American Social Work and Psychology Faculty Members' Scholarly Productivity: A Controlled Comparison of Citation Impact Using the h-Index

Abstract

The <it>h</it>-index is a relatively new measure of scholarly productivity, and is a simple tabulation of the number of articles (<it>h</it>) a given author has published which have been cited at least <it>h</it> times. For example, a scholar with an <it>h</it>-index of 10 has published ten articles which have been cited in subsequent articles at least ten times. The <it>h-</it>index for all social work and psychology tenured or tenure-track faculty housed in the top-25 American social work programmes as ranked by <it>U.S. News and World Report</it> in 2008 was obtained, permitting an overall comparison of the scholarly influence between members of the two cognate disciplines. This involved 950 social work faculty and 1,080 psychology faculty cited during the 2001–11 time frame. The average <it>h</it>-index for social work and psychology faculty was 6.34 (SD = 5.57) and 11.32 (SD = 8.21), respectively—a difference which was <it>not</it> significantly different. These results are an improvement over prior related research which showed social work faculty to be disadvantaged in terms of scholarly impact. These results are discussed in terms of the higher scholarly standards expected of social work academics in recent years.