VI. The Interdisciplinary Dilemma - Accounting for the critical interdisciplinary scholar in our promotion and tenure process

In many arenas of medical science (and in other branches of science as well) large teams, often interdisciplinary, create the scholarly products of new knowledge. The position in authorship does not necessarily equate with parsed scholarly contribution. Who is to say that the first or last author was "more important" than a second, third, or middle author? Interdisciplinary teams are often linked by a key middle author who may have provided the critical question or hypothesis that leads to a paper, or the skills that made the paper possible, or the analysis that provided the answer to a question. One hopes that all authors of a paper provided significant value to the end product, and that competitive jockeying for position in authorship will not be mandated by promotion committees that take a purely numerical view of the byline (that is, only first or last place in authorship lists are worthy of claim to a paper).

Collegiality and interdisciplinary mindsets must be core values of academia, and a narrow view of authorship position mars those virtues. Interdisciplinary collaborations need to be identified, indeed they need to be touted up front, by the savvy chair and by the useful external evaluator. Almost by definition, cutting edge interdisciplinary scholarship has few, if any, peers. It may take a resourceful and imaginative chair to provide meaningful external reviewers to give meaningful comment on seminal and novel contributions in new interdisciplinary arenas. Academic leaders will have to break away from the conventional wisdom that every scholar granted tenure will have two dozen peer reviewed papers with first or last authorships. Authorship position and fundamental contribution to the body of work should be explained carefully somewhere in the promotion package.