Who are the Top 100 Contributors to Social Work Journal Scholarship? A Global Study on Career Impact in the Profession

Abstract

Purpose: This study identified the top 100 most impactful global contributors to social work journal scholarship. Methods: To conduct this descriptive study, we used a publicly available database of the world's leading scientists. After extracting all scholars in the social work category, we rank ordered them according to a composite measure of scholarly impact that controls for self-citations and author order. Results: All identified contributors to the profession's journals ranked highly relative to the larger global population of published scientists. Furthermore, 23 individuals were in the top 100,000 scientists globally. Scholars were based in seven different nations and most had solid social work credentials according to three measures: current affiliation in a social work program and Master of Social Work/doctoral degree status. Conclusions: The results reveal that social work is home to some of the world's leading scientists. Leveraging their skills and knowledge can help advance the profession's collective knowledge development and dissemination.

The 100 Most Impactful Global Contributors to Social Work Publications: An Update Based on 2023 Data

“…In conclusion, it may be helpful to mention some social work programs have used our previous study identifying influential contributors to highlight members of their faculty (Hodge & Turner, 2023). We believe it is appropriate to recognize the profession's most influential scholars in this manner.…”

“…Included in this update is information on scientific impact and productivity. Data in our previous study, as well as the current update, are derived from Scopus and depict contributors to social work periodicals (Hodge & Turner, 2023). As such, the table contains people who are not professional social workers based upon their degrees.…”

“…Measures of scientific impact reported in this update are based on career-long citation data through to the end of 2022 while one of the productivity measures include data from 2023. Additional information about the study methods and associated limitations is available elsewhere (Hodge & Turner, 2023; Ioannidis, 2023).…”

Co-Word Analysis of First-Authored Publications Written by Top Cited Scholars of Social Work

“…These works represent the most elemental practice and fundamental development for social work as well as serve as the intellectual base for cross-disciplinary social work research. However, scholars from disciplines other than social work have also made significant contributions to this field (Hodge & Turner, 2022). Future comparative studies should be conducted to understand the differences in the contributions of these two types of scholars across the four stages of the evolution of a scientific discipline (Shneider, 2009).…”

“…Third, 58 scholars had missing data on their education and were therefore excluded from this work. However, such exclusion may introduce a bias on part of the representative 60 scholars eventually selected in this study (Hodge & Turner, 2022). Fourth, the seven research hotspots identified in this work did not cover all themes.…”