Citation Classics in Social Policy Journals

Abstract

This article is the first to explore the concept of 'Citation classics' in social policy by examining the articles published in five leading social policy journals that have 50 or more Web of Science (WoS) citations. It introduces the concept of citation analysis; discusses 'citation classics' in terms of definitions, measures, journals and databases; examines the literature on other social sciences, and particularly social work; and then focuses on the empirical material of citation classics in social policy journals. It finds 79 articles with 50 or more citations. Over half of the articles were written by authors based in the UK at the time of publication, with most of the others from the rest of Europe. About two-thirds were classified as 'conceptual', and about a quarter were quantitative. Surprisingly few were qualitative or reviews. Roughly one-third of articles were mainly focused on a particular service area, with the leading areas being employment, health, social care/community care or long-term care. For the setting or focus of the study, nearly two-thirds were comparative, while about a quarter were based on the UK. The leading topic was welfare regimes (14 articles). The limitations to this analysis include focusing on five social policy journals, and ignoring other outputs such as books; and the problem of determining what influence these articles have on the field of social policy. However, exploring the neglected area of citation classics in social policy provides one way of determining intellectual significance within the discipline.

Social Policy's ‘Greatest Hits’

“…A 'citation classic' refers to highly cited papers in a scientific discipline, which are regarded as the 'gold bullion of science' (Martınez et al 2014). There are a wide range of approaches to selecting citation classics, with differences in terms of definitions, measures and databases (see Powell 2016). There are two approaches to definition: setting the threshold values on the citations received (e.g.…”

“…Citation classics have been examined in many research fields (see e.g. Hodge et al 2012;Martinez et al 2014Martinez et al , 2015a, but only rarely in Social Policy (Powell 2016;Spicker 2016). Spicker (2016) aimed to discover the most cited works in Social Policy.…”

“…However, he admitted that the dividing lines are difficult, and that there were some 'marginal calls'. (Powell 2016) found 79 articles with over 50 WoS citations in the period of the journals' inclusion in the database. Of these, 31 appeared in Journal of Social Policy, 24 in Journal of European Social Policy, 14 in Social Policy & Administration, eight in Critical Social Policy and two in International Journal of Social Welfare, with the most cited article being Macintyre et al's (1993) review of area and health with 523 ISI and 968 GS citations.…”

“…The 'age of metrics' (Baneyx 2008) or 'the metric tide' (Wilsdon et al 2015) in the form of bibliometrics has largely by-passed Social Policy (but see Powell 2016;Spicker 2016). It has been argued that bibliometrics is a potentially valid, although imperfect, indicator of the impact of a scientist, organization, country or journal (Holden et al 2005a(Holden et al , 2010Martınez et al 2015a) that is increasingly valued as a tool for assessing scholarly quality and productivity (Martınez et al 2015a).…”

“…Bornmann and Daniel 2008;Holden et al 2005b;Leydesdorff 2008;Meho 2007;Wilsdon et al 2015), and tends to be used more in the USA and within science disciplines, with its value in social sciences less certain (Ouimet et al 2011;Archambault and Larivière 2010). (Powell 2016) was the first to explore the concept of 'Citation classics' in Social Policy by examining the articles published in five leading Social Policy journals that have 50 or more Web of Science (WoS) citations. However, there are some problems in determining the extent to which these articles are 'Social Policy citation classics'.…”