From "Nice Hobby" to Academic Asset: How Promotion Rules Are Quietly Shifting

The Public Physician-Scientist, Part 1

By Dr. Lynora Saxinger

Publish, Perish… or Engage?

I have spent time in the public communication digital trenches and worked with traditional media and the public directly. One focus has been analyzing the epidemiology of disinformation and—and, more importantly, how practical, sharp science communication (scicomm) can actually help improve patient care, and make us better academic writers in the process.

But something bigger is happening right now at the interface of academics and the public that goes beyond debunking viral myths on social media. We are in seeing a major structural shift in how science, medicine, and society interact, and communication is a central feature.

Institutions are realizing that the old model—publishing a paper behind a $45 paywall, issuing a dry press release, and hoping the public "trusts the experts"—needs to be retired. So, the academic machinery is changing. Funding bodies are writing mandates into grants, promotion committees are rethinking what counts as "scholarship," and the definition of what it means to be a modern health professional is being rewritten in real time.

This newsletter is the first in a four-part series where we’re going to map out this new terrain. We’ll look at the big-picture science-society crisis, how our institutions are reacting, how we may leverage these changes in our own academic careers (without feeling like a sellout), and how to do practically start down this path and stay ahead of the curve.

Let’s start with a look at how the rules of the game are changing—whether our tenure committees have fully admitted it or not.

Part 1: How it is changing (with mandates coming!)

For decades, if an academic physician spent time writing public op-eds, creating educational infographics, hosting podcasts, or running an active social media account, the departmental consensus was usually clear:

That’s a nice little hobby, but when are you going to publish a real paper?

But, that take is increasingly… historic. Driven by a collapse in public trust, rampant health illiteracy, and the need to show taxpayers where their money goes, major global research infrastructure has shifted from treating public engagement as an "optional extra" to an explicit requirement.

1. A Global Shift to Mandated "Knowledge Mobilization"

Funding bodies and universities are changing their evaluation metrics. Examples below:

• Canada: CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC don't just ask for a dissemination plan anymore; they require explicit Knowledge Mobilization (KMb) strategies. Promising to publish and present at a meeting without a defined strategy for non-academic audiences will not cut it. Canada’s granting agencies signed on to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) which shifted CV evaluation to be a nuanced narrative rather than solely metrics-driven.
• Major universities, like UBC and SFU, already explicitly evaluate non-traditional outputs—blog posts, podcasts, policy briefs, and digital advocacy—under public scholarship criteria, and many are evolving ways to do this.
• The United Kingdom and Europe: In the UK, the Research Excellence Framework (REF), and with the CoARA (Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment) across Europe, universities are legally and financially evaluated on "societal impact". With that comes formal recognition of the diversity of scholarly contributions, including scicomm and public engagement. Pure journal impact factor and bibliometrics (like the h-index) are actively being deprioritized in favour of evidence of real-world application. There are caveats around social media-based KT work, with use of qualitative peer evaluation rather than “like and share” metrics. In the UK, the framework relies on “impact case studies” with use of social media dissemination, but they do not equate dissemination and impact. They need to show a measurable change as significance and reach.
• The United States: individual organizations have been innovative: the Mayo Clinic created an explicit "Digital Footprint" metric back in 2016, allowing faculty to track Altmetrics and educational social media reach directly for academic advancement. The National Science Foundation also has a “Broader Impacts” criteria in it’s grants, which values public engagement and scicomm, as well as the DORA (The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment), a pledge that pushes institutions to drop predatory metrics and expand what is counted as “excellence” in hiring and promotion.

So, the institutions that fund and employ academics and researchers will increasingly require that we bridge the gap between our data and the society that pays for it.

2. Enlightened Self-Interest: this helps you

There is a bright side to this—you don't have to choose between altruistic public engagement and academic self-preservation. Good scicomm and outreach is high-yield for your “traditional” career trajectory as well.

At the interface between social media/media communication of your work and traditional research, we find the Amplifier Effect. Multiple studies suggest that peer-reviewed papers accompanied by accessible digital communication (a clear thread, an infographic, a summary for non-specialists) get significantly higher downloads, broader cross-disciplinary reads, and potentially higher traditional citation counts over time.

Altmetrics, which tracks news pickups, policy citations, and social shares, can act as an early-stage radar, as a good Altmetric score can correlate with higher citations down the road. While a traditional citation takes 12 to 36 months to show up in the literature, digital engagement builds an immediate audience, opens up international collaborations, and gives you a compelling narrative edge when applying for competitive grants. Also, higher visibility can result in increased invitations to present, increased networking with peers, and increased collaborations and international presence.

3. The Possible Downsides: Goodhart’s Law and the "Cobra Effect"

In a forward-thinking move, our Department of Medicine is already looking at ways to help people capture various forms of public engagement through media. But we aren’t about to start choreographing TikTok dances in our white coats to secure our next promotion. What we do in public engagement and how we track these activities matters.

One issue we need to be way of: whenever an institution starts measuring something new, it runs straight into Goodhart’s Law:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Once people are punished or rewarded, based on a specific measure, the behaviour shifts to maximize that metric regardless of the original goal the metric was meant to achieve.

In academia, this may manifest as a focus on publication numbers and citations, causing groups to form citation rings to inflate numbers or a researcher breaking one excellent research paper into four lower quality papers to inflate numbers.

In social media, click counting leads to sensationalist clickbait and outrage loops.

This is highly related to the Cobra Effect—a phenomenon named after a British colonial scheme in India that offered a cash bounty for dead cobras. Instead of exterminating the snakes, people bred them. When the government realized this and cancelled the bounty, the breeders released thousands of now-worthless cobras into the streets.

If academic medical bodies start blindly rewarding faculty based on "likes," "retweets," or raw follower counts, we will unleash our own Cobra Effect: a wave of performative "influencer medicine" where clout-chasing is a bigger driver than scientific, nuanced communication, and that could cause a loss of trust (and professionalism).

But our goal as a department isn’t to generate viral noise. It should be to build high-value, evidence-based science communication that improves patient health, informs policy, and reflects genuine academic scholarship. We can do this, thoughtfully.

What’s Next?

Over the next three issues, we’ll explore the how—so we can be early leaders in considered academic public communications and engagement.

• Issue #2: Beyond the Abstract: A practical guide to translating your academic work for the public. To get us ahead of the curve, we’ll run a step-by-step "One-hour Strategy" to translate a newly published paper or trial into public-facing media.
• Issue #3: Engagement has its risks: Setting Boundaries. How to deal with social media-based pushback, maintain professional guardrails, and potentially advocate for public health without generating severe stress.
• Issue #4: Translating SciComm and Community Engagement to Your Promotion Dossier. Start thinking of ways to frame digital outreach, Altmetrics, and policy impact into a portfolio that promotions and tenure committees can appreciate.

So, stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you’ve got a paper coming out or a clinical program or innovation you think needs a broader public translation, you can email DoM Communications (domcom@ualberta.ca) to engage with us and maybe get a boost.

Let's get to work!