The 100 Most Influential Contemporary Social Work Faculty As Assessed By the H-Index

Abstract

Background:  Increasing attention has been given to identifying the most influential members of academic disciplines, individuals who have made the most influential contributions to their field’s professional literature. Moving beyond the simple tabulation of the numbers of publications and citations to a given author’s articles, the h-index was established in 2005 as a bibliometric intended to assess academic productivity on an individual level.  The h-index is defined as the number, h, of publications a given researcher has that have been cited h times.  For example, someone with a h-index of 10 will have published at least 10 papers that have been cited at least ten times.  The h-index has been used in social work to identify the most influential members of the Society and Social Work and Research, and of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.  In an extension of this line of research, we tabulated the h-indices of all faculty affiliated with social work programs (N = 76) belonging to the Group for the Advancement of Doctoral Education in Social Work. 

Methods:  The number of citations for each faculty member was ascertained using the h-index calculated by the Publish or Perish (PoP) software program.  It draws upon the information compiled by Goggle Scholar (GS) and systematically produces an h-index for each person with a Google Scholar account.  For faculty lacking a GS account, we manually tabulated that person’s h-index.  We calculated the interrater agreement for the PoP –derived h-indices and those we manually calculated for the top-most 125 faculty, achieving a correlation of .995, indicating the high reliability of our manually calculated h-indices.  Data were collected from 7 September 2015 – 31 January 2016.

Results:  A list of the top 100 most cited social work faculty, as assessed by h-indices, is reported.  Apart from the complete list of 100 faculty and their h-indices we also report the academic affiliations of these authors.  The h-indices of social work faculty compared favorably with those in other academic disciplines.  However we noted that of the top 10 most cited social work faculty, the top 7 producers had not earned any social work degrees; rather they were members of other disciplines (sociology, psychology, medicine) who made their academic homes within social work programs and thus appeared on our list. 

Implications:  Identifying the most productive social work faculty in terms of their citation impact is important for a variety of reasons.  First, it is appropriate that the decades-long pattern of productivity created by these scholars be recognized for the influence they have had on the field.  Second, by identifying highly productive individuals (and the institutions they are affiliated with), it may be possible to isolate factors which are associated with high productivity.  Third, lists such as this one can be used to compare influence and productivity factors between social work faculty and authors associated with other, non-social work, programs.