This is a really good thread and I want to add something I have been thinking about. We need to think about hiring and promotion in academia as prospective not retrospective. https://twitter.com/jennifernvictor/status/1284160072755675137

When hiring a new assistant prof, we should be trying to find the person we think will be the best for our department/university for the next 6 years.

Tenure shouldn't be thought of as some mythical bar that we have to get over. We are asking if giving this person a job for life is a safe bet of institutional resources. Will the university be better off if this person spends the rest of their career here?

When a department makes a decision, they are forecasting and the tenure/application file is data that can hopefully help with the prediction.

In this context, how should we think of a “gap” on a cv? How much does have a period of time with little research productivity help predict future productivity? The answer, in part, depends on the nature of the gap.

A little context. I have what is basically an 8-year gap in my CV. From 2010 to 2018 I published 2 articles and one of those is in PS (nothing against PS, but it isn’t exactly a top 3 publication).

I have this gap because I directed a public policy institute that was ended up going, um, poorly. I then started editing a journal. But I also had two sizable projects that collapsed. I had hypotheses for how the world worked that ended up being wrong.

If I had not been promoted to full already, my promotions would have essentially stopped as a result of that (but I wouldn’t have done the service work without the promotion).

Was this gap predictive of my future productivity? Thankfully, no. I’ve had a good run for the last 2 years, but if I had to wager on my future in 2018, I would have probably bet against myself.

How should we think about gaps in productivity in 2020? They should be ignored. They provide no information about future productivity. Being unable to be productive during all of this is not an informative signal about whether or not someone will be productive in the future.

And given that hiring and tenure decisions are decisions that create obligations for universities for potentially decades, we shouldn’t worry that a drop in research this year might signal that there will be less next year too.

If a university tenures you, they should be looking at your productivity over the long run. Most of us will end up with down years in our research. Hopefully, yours are shorter than mine. It happens to all of us for a host of different reasons.

But a couple of down years should be expected in everyone's career.