Assessing Influence on the Field: An Analysis of Citations to Educational Administration Quarterly, 1979—2003

Abstract

Study Purpose: This article examines the influence of Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ) on the scholarly literature in education during the 25-year period 1979 to 2003. This article continues part of the first critique of EAQ conducted by Roald Campbell in 1979. Study Methods: Two citation measures are used in this study to assess EAQ influence: (a) citation frequency, the total citations counts to EAQ articles found in the Web of Science database and (b) the impact factor, a ratio of citations to articles published that is calculated as part of the Journal Citation Reports . Study Findings: The findings point to three conclusions: (a) EAQ's substantive, ongoing influence on the scholarly education literature is limited to a small percentage of its published articles, which are cited predominantly by subsequent articles in EAQ; (b) this level of influence, though perhaps not the form, appears to be generally comparable to the level of other scholarly education journals with a solid academic reputation; and (c) EAQ appears to be statistically among the top tier of influential scholarly journals in education, but below the most influential. Overall, EAQ's influence on the scholarly education literature has improved since the first critique published in 1979.

Automated Text Data Mining Analysis of Five Decades of Educational Leadership Research Literature

“…The journal Educational Administration Quarterly was chosen because it has been consistently considered as the most prestigious journal in educational leadership research (Campbell, 1979;Cherkowski et al, 2011;Haas et al, 2007;Murphy et al, 2007;Richardson & McLeod, 2009;Wang & Bowers, 2016). Below, we present in detail how we applied topic modeling to all articles published in EAQ from 1965 to 2014.…”

“…In response to Hallinger's (2014) call for the improvement in the methodology of conducting systematic reviews of research in education leadership, in this study we build on recent innovations in the field of automated text data mining and machine learning to apply probabilistic topic modeling-a suite of automated text mining algorithms that computationally detect latent topic structures from a corpus of documents such as journal articles-to investigate the nature of topics in the educational leadership research literature. As Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ) has been consistently regarded as the most prestigious research journal in the field (Campbell, 1979;Cherkowski, Currie, & Hilton, 2011;Haas et al, 2007;Murphy et al, 2007;Richardson & McLeod, 2009;Wang & Bowers, 2016), we use probabilistic topic modeling to empirically derive the latent topics discussed by the research literature across the entire history of EAQ starting with Volume 1, Issue 1, in 1965 up through Volume 50, Issue 5, in 2014, as a means to build on the past work of narrative reviews (e.g., Campbell, 1979;Haller, 1968;Murphy et al, 2007). We specifically seek to answer two research questions:…”

A Bibliometric Snapshot ofThe Journal of Higher Educationand Its Impact on the Field

“…Some researchers study groupings of journals (Bayer 1983, 104;Budd 1990, 85;Hutchinson and Lovell 2004, 386;Silverman 1985, 154;Smart 1983, 176-77;Tight 2006, 43;Tight 2007, 236;Tight 2008, 596), others study one particular journal in depth (Haas et al 2007;Johns and Shonrock 2007;McBride 2006;Poling 2008;Rekha & Parameswaran 2002;Volkwein, Carbone, and Volkwein 1988, 272). Of these, some looked at the entire history of a journal or look at a selected time frame; they used each article or took a sampling of articles.…”

Mapping the field of educational administration research: a journal citation network analysis

“…Haas and his colleagues (Haas et al, 2007) continued part of Campbell's study (1979) by examining EAQ article citation patterns to gauge EAQ's influence on education literature from 1979 to 2003. Overall, EAQ had "a broad, but mostly shallow, influence" (Haas et al, 2007, p. 500) A recent citation study in the educational administration field was conducted by Richardson and McLeod (2011).…”

“…Moving beyond the sole dependence on citation frequency counts (Campbell, 1979;Haas et al, 2007;Murphy et al, 2007;Richardson and McLeod, 2011) or on surveys of perceptions of journal prominence in the field (Campbell, 1979;Cherkowaski et al, 2011), here we rely on the results of social network analysis to provide evidence for the first time in the field on not only the rank order of the most prominent journals, but also the highly interdisciplinary journals because of the critical role of interdisciplinarity in knowledge creation (Zitt, 2005). Figure 3a The educational administration journal citation network (threshold: tie strength ≥ 50).…”