--by Kris Twesme

Budd and Seavey based their study, covering the period of 1981 through 1992 inclusive, on the annual Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) for both journal publications and citations data. Books, columns, editorials, and book reviews were not included in any of the counts. Only full-time faculty holding the rank of assistant professor, associate professor, or professor and affiliated with an ALA-accredited program were considered in the study.

Counting a faculty's member's number of publications over a span of time and determining how frequently other writers quote or reference the faculty member's writings (citation counting) are measures that may translate, respectively, to quantity of published work produced and quality of published work produced. The aspect of quality can be particularly difficult to define, and citation counting is one tool used in the effort. When an author is frequently cited by his or her peers, it is often considered an indicator of high quality work--the author has set a particular standard or contributed significant research, analysis, or original thinking to the field.

Budd and Seavey found no statistically significant differences in publication rates by rank. The numbers of citations, however, increased with the higher ranks. They hypothesize that higher rank indicates a longer period in which to build a published, citable body of work. In considering productivity by program, there appeared to be a positive correlation between the counts of publications and citations and factors such as the relative emphasis on research and the offering of doctoral degree(s).

Budd and Seavey's rankings of IST's faculty and program are summarized below.

JOURNAL ARTICLE
Budd and Seavey included only scholarly, "substantive" journal articles (published and cited) from journals indexed by the SSCI in this study. They do not provide their criteria for defining an article as "scholarly" or "substantive." They note that the exclusive use of journal articles is likely to bias the study in favor of specialties within LIS that communicate heavily by this publication format (information science vs. library history, for example). Their choice of the SSCI would also tend to work against journals which emphasize the humanities rather than the social sciences.

CITATION
As used in this document, a citation is a reference to or quoting of a previously published article.

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