Recommendation letter dataset

Question

I am looking for a dataset containing academic recommendation letters, written in English, with as many following fields as possible:

• content of the letter
• date of the letter
• purpose of the letter (e.g., faculty application, visa application, internship application, etc.)
• relationship between recommendee and recommender
• demographics on recommendee and recommender

Answer 1

Idea 1: Troll google for personal letters of reference with a search engine - here are some samples:

• include the strings "letter of reference", "to whom it may concern"
• exclude the string "template"
• filter for PDF and DOC files

example query

examples results pdf1, pdf2, pdf3

enhanced query:

• include degree (Master, PhD)

• include department (Physics, Law)

The downside is you'll have to do the categorization yourself

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Idea 2: (ethical?) Post fake job advertisements on Craiglist or Indeed and ask people to send CV with letters of reference. At least one would then have geographical and topic-based categorization.

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Idea 3+: There are plenty of less-ethical things beyond here. That being said, analysis of the hiring process is an important research topic and leads to important discoveries like - Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination.