Department of Physician Assistant Studies Scholarship Statement

DATE ADDED: April 1, 2024 – taken from the SHS MS Team document folder.

ACTION PLAN: Request confirmation from the PA chair including last update information.

Peer-Reviewed Scholarship at Elon University

and in the

Department of Physician Assistant Studies

Elon nurtures a rich intellectual community characterized by active student engagement with a faculty dedicated to excellent teaching and scholarly accomplishment.¹ The Elon faculty embrace the idea that scholarship and teaching are inseparable, for scholarship is the foundation of teaching.² The faculty of Elon also embrace the idea that scholarship is essential to an intellectually vibrant and enriching community, and so it represents the most fundamental form of professional activity.²

Professional activity is an essential criterion by which all faculty performance is judged, along with the criteria of teaching, which is given top priority, and contributions to the life of the university (service).³ Defined broadly, professional activity results in a range of valued work involving the serious practice of disciplinary expertise², including academic presentations, exhibitions, creative performances, leadership positions in professional organizations, consulting, and mentored student research.³

Peer-reviewed scholarship is a crucial subset of professional activity and, with evidence of activity at a high level, a necessary but not sufficient condition for promotion and tenure.³ Scholarship is the creative process of inquiry and exploration that adds to the knowledge or appreciation of disciplinary or interdisciplinary understanding,² and is not limited to traditional basic research, also sometimes referred to as “the scholarship of discovery.” Elon faculty embrace the full range of scholarly activity reflected in the Boyer Model (Ernest L. Boyer, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, 1990) as valued by and valuable to Elon’s intellectual community and traditions.

Across all disciplines, recognized peer-reviewed scholarship shares some common features:

• It results in a product, presentation, exhibition, or performance that expands knowledge, skills, or understanding that can be shared with others;
• It extends beyond the limits of the institution;
• It develops and/or expands the expertise of the faculty member and lifts the faculty member's standing within the institution and in his/her greater community (scholars, artists, researchers, professional practitioners); and
• The work is reviewed by those outside the institution who have appropriate expertise.²

However, distinct differences exist in the types of peer-reviewed scholarly activities, what characterizes high quality, and the tangible results of peer-reviewed scholarship that are valued both within and between disciplines.² Though faculty who prepare their annual reports or tenure/promotion files carry the primary burden of clearly articulating the significance and quality of their scholarship, departments must – for both the effective development and review of their faculty – clearly distinguish and characterize high quality peer-reviewed scholarship in their specific disciplines.

Therefore, in what follows, the Department of Physician Assistant Studies characterizes peer-reviewed scholarship for its discipline(s), distinguishing it from more general forms of professional activity and also distinguishing what is generally considered high quality scholarly activity.

Peer Reviewed Scholarship in Physician Assistant Studies

Peer reviewed scholarship is valued as the highest level of scholarship. Peer review ensures that scholarship products are reviewed by colleagues or professionals within the field of physician assistant (studies), medicine and other scientific communities, in either academic or clinical practice communities related to health or delivery of health care services.

The following are examples of peer-reviewed scholarship. However, this alphabetical list is representative, rather than exhaustive. DPAS faculty are not expected to complete or demonstrate evidence of each, but may use the list as a guide to demonstrate avenues to meet scholarship requirements.

• Books and book chapters where the author is acknowledged in the public credits
• Competitive grant proposals with a result of funded, or positive feedback without funding
• Competitive research proposals that are funded and knowledge dissemination results
• Presentations at regional, state, national or international venues and/or professional meetings, either invited or selected through an abstract review process
• Peer-reviewed journal articles
• Published abstracts and monographs
• Published evidence-based clinical practice guidelines adopted by a healthcare facility

Characterizing “High Quality” in Peer-Reviewed Scholarship

The level of quality of peer-reviewed scholarship is measured by the impact of the work, using a variety of measures, as appropriate to the type of work. Measures of impact may include:

• Substance:Refers to the comprehensiveness of the work, such as a work of significant content and complexity compared with a work of smaller scope.
• Reach:Refers to the size and/or composition of the audience, such as a nationally presented work compared with a locally presented one.
• Selectivity:Refers to the stringency of the review process prior to the work entering the public domain, such as acceptance rates or qualified professional review.
• Permanence:Refers to the work’s durability in the public domain, such as publication being more permanent than presentation.
• Significance:Refers to the importance of the work as measured by the use of the work by others, such as citation or adoption.
• Recognition:Refers to accolades that the work receives from qualified evaluators and critics, such as positive reviews, awards and honors.

Individual faculty members are encouraged to articulate the quality of their own scholarly work in the annual review and promotion and tenure process.  This includes the ways their work meets standards of quality appropriate to their research agendas, goals, development, etc.

The Department also encourages members to be engaged in professional activities that require scholarship, but may not be subjected to peer review as defined above. This may include:

• Advancement of education: doctoral degrees for master’s prepared faculty, post-doctoral fellowships, specialty clinical certifications
• Authorship of print, electronic or multimedia instructional material
• Grant reviewer
• Peer reviewer for a journal
• Serving as a journal, department or journal feature editor
• Serving on editorial board
• Serving as an invited expert panelist or discussant
• Award of funding for non-competitive grant proposals
• Technical reports resulting from consultation, evaluation, or service on a professional organization policy task force that provide new knowledge and can be disseminated to the larger professional community
• Ongoing research activities initiated by the faculty member (examples include clinical, epidemiological, qualitative research or case studies)

Last updated: 2017 (per SHS MS Team file name)