Frequency of Citations as Criterion for the Ranking of Departments, Journals, and Individuals

Abstract

Interest in the structure and dynamics of sociology as a discipline has led io recurrent attempts to measure the prestige. productiviiy, and quality of educaiion of the various sociology departments. While several previous papers have suggested the poiential value of the Science Citation Index ( X I ) as a measure of scientific standing, f e w attempts have been made to utilize a citation-based measure of scientific prestige. This paper considers the meaning of the citation in science and in stratification theory. Procedures are described whereby citations to individual sociologists and journals are employed to yield rankings of departments of sociology and journals. The differences between these rankings and other rankings are discussed.; ; I

Sociology research at liberal arts colleges

“…Since Hughes published his rankings of graduate programs in 20 different disciplines (including Sociology), there have been countless other studies of this sort. 1 There is now a large literature ranking sociology programs by some measure of research output (e.g., Cartter 1966;Lewis 1968;Knudsen and Vaughan 1969;Glenn and Villemez 1970;Roose and Anderson 1970;Oromaner 1973;Roche and Smith 1978;Keith and Babchuk 1994). But all of this work has either focused exclusively on graduate programs or used only limited journal sets.…”

Scientists at major and minor universities: mobility along the prestige continuum

“…Empirical evidence suggests that such scientists, scaciscically speaking, are relacively rare: alchough the probability of a scientist remaining with a given field of research increases the longer he or she stays with It, the likelihood a scientist will persist more than a few years is fairly low (Rappa and Garud 1992 Small (1990) (Myers 1970) and prestige of academic depanmenrs (Roche and Smith 1978), a laboratory's research performance (Mullins 1987;Narin 1987), and the competitive stature ot a country's scientific community (Narin and Frame 1989 Table 4 remain consistent when studying respondents who enter the field as students versus respondents who enter after graduation. Table 5).…”

Changes in Scholarly Influence in Major American Criminology and Criminal Justice Journals Between 1986 and 2005

“…In addition, citation counts are strongly related to other measures of a scholar's influence, professional prestige, intellectual reputation, and scientific quality, such as peer ratings of professional eminence, the receipt of scholarly prizes, academic appointments, scholarly productivity, and even salary (see e.g., Cole 1971 Diamond 1986;Garfield 1977aGarfield , 1977bGarfield , 1977cGordon and Vicari 1992;Hamermesh, Johnson, and Weisbrod 1982;Myers 1970;Rushton and Endler 1979). Citation counts of faculty also are related to departmental prestige (see e.g., Doerner, DeZee, and Lab 1982;Roche and Smith 1978;Rushton, Littlefield, Russell, and Meltzer 1983). While the reliability and validity of citation counts have been questioned, Rushton (1984) has stated that citations COHN meet the necessary criteria for reliability and are highly valid indices of academic quality.…”