Going Beyond the H-Index: Exploring African American Faculty Scholarship and Its Character Using 3-Additional Metrics from the Publish or Perish Site

Rationale: This study is fourth in succession in our knowledge-building journey related to African American scholarship in the U.S.  There are no other empirical studies written about this subject matter. 

Background: In an earlier study, two years prior, we published the first study highlighting the top ranked African American scholars in the top 25-ranked schools of social work in the U.S.  In this study, we only assessed the h-index which is a standardized measure of the impact of overall lifetime scholarship of individuals.  Despite its known limitations, it is still the most widely used metric to assess academic performance worldwide.  The Publish or Perish website <http://www.harzing.com/pop.htm> publishes 18 other metrics along with the well-known h-index.

Purpose: This study explored the h-index as well as 3 additional metrics listed on the Publish or Perish website. We were concerned whether other metrics, namely: g-indices, age-weighted citation ratios, and per-author age weighted citation rates influenced the impact of their overall citation counts. This allowed us to explore further about not just their impact but the character of African American scholarship.  The main research question was: What other factors impact the character of African American h-index scores?

Method: N=14 African American scholars defined by an earlier study as being the top ranked in social work were examined by 3 additional citation impact metrics to determine whether these metrics influenced the character of these scholars scholarship.  Two independent PhD students collected data from the PoP dataset of each scholar, and cross referenced them for their lifetime scholarship.  Inter-rater reliability was 98.7% and where there were differences, they were resolved by a team discussion.

Major Findings: The ­h-index which was the original benchmark metric for ranking scholarship impact showed that other metrics presented different rankings in terms of their citation impact, than did the h-index alone. These findings indicated: that the h-index should not be the only factor used to assess one’s scholarship impact as: one’s lifetime scholarship, one’s tenure scholarship, one’s age, the effects of co-authorship, the impact of peer assessments, and journal impact scores significantly affect the h-index.

Implications: While the h-index is the most well known metric to assist with promotion and tenure decisions for social work faculty, it should be considered with other metrics such as the g-index to provide a more robust understanding of the overall character of an individual’s scholarship. As the movement afoot toward corporatization and outcomes for U.S. universities evolves, the importance of using metrics to assess faculty in their performance will become more front and center across all social work departments. We believe that this article contributes to the paucity of empirical literature in this important subject area. Additionally, social work units should become more proactive in building research cultures to support their faculty to achieve this goal.