Diversity and Influence as Key Measures to Assess Candidates for Hiring or Promotion in Academia

Assessing candidates for academic positions or for promotion in academia is a challenging task with many variables to consider. Universities in general and departments in particular may prefer or emphasize diversity, quantity, quality, seniority, juniority, etc. Our case study focuses on the Department of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. Our target is to check how diversity and influence contribute to a department-centric look for hiring or promotion by producing a standard that a candidate may be measured against. We use social network analysis and community detection to measure the influence and diversity of department members. Another measure of diversity could be derived from the number of joint publications between authors and coauthors. The differences in these measures between various positions at the department (including instructors, assistant, associate and full professors) are presented and discussed.