How to Read a Provost Candidate's Record

When a board appoints a provost or a dean, it is appointing the person who will shape a research portfolio for years. The evidence it usually receives was designed for a different question. A curriculum vitae, references, a presentation and an interview test whether a candidate is credible, articulate and suited to the institution's culture. None of them shows what happened to the research of the units the candidate has already led, although that record is public.

The unit is the record

A leader's own publications say less about their leadership than the record of the units they ran. The open scholarly record allows that record to be read year by year: how much the unit published, how its papers were cited relative to similar papers worldwide, what share reached the world's top 10% in their field, and which subjects grew or thinned.¹

For a president or provost, the unit is the institution. For a dean, it is the set of fields that make up the faculty, read at that institution.²

Before, during and after

A trajectory is read across three windows. The years before the appointment show what the candidate inherited. The years in post show what changed. The years after they left show whether the change held.

Each window is set against a peer set: comparable units over the same years. Research output moves with funding cycles and national policy, so a gain that matches the peers says little about the leader. A gain that runs ahead of the peers, and holds after the leader's departure, says more. Papers also trail the decisions behind them, so the reading allows for that lag.

Exhibit 1· Illustrative

Citation impact of a unit relative to its peers, by period

Period	Unit	Peer median	Difference
Three years before tenure	0.94	1.02	−0.08
Five years in post	1.18	1.06	+0.12
Three years after	1.15	1.08	+0.07

No trajectory is a verdict. A unit's record is the work of many people, and some of the most important decisions a leader makes take years to show. The trajectory is evidence for the committee's questions, not a substitute for its judgement.

What the board receives

A board-ready dossier for a leadership search sets out four things: the candidate's own scholarly record, with identity confirmed from the works record; the trajectory of each unit they led, against its peers; the questions that trajectory raises, such as why impact rose in two fields and fell in a third; and the limits of the reading.

Approaches are made, and references taken, in confidence by a senior member of the team, so the candidate's current institution learns of the search from the candidate, if at all. Leadership searches follow the same discipline as every White Matter mandate: the full field first, then a short list scored against the institution.

Read alongside the interview, the record shows what a candidate's leadership achieved.

Footnotes

1. Impact values are on the ATLAS scale (world average 1.0). A paper is in the top 10% when its citations exceed the 90th percentile of its field and year. ↩

2. Departmental affiliations are not recorded consistently in the open scholarly record, so a faculty is read through its fields at the institution. ↩