturally, though you can use the numbers to point out particularly impactful papers, or use the data to give an overview to make the case that your career as a whole has been noticed.

For the most part, those were the high points. I do want to point out that there are lots of other ways one might talk about making impact. I’ll pass the torch to Elizabeth Churchhill’s discussion of impact more generally  that among other things riffs off of Judy Olson’s Athena award talk about the many paths to scholarly impact at CSCW 2012. A group called altmetrics is pushing on other ways to think about impact, and other folks such as danah boyd [13] and Johnny Lee have carved careers out of making impact beyond research papers. These kinds of impact are worth talking about. However, for all that academia is pretty liberal politically, it’s fairly conservative in how it measures impact, and so a diversified portfolio with a fair percentage invested in traditional impact measures is probably less risky.

The statements didn’t have so much to say about potential future impact and work directly. There was sometimes a discussion of the next questions on a current line of work, and sometimes the overarching research question was used to highlight a general next line or lines. I guess this makes sense, because our next research moves are shaped by resources, people, contexts, and events [14], but it was a little surprising given the ‘future continued potential’ part of the tenure evaluation process.

Likewise, there was not as much “so what” as there probably could be, especially. There were reasonable connections to other work at a high level [15], to help make novelty claims and make the ‘so what’ case within the field. But there is much less of an argument about why the work is important to do in the grand scheme of things. This may be in part an artifact of length restrictions (there’s not a formal limit, but most of the tenure-time ones seem to clock in around 4-5 pages plus references). Our values around academic freedom also probably help us out when folks in other fields look at our tenure cases, even if they don’t see obvious indicators of importance, and our external letter writers are probably close enough to our work to appreciate it for its own sake. But I was still surprised at how little this was addressed in our statements.

So, that’s it for now–I should probably stop writing about writing research statements and get on to the business at hand. It was, however, useful spending some time thinking about what might make for a good research statement and hopefully some of this thinking will help future fellow travelers out.

#30#

[0] Web search turns up a variety of other useful resources and perhaps I should have just read them rather than writing my own. However, spending some time writing and analyzing myself felt valuable, and most of those I did find seem to be tuned toward research statements for the graduating PhD seeking a job rather than tenure. Many also seem to have been generated by searching for other articles about writing research statements. That said, this article on research statements from Penn’s career services  looked useful and had pointers to some examples. Oregon Academic Affairs also has some thoughtful slides on writing tenure statements, including the research statement.

[1] Here’s an example of promotion guidelines from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

[2] Also part of Cornell ADVANCE’s  “Successful Tenure Strategies” document.

[3] I haven’t been on a tenure committee yet, because you don’t get to vote on tenure cases until you have it, but for faculty hiring a number of recommendation letters look a lot like the candidate’s research statement or dissertation proposal/outline. I am guessing similar effects will happen for tenure letter writers.

[4] John Riedl often gave me talk advice that a key takeaway, in addition to the main points, should be that you’re awesome (not via self-aggrandizing–not John’s style–but through being interesting and demonstrating competence). It seems apropos here as well.

[5] Dan Frankowski, a research scientist at GroupLens when I was there, once claimed that the main thing we learn in grad school is how to tell bigger and better stories about the work.

[6] I made a followup post about how these statements evolved with some behind-the-scenes thinking, but this is already a pretty long post in its own right.

[7] It is fine to leave side projects out. A piece of career/tenure advice I have received from multiple sources is that it’s good to become known as “the X guy” for some very small number of X’s (often 1). Thus, focusing on the coherent and compelling story of ($1 to Richard Hamming) You and Your Research is probably best. Your side stuff will be in your CV and your online portfolio, and if people care about them and/or they’ve had an impact, you’ll get to talk about them.

[8] Joe Konstan sometimes talks about the grid as a useful way to organize a research story. For instance, for a dissertation you might try different items on the axes (levels of analysis, research questions, time periods, systems, theories, etc.), and think about a research path that cuts across a column, a row, or (to sample the space) a diagonal. If I were to do this for my tenure case, it feels like most of the cells should be filled in, at least some.

[9] Unless you’re in a clearly systems areas, though, focusing on systems runs the risk of pigeonholing you. You probably want to study recommender systems, not GroupLens; crisis informatics, not Katrina; collaboration, not Wikipedia; crowd work, not Mechanical Turk. I know that some people think of me as a “Wikipedia guy”, and that’s part of my story, but only part.

[10] The contrapositive is not true; if work isn’t funded, it still might be important and impactful. There are lots of ways to not get funding.

[11] Again, the contrapositive isn’t true; some disciplines and traditions value solo research more than my home area of HCI, and some people are just more comfy working alone and don’t seek collaborators.

[11a] Folks who are creating or colonizing quite new areas may find it useful to do a bunch of community-building through workshops, special issues, and the like to build and connect to fellow travelers.

[12] Here, unfortunately, the contrapositive is more plausible: you do want your work to be cited.

[13] Who has enough impact that, at least as I was writing this, if you typo her name to “danah body” Google will give you a “Did you mean: danah boyd”.

[14] FYI, although this is a true answer to kind of “Where do you see yourself in N years” question that you might get asked during a job interview, it is not a good answer. This I can attest from personal experience.

[15] Not many citations though, which was a little surprising, because that could both help ground the work and suggest appropriate tenure letter writers.