Feature Focus: External Review
The story
A public university ran its first promotion and tenure season in Scholarly this year, across more than a dozen workflows. Its faculty affairs lead summed up the external review portion like this: "I've gotten zero complaints about the external reviewer process, and that is about 1,000 fewer than the complaints I received last summer."
A tenure case rests partly on documents the institution cannot produce itself. External review letters are written by scholars at other institutions: people with no account in the institution's systems, whom a chair might not know personally, and who typically have jam-packed schedules. They are the participants in the process the institution has limited visibility into and limited authority over, and the case typically cannot close without them.
And countless complaints are what external review generates when it goes badly, coming from every direction at once: from the candidate whose file is incomplete, from the chair chasing letters, and from the reviewer who cannot work out what is being asked.
What is an external review, exactly?
For those outside core faculty affairs: when a faculty member comes up for tenure or promotion, institutions often ask scholars within the candidate’s discipline to assess the quality and impact of their work. These are peers and leaders in the same subfield, senior enough to judge, and independent enough that their assessment is unbiased.
The institution is asking for detailed work that can involve hours of careful reading and a written assessment. The institution has no way to insist (i.e., you can’t bribe or force your way to a completed review). A reviewer who declines, or who simply never replies, faces no consequence. So the institution can only ask clearly and make saying yes easy.
Meanwhile, the institution may have rules about who may be asked, what counts as a disqualifying relationship, and who gets to make that call. The hard part is serving both at once: strict governance on the inside, almost nothing to figure out on the outside.
Who decides who reviews?
It depends…
At some institutions, the candidate nominates their own reviewers and an administrator approves or denies each one while adding nominees of their own. At others, the candidate is kept out of it entirely and nominations come only from individuals like the department chair, because the bylaws say the candidate should not shape their own review panel. And at others still, the faculty member nominates and sends invitations without an approval step.
Scholarly supports all three.
The same holds for the smaller decisions underneath. Whether a read-only departmental administrator may approve nominees. Whether the nomination step appears at all, since plenty of processes running in the same system, including annual reviews and many non-tenure-track promotions, do not require external letters. What the step is even called, because not every institution uses the word "external" for the same thing.
None of these are particularly large features. They are the questions that surface in month two of an implementation, when "the system cannot do that" is an expensive answer.
What makes Scholarly's external review capability different?
Conflict screening runs on your criteria: Scholarly flags potential conflicts of interest in nominated reviewers before invitations go out. It also takes custom criteria: one engineering school screens for rank as well, so a candidate going up for full professor cannot be reviewed by someone junior to the rank they are seeking. The flag is a prompt for a human decision, not an automatic rejection.
Letters are not assumed to be one thing: External letters, internal letters, and student letters can be collected as distinct categories with their own handling, which matters at institutions where a teaching-focused case or a doctoral program carries its own letter requirements.
You can see what was actually sent: The invitation, the reminders, the attachments, and the delivery record sit on a single screen, so the question, "Did she ever get it" has an answer, not a guess. Scholarly can send from your email domain if desired.
Reasons for declining are recorded: When a reviewer turns down an invitation, the reason is captured, which can tell a chair something useful about why their requests fail.
The workflow follows your exact process: Who nominates, who approves and when, who has access to view the letters, and more are all configurable to your specifics.
What is still hard
You have no authority over the reviewer's behavior, and no software changes that.
An invitation can land in a junk folder, an address can be stale, or a reviewer can retire between the day the candidate listed them and the day the chair writes. What a system can do is shorten the gap between a failed request and the person who needs to know about it, and that is where our work on external review is concentrated: surfacing delivery problems to the chair faster, giving chairs the full send history for each reviewer, and reducing the number of clicks a reviewer has to get right.
The bottom line
External review is where promotion and tenure cases can stall. Not because the step is complicated, but because it waits on people the institution has no authority over, and every piece of friction costs days. If you are evaluating a system, four questions get at whether the vendor has thought about it: who may nominate, who must approve, what gets checked before an invitation goes out, and how much the reviewer has to figure out when it arrives.
About Scholarly
Scholarly is a modern faculty information system that centralizes faculty data and streamlines the manual work that buries administrators and faculty, so your team spends less time wrangling documents and spreadsheets and more time supporting faculty. Book a demo or reach out to sales@scholarlysoftware.com to learn more.
