The relationship between publication frequency, citation frequency, and judgments of enduring worth in counseling psychology.

摘要

Research literature concerning scholarly productivity and impact in the field of counseling psychology was reviewed. The present study investigated whether or not easily obtainable measures such as publication counts from PsycLIT (i.e., productivity) and citation counts from Social Sciences Citation Index (i.e., impact) produce valid estimates of the enduring scientific worth of the work of highly published academic counseling psychologists. To do so, a measure of enduring scientific worth was devised which was both more precise and more labor intensive than either publication or citation counts.; The recent scholarly work of 199 academic counseling psychologists was evaluated by 23 expert judges in the field, resulting in an enduring worth score (dependent variable) for each subject. Four independent variables were employed, representing each subject's publication count, citation count, professional age, and sex. Initially, the plan was to regress the enduring worth scores on the four independent variables to determine which of them, alone or in combination, would best predict enduring worth. However, preliminary analyses showed that sex was not significantly correlated with enduring worth scores; thus it was not included in the regression analyses.; Using multiple regression analysis, it was shown that approximately one-sixth of the total variance in predicting enduring worth was accounted for by a combination of citation count and professional age; publication count did not contribute significantly to variance when citation count was included in the equation. To determine whether differences existed for professionally younger subjects versus professionally older subjects, the data were reanalyzed for these two subsets. Within both subsets, citation count alone accounted for a significant proportion of the total variance; professional age dropped out of the equation due to attenuated range.; It is concluded that citation counts do account for more of the variance in predicting enduring worth than do publication counts. However, the proportion of total variance for which they account is still relatively small. Therefore, when enduring worth is the construct of interest in the measurement of scholarly impact, then expert judgments of enduring worth should be used--in spite of the highly labor intensive nature of collecting such judgments.