The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) published a statement of recommendations concerning the appropriate means of assessment of varied research outputs. In the statement, the term “corpus” refers to the body of language documentation scholarship that is deposited in a language archive. The statement notes that “unlike traditional publications, documentation is not ordinarily peer-reviewed. Thus, the approaches to evaluation described here involve ways of having documentary scholarship peer-reviewed, for candidates for whom this seems necessary.”
Using this discipline-specific terminology, the statement outlines several recommendations for how to present scholarly linguistic work for assessment:
- “Corpus review”, which is a brief summary and written evaluation of the scholarly corpus by a person who is not in the project. This Corpus review would be published in a recognized journal. In a dossier for hiring, tenure, or promotion, it would be treated like a book review. The committee for hiring, tenure, or promotion would rely on the testimony of this book review.
- “Corpus overview article”, in which the scholar writes a description of their own documentary corpus, submitting it to a peer-reviewed journal.
- “Corpus journal” or “corpus-as-article”, which is the publication of the actual corpus of documentation in a peer-reviewed journal.
- Solicit outside letters of evaluation from senior scholars who have expertise in documentation.
See also the LSA Statement on the Scholarly Merit and Evaluation of Open Scholarship in Linguistics.