Referee Letters for Academic Radiology Promotion Dossiers: Benchmarking Effort

As part of promotion consideration, letters of evaluation are requested from external (to the candidate's institution) reviewers (referees). In some instances, internal letters are also requested. The process of responding to, reviewing the provided materials, writing the letter, and submitting it takes time. To our knowledge, there is no benchmark for the number of reference letters requested from senior faculty to or the time required to provide these letters. Our aim was to quantify this effort.

5 Professors at different institutions, in different parts of the United States, representing a range of subspecialties, were anonymously surveyed. The number and type of referee letters written, estimates of the time spent with each portion of letter writing, and the number of years writing letters were tabulated.

In total, this group has written 218 letters over 49 total years of service (Table 1). This consisted of 179 external (average 4.7/year) and 39 internal (0.8/year). There were 28 instances of repeat letter requests (including consideration for different faculty ranks and changing institutions). We estimate it takes between 2.5 and 8 h to complete the necessary review of institutional guidelines and individual qualifications to complete one of these letters (Table 2).

This work provides benchmarking information for the academic radiology community, including appointment and promotions committees, department chairs, and faculty members. The time, effort, energy, and attention that is required is significant but essential to academic career advancement. We recommend that departments and institutions recognize and assign value to this work.