Citation Impact Factors Among Faculty in Canadian Social Work Programs

Rationale:  All over the world, universities have become enamored with the use of outcomes and measures which often include citation indices, external funding, and increased faculty publication to bolster their reputations.  This study reports the first national citational impact investigation of Canadian schools of social work.

Background.  There are approximately 10 North American studies conducted in the past decade by social work scholars assessing the impact of their scholarship using metrics from Google Scholar, and the software Publish or Perish (PoP).  PoP offers 18 metrics including the two most popular, the h and g.  Collectively, these studies compared social work vs. psychology scholarship, or explored sub-populations of social work scholarship namely, African Americans and women.  They also used the h-index as the only metric of scholarship.  As such, this study fills a distinct void in the literature and adds to the understanding of the use of multiple citational impact bibliometrics to assess Canadian social work faculty scholarship.

Purpose.  The study had two research aims: 1) to assess the citational impact of social work faculty in Canada using the h and g indices, and 2) to assess Canadian academic scholarship via citational impact frequency. 

Method. We sampled all Canadian schools of social work from the Canadian Association for Social Work Education (CASWE) in Summer 2016. We selected all assistant, associate, and full professors working full-time,  in all accredited programs (N = 30). Each scholar’s h and g index was analyzed via PoP, and data were then aggregated by school, and frequency of the highest cited individual articles between 2006 - 2016.  Interrater reliability was established at 95% using a sample of 10% of both individual faculty and school scores, across 2 independent raters.  

Major Findings. The top-5 ranked Canadian programs by both h and g scores were: the University of Toronto, Dalhousie University, University of British Columbia, McGill University, and King’s University.  The top 5 cited articles were by: M. Unger (666), M. Kelley (517), M. McGuire (453), F. Mishna (312), and M. Saini (312). The emphasis of these top-15 articles were focused on either matters of Canadian children/youth/adolescents, or health and were published in prestigious journals.  

Implications.  We offer several constructive suggestions to deans and directors of Canadian schools of social work to enhance the discourse on this topic, and assist them in developing their accountability, research and scholarship capacities, and outcomes in the dawn of this “new era of legitimacy.”  As the global movement afoot toward corporatization and outcomes in universities evolves, the importance of using metrics to assess social work faculty more meaningfully, looms large on the horizon for our profession. Thus, social work units should become more proactive in building their own unique research cultures to support faculty in achieving this goal.