Purpose: This review demonstrates how to position Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) papers reasonably in order to promote the reform and development of the system for evaluating social sciences research (E-SSR) in China. Design/Approach/Methods: This review examines the contributions made by SSCI papers after such papers became a tool in the…

With limited campus resources for faculty scholarship, the College of Science (CoS) at San José State University (SJSU) developed scholarly output metrics as a way to add a quantitative component to the distribution of funds, to ensure objectivity, and to reward proven researchers. To support CoS's efforts to identify and quantify science faculty…

Long historical trends in scientific discovery led mid-20th century scientometricians to mark the advent of "big science"--extensive science production--and predicted that over the next few decades, the exponential growth would slow, resulting in lower rates of increase in production at the upper limit of a logistic curve. They were…

Many research libraries are looking for new ways to demonstrate value for their parent institutions. Metrics, assessment, and promotion of research continue to grow in importance, but they have not always fallen into the scope of services for the research library. Montana State University (MSU) Library recognized a need and interest to quantify…

The objective of this current study is to identify the growth and development of scholarly literature that specifically references the term "school psychology" in the Science Citation Index from 1907 through 2014. Documents from Web of Science were accessed and analyzed through the use of scientometric analyses, including HistCite and…

Faculty scholarship at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) has in the past served as a blueprint for the Black masses. Even today, HBCU faculty scholarship continues to be an informative source to communicate accurate information regarding marginalized groups. This study examines h-index scores of 65 faculty members at five…

Citation is a highly valued practice in the academic community. This mechanism supports an author's ideas, theories, and research; it acknowledges the scholarly contributions of others; and integrates academic works to enrich scholarly communication. Well-constructed citations, in addition to providing the appropriate bibliographic information…

Ruscio et al. (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) have provided an impressively comprehensive conceptual and empirical psychometric analysis of 22 modern-day citation measures. Their analyses show that although numerous measures have been developed to ameliorate perceived limitations of Hirsch's (2005) "h" index (which is…

Scholarly impact is studied frequently and used to make consequential decisions (e.g., hiring, tenure, promotion, research support, professional honors), and therefore it is important to measure it accurately. Developments in information technology and statistical methods provide promising new metrics to complement traditional information sources…

Ruscio and colleagues (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) have done a great service by systematically comparing indices of scholarly impact. Three aspects of their work are particularly valuable: (1) Their assessment of the proliferating collection of metrics, whose development has become something of a cottage industry,…

Athletic training faculty seeking tenure and promotion, or simply undergoing an annual merit review, may need an understanding of the impact of their scholarly work. To that end, citation counts are frequently used as a measure of impact that a journal article has had in a given discipline. As compared to the simple quantity of publications, the…

Limited time and budgets have created a legitimate need for quantitative measures of scholarly work. The well-known journal impact factor is the leading measure of this sort; here we describe an alternative approach based on the full structure of the scholarly citation network. The Eigenfactor Metrics--Eigenfactor Score and Article Influence…

There has been debate about the extent to which open access affects the quality of scholarly work. At the same time, researchers have begun to look for ways to evaluate the quality of open access publications. Dating back to the growth of citation indexes during the 1960s and 1970s, citation analysis--examining citation statistics--has since been…

Ruscio and colleagues (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) provide a thoughtful empirical analysis of 22 different measures of individual scholarly impact. The simplest metric is number of publications, which Simonton (1997) found to be a reasonable predictor of career trajectories. Although the assessment of the scholarly…

Ruscio et al. (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) write of a thing with which scientists and scholars are all too familiar, the assessment of published research and of its authors. The author was startled to discover how little the agenda of the paper seems to engage with factors one relies on for salary and promotion…