editorial
Letters of Recommendation
A
n important part of the culture of modern science is our practice of pro bono preparation of reviews of papers and proposals and evaluations of people. It is a voluntary duty, on which a huge number of work hours become expended. Outside of my work as Editor, I spend several hours every week reviewing and evaluating papers and proposals from a variety of journals and agencies. I’m sure I am not an atypical academic chemist. As Editor, I am grateful to the people who provide reviews of research manuscripts submitted to Analytical Chemistry. I am similarly grateful for the existenceOand general healthOof our culture of evaluating people who face different phases of their professional employment, promotion, or continuation. It is an important strength of science and analytical chemistry that such evaluations are carefully and candidly doneOon a professional level. Chemistry professors write a lot of recommendations because we are in the business of teaching people, and a natural task is evaluating our students as they move on to employment or to a further phase of their education or apply for fellowships. Being part of the academic system, we may be asked for an evaluation of a faculty member at a different institution by a department that is considering whether to recommend tenured status for a faculty (or prospective) member. This is one of the most difficult and trying of all evaluation letters to write; it is forecasting performance of a high level by reading the tea leaves of past performance as a guide. Writing tenure letters is a form of informed extrapolation. Other evaluation letters are for administrative posts, such as those for people being considered for deanships, research director positions, or some other higher administrative office. Those letters are hard because few of us have held such positions, and each administrative post has a different character.
10.1021/AC100586W 2010 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
Published on Web 03/15/2010
Workers in industry and government laboratories are also part of our recommendation letter writing fabric, just as they are of our community of reviewers. They are less likely to be writing for students but have important roles as references for other professionals as they advance through different positions. Recommendations need not be long documents but should address certain topics, including the level of technical skill and breadth; creativity and originality of thinking; ability to communicate (written and oral); and collegiality. I once served on the University of North Carolina Arts and Sciences Dean’s Committee for evaluating tenure recommendations by departments. An interesting sociological lesson learned there was that faculty in the humanities write tenure recommendation letters that are 3⫺4⫻ as wordy as those of scientists. Journals like Analytical Chemistry have Ethical Guidelines documents that lay out the ethical do’s and don’ts of editing, authoring, and reviewing. It’s a very useful documentOa set of rules of behavior. An analogous set of guidelines for the various kinds of letters of recommendation would be something useful to have and to teach our students, who may face the recommendation letter task later in life. Instead, we all just rely on our common sense and fairness and strive to set aside any personal dislikesOand the system seems to work pretty well.
APRIL 1, 2010 / ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY
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