Ranking academic departments: Empirical findings and a theoretical perspective

Exploring Data to Learn about the Nature of Science

“…Faculty who publish frequently in quality journals are much more likely to achieve tenure, be promoted, and gain recognition within and outside their institution, regardless of how much energy they invest in teaching. In a study of the correlates and predictors of national peer review departmental rankings carried out by the National Academy of Sciences, Drew and Karpf (1981), found that the departmental prestige ranking correlated .91 with one variable: the rate of publication by departmental faculty in the 20 most highly-cited journals in the field.…”

Journal Collection Management as a Cumulative Advantage Process

“…91 between the 1964 Cartter ratings and departmental publication rates in highly cited mathematics journals during 1960-63. 60 Michael E. D. Koenig reported in a study of the pharmaceutical industry that expert judgment is very highly correlated with measures of publication activity and appears to be an additive function of publication size and publication (citation) quality, with the principal component being size. 61 In their analysis of more than thirty university measures, including publication rate in journals covered by the lSI indexes, faculty size, university revenue, volumes in the library, number of students, and the Roose-Andersen ratings, J. Philippe Rushton and Sari J. Meltzer found that those universities that were high on one measure were also high on the others.…”

“…Hagstrom compared both the mean number of research articles published by the faculty in the period and the mean number of citations to their works in the 1966 SCI to the 1964 Cartter ratings andreported that citations to published works are a better predictor of departmental prestige than is quantity of published articles. 55 Moreover, in their work on the social stratification of science, Jonathan R. Cole and Stephen Cole found that straight citation counts from the SCI are highly correlated with virtually every refined measure of quality, and upon analyzing the references made to a sample of 385 authors by eighty-four university physicists in their papers that were most often cited in the 1965 SCI, they discovered that 60 percent of the references were to scientists at the nine most distinguished departments, as ranked by the Cartter study, and that merely 7 percent of the references were to scientists at the less prestigious departments. 56 However, perhaps the most important work in recent years on the application of lSI's citation indexes in academic evaluation has been done at the research institute Computer Horizons, Inc. (CHI),…”

Institutional and Faculty Influences on the Reputation of Doctorate-Granting Programs in Special Education

“…Since then, many others have looked at the multiple variables influencing productivity within college and university departments (Conrad 8c Blackburn, 1985;Cox & Catt, 1977;Drew, 1975;Drew & Karpf, 1981;Guba & Clark, 1978;Hagstrom, 1971;Jones et al, 1982;King 8c Wolfle, 1987;Knudsen 8c Vaughn, 1969;Saunier, 1985;Tan, 1990). Voeks (1962) and Dent and Lewis (1976) looked at teacher evaluations by students and faculty productivity as measured by both faculty membership in research groups and the number of citations in the Social Science Citations Index.…”

“…The results include updated rankings of special education departments and a multiple regression model identifying doctoral program characteristics that are closely linked to the rankings. Examples of these program characteristics are faculty performance, such as research productivity (Conrad 8c Blackburn, 1985;Cox 8c Catt, 1977;Drew, 1975;Drew 8c Karpf, 1981;Guba 8c Clark, 1978;Hagstrom, 1971;Jones et al, 1982;King 8c Wolfle, 1987;Knudsen 8c Vaughn, 1969;Saunier, 1985;Tan, 1990); outcome measures, such as number of graduates, (Astin 8c Henson, 1977;Conrad 8c Blackburn, 1985;Elton 8c Rodgers, 1971;Elton & Rose, 1972;Jones et al, 1982;Solmon & Astin, 1981); and institutional and departmental characteristics, such as specialization and faculty inbreeding (Cartter, 1966;Conrad & Blackburn, 1985;Glower, 1980;Jones et al, 1982;Solmon 8c Astin, 1981).…”