Published Intervention Research Has Greater Impact Than Other Types of Social Work Research: A Citation Analysis

Purpose:  The social work research literature suggests that intervention studies possess a unique value to help inform our practice. As such, social work doctoral programs should emphasize training in intervention research methodology over other forms of scientific investigation.  It has also been suggested that intervention research produce results that have greater potential for practitioner use than findings of alternative forms of scholarship.  We thus tested the hypothesis that “Published intervention research studies will be cited more frequently than other forms of published social work scholarship.”

Method:  All regular articles published in Research on Social Work Practice, Social Work Research, and the Journal of Social Service Research during the years 2009, 2010 and 2011 were reviewed and coded as “Intervention Research” or “Other Research”.  Editorials, conceptual articles, and book reviews were excluded from our analysis.  Intervention research was operationalized as outcome studies that used pre-experimental, quasi-experimental, experimental designs, and meta-analytic studies.    

Results:  We found a total of 72 intervention, and 59 non-intervention research articles.  An interrater reliability check classifying these studies, was conducted on a random sample of 10% of all articles, and found 95% agreement. We used the Google Scholar database to assess the number of citations each study had accumulated since publication through April of 2017.  Intervention studies were cited an average of 35.8 (SD = 71.2) times.  The average citation frequency for the non-intervention articles was 20.8 (SD = 16.5).  A one-tailed two-sample t-test of this difference found t (71) = 4.2, p < .0001, Cohen’s d = 0.3 (.95 CI = 20.8 – 35.8), which is a moderate effect size.  Thus, our hypothesis was supported.  Articles reporting intervention research were cited statistically significantly more than other types of articles, among these three major social work research journals, in 2017.

Discussion:  These results lend credibility to the contention that social work intervention research has greater impact than other forms of published scholarship in our periodical literature.  As an applied profession and not an academic discipline, we seek to conduct studies that can effect positive change, not simply add to knowledge. These data make a greater contribution to intellectual discourse within the field of social work, and suggest that an emphasis be given in doctoral education programs, and in our journals and textbooks to provide more training in methods used to conduct outcome studies.  Disciplinary efforts to proactively encourage the design and conduct of intervention research are called for.  Among the study limitations is our sampling of articles from a three year period among only three research journals.  Extensions of our investigation to additional social work journals, and using articles published during different time periods are warranted.  We recognize that citations to any given article is an imperfect measure of its impact or of scholarly influence, but it is also a justifiable one, if its limitations are recognized. We provide examples of some of the more highly cited papers, including one that has garnered over 600 citations since publication, a remarkable achievement.