Scholarly Productivity of Social Work Faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Are h-Index Scores a Suitable Measure?

Faculty Members’ Scholarly Learning Across Institutional Types

“…The scholarship of engagement is also considered an important and relevant form of scholarship for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) given their mission and past commitments (Lowe, ; Marshall et al., ; Sydnor, Hawkins, & Edwards, ). According to Lowe () “for HBCU faculty members engaged in scholarship, much of it follows a historical tradition of being public—responding to problems and opportunities in their respective communities through such forms as direct service, technical assistance and the dissemination of reports” (p. 551).…”

Citation Impact Factors Among Faculty in Canadian Social Work Programs

“…Other studies using such bibliometric data have mentioned one consistent limitation of the h- factor—as being used as a sole determinant of one’s academic scholarship performance (Holosko & Barner, 2014; LaCasse et al, 2011; Marshall et al, 2016). We therefore included the companion g- statistic which gives more weight to the most highly cited publications (Alonso, Cabrerizo, Herrera-Viedma, & Herrera, 2010) and is defined as a set of papers has a g -index, if g is the highest rank such that the top g papers have, together, at least g 2 citations, which also means that the top g + 1 papers have less than ( g + 1) 2 (Egghe, 2006, p. 132).…”

“…Their findings identified a number of gender-specific factors related to long-standing systemic and structural variables that served as formidable challenges for these women to achieve publication, both within their own schools and collaborating across various institutions. Finally here, Marshall et al (2016) studied the h- index scores for faculty members at Historically Black Colleges and Universities doctoral granting institutions of social work in the United States. Their conclusion was that the h- index was not a good measure to use to evaluate their productivity or scholarship overall, as it was a singular and rather delimiting biometric.…”

High-Impact Social Work Scholars

“…This free software program retrieves and analyzes academic citations using Google Scholar as the data source. This program has been used to conduct citation analysis in a number of disciplines (Ashkanasy, 2007;Franceschet, 2010;Keloharju, 2008;Mingers, 2009;Moussa & Touzani, 2010;Vanclay, 2008), including social work (Barner et al, 2014;Hodge & Lacasse, 2011b;Lacasse et al, 2011;Marshall Jr. et al, 2016). RG scores were obtained from the fellow's RG profile.…”

“…To be clear, other facets of professional discourse are also important (Marshall Jr. et al, 2016). Faculty contribute to social work discourse in many unique and important ways (Lacasse, Hodge, & Bean, 2011).…”