Saturday, 15 January 2005 - 4:00 PM

This presentation is part of: Social Work Education

Bibliometrics: A Potential Decision-making Aid in Hiring, Reappointment, Tenure and Promotion Decisions

Purpose: Scholarship has assumed an increasingly important role in promotion and tenure decisions. These are the most important decisions in academics’ lives and should be as free from bias as possible. But that is not what happens in untold instances. Furthermore, these concerns are not new. Kirk, Wasserstrum and Miller (1977) noted in 1977 that “schools have developed refined methods of applying vague generalities” (p. 89). It seems to us that little has changed in the past 25 years. Building on the bibliometric work by those both outside and inside social work (e.g., Lindsey, Kirk, Green, Baskind, Baker, Thyer, Ligon, Klein, Bloom Epstein, and others) this session will describe a system that is designed to inject increased standardization into these important decisions.

Methods: The proposed faculty evaluation system focuses on citation analysis of an individual’s peer reviewed journal articles. The data are obtained from the individual’s CV and the Web of Science databases.

The primary statistics computed for the target individual’s work are ones that have been used previously in the bibliometric literature including: number of authors; target authors position in that array of authors; age of the article; number of references in article, proportion of references to serials; Price Indices for serials and non-serials; proportion of synchronous self-citations, lag time; persistence; a number of diachronous self citation statistics, and the total number of cites received by the paper. New measures and adjustments created for this approach include: the multiple author qualifier (MAQ - correction factor for multiple authorship); time adjusted (by age of article) and MAQ adjusted diachronous citation outcome measures.

The sample used to demonstrate the method for this presentation includes ten articles written by our research group.

Results: The typical article had four authors and this author’s median position in this array was 1.5. This average article was nine years old, had 48 references of which 65% were to serials. Forty percent of the references to serials and 47% of the references to non-serials were five years old or less (Price Indices). The proportion of synchronous self-citations ranged from .00 to .15 (M = .04).

The typical article was first cited two and one half years after publication and was cited in three and one half different years after it was published. This article is self cited by this author one time, has not been cited by any of the co-authors on that article and is cited 5.5 times by others. Overall, this set of articles was cited 129 times (24 times by this author, 0 times by co-authors, 105 times by others). The MAQ adjusted total number of cites was 83. Three articles accounted for 74% of the citations. The median number of MAQ adjusted total cites per year was .313.

Implications Decisions about tenure and promotion are among the most vital decisions made regarding academic lives. These decisions should be as fair and fully informed as possible. This session provides a starting point for discussions aimed at achieving these goals, in part, through bibliometrics.

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