The standard is placing all shared partials in app/views/shared, and referencing them as
render :partial => 'shared/partial_name'
If you have a standard “row in a list” partial (say, for an index page), you could use a shared partial like:
# To render a single object row:
render :partial => 'shared/item', :locals => { :item => @item }
# Or to render them all:
render :partial => 'shared/item', :collection => @items