I faced a similar question in January; at my institution we do this at the end of each calendar year. My situation was different from yours. I had done both clearly mainline stuff and stuff to do with Mormonism, including an item forthcoming in a recently established forum specifically dealing with Mormonism (Element). I reported all the stuff on Mormonism. But that said, I felt it was important that it be clear to the Dean that my work on Mormonism is not my main work. It isn’t, and I don’t think it should be for now. My dissertation was on virtue ethics (with no mention of anything distinctively Mormon), and I think my main work should continue to be on ethical theory for a while, because, well, virtue ethics and issues that it leads to are my main interest, but also because I have a lot of material already developed there that I need to translate into publications, and because I was hired as an ethics guy. If I were to suddenly ditch mainline ethical theory, or start only picking topics in ethical theory that have some connection to Mormonism, I think my institution might feel like I wasn’t doing what they hired me to do.

The upside of this reasoning, though, for my real interests in Mormon Studies, is that I did list a bunch of stuff I’ve done on Mormonism, including stuff in specifically Mormon fora (SMPT, FARMS Review) on my CV when I applied here, and so I see no reason to change that now. I think the quality standards of SMPT’s fora (the Mormon fora I know best) are very strong. I would say they are higher than some “mainline” fora I have checked out, though not as high as the most selective mainline fora. If a colleague in another department wasn’t sure how much weight to give work in these fora, though, I wouldn’t find that strange, since they are new, and as Jim says, the peer networks on which they rely for review are not as well established as in the case of mainline fora.

As for the memo, I am not including anything in it that is published in a Mormon fora (especially since I haven’t published anything in a Mormon fora). Rather, I have current research projects on certain aspects of Mormon legal history that I am hoping to publish in mainline law reviews. I discuss these (along with more traditional legal projects) in the “current research” section of the memo. My question is does there come a point at which things look too Mormon. Since I am doing work in fields unrelated to Mormonism, and all of my Mormon stuff is related to law, I suspect that I am just fine. (Ask me again in five years when I go up for tenure review.) The question is under what circumstances and in what fields can you get away with making the study of Mormonism part of your “real” research agenda, and how many Mormon scholars with an interest in studying Mormonism regard it as something quite seperate from their “real” scholarship? The latter attitude is widespread enough LDS academics that I have talk to that it seems like it is worth thinking about.

This is the reason why being a Religion scholar is actually the best job in the world (and not being a Law professor as you claim). My work on Mormonism is my legitimate work. Studying, teaching, and publishing about religion is what I’m trained and paid to do. ;)

Work published in non-LDS academic journals is relatively easy to decide, though not necessarily easy to find an audience for. Something that appears in a peer-reviewed journal should count. In contrast, work that is aimed primarily at a Mormon audience doesn’t have, at least at this point, enough of a peer-review structure to be evaluated easily. That makes it more difficult to decide whether it should count.

For example, I’m doing some pieces on LDS theology for BYU Studies and FARMS Review. I don’t think either is a puff piece; I hope that they make a contribution to the scholarly discussion of LDS theology. However, though I believe both of those journals are peer-reviewed–at least the former is; I think FARMS Review also is–it isn’t easy to decide whether there is a large enough pool of those who know theology professionally to review those pieces and pass judgment on them. In many cases one could argue that the answer is “yes,” but I’m sympathetic to those who decide that it is “no.” (Here’s hoping that next year my chair thinks that the answer is “yes.”)

The problem is that you don’t want to put things on your CV that make it look like you are padding it. So the “better safe than sorry” principle could lead a person to decide not to include those kinds of things.

Until there are more scholars in Mormon Studies, I don’t think the problem is going to get easier.