As the department dialogue about the pre‐tenure colleague’s scholarship progresses, important issues for discussion during the fourth and fifth year are:

• Time frames: Are the plans made in previous years on target? What needs to be done to ensure that article submissions are accepted in final form before the tenure review?
• Do plans need to be adjusted so that there is a body of externally validated scholarship at the time of the tenure review? As an example, a large book project might need to be split into smaller article‐sized pieces to ensure that the work attains successful peer review and publication.
• Discipline‐specific issues regarding external validation and peer review for each of the colleague’s research projects: Is a given volume of conference proceedings peer reviewed, and in what manner? What level of peer review is constituted by the editorial policy of a given book publisher? Is a given book chapter peer reviewed, and in what manner?