A Comparison of Citation Impact Scholarship Between Social Work and Psychology Professors in Their Respective Top 25 Ranked Schools: Does Having a Research Culture Matter?

There is a small but growing cadre of research literature devoted to examining aspects of social work scholarship itself.  This takes many forms, as in an examination of the content of our journals, the types of designs and methods we use, issues related to scholarly criteria for promotion and tenure among the professoriate, etc. This study builds on previous work which compared the scholarship of psychology and social work academics using their citation impact scores.  Purpose: The present study has a fairly narrow focus, to examine the scholarly productivity of social work faculty located in highly ranked academic programs, and compare them to colleagues in their top ranked psychology programs. Method: The h-index for all social work and psychology tenured or tenure-track faculty housed in their top 25 social work programs as ranked by U.S. News and World Report in 2012 was obtained, permitting an overall controlled comparison of the scholarly influence between members (N=1,939) of the two fields.  This involved N=970 social work faculty and N=969 psychology faculty. Results: The average h-index for social work and psychology faculty was 6.62 (SD=2.87) and 11.32 (SD=13.59) respectively, representing a significant difference. These results contradict prior published research showing social work to be similar to psychology faculty in their scholarly impact.  In addition, between group t-tests were conducted with assistant, associate and full professors ranks. These data revealed psychology professors to be more significantly cited than social work, at all levels.  These results are discussed in terms of the higher scholarly standards expected of academic social workers in recent years, as North American universities move toward a more corporate-based model with outcomes and publications being more highly valued.  We also report the average h-index for the 25 highly ranked American social work programs, appropriately recognizing those program's whose faculty are being the most widely cited in the academic literature.  Implications: In general, if social work programs are to successfully compete for scarcer academic resources, they must adhere to the same scholarly standards as other university-based practicing professions such as nursing, clinical and counseling psychology, and public health.  Social work and psychology faculty located at the universities hosting the top-25 social work programs are exerting uneven scholarly influence, as measured by the h-index over a recent ten-year period.  Based on this evidence, we offer the working hypothesis that social work has a decidedly different research culture in academia than does psychology.  This study also further illustrates the use of the relatively new h-index as a measure of intellectual impact in our field, and as a platform to conduct such analyses for the betterment of our academic knowledge-base and contributions to the discipline-at-large.