Nosek et al., 2010, Cumulative and career-stage citation impact of social-personality psychology programs and their members
Nosek, B. A., Graham, J., Lindner, N. M., Kesebir, S., Hawkins, C. B., Hahn, C., Schmidt, K., Motyl, M., Joy-Gaba, J . A., Frazier, R., & Tenney, E. R. (2010). Cumulative and career-stage impact of social-personality psychology programs and their members. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36, 1283-1300. [Request paper]
The number of times an article or person is cited and the h-index (Hirsch, 2005) are popular metrics for indexing scientific impact. These, and other existing metrics, are strongly related to scientists’ seniority. We introduce complementary indicators that are unrelated to the number of years since PhD. To illustrate cumulative and career-stage approaches for assessing the scientific impact across a discipline, we amassed and analyzed citations for 611 scientists from 97 U.S. and Canadian social psychology programs. Results provide benchmarks for evaluating impact across the career span in psychology, and other disciplines with similar citation patterns. Career-stage indicators provide a very different perspective on individual and program impact than cumulative impact, and may predict emerging scientists and programs. Comparing social groups, Whites and men had higher impact than non-Whites and women respectively. However, average differences in career stage accounted for most of the difference for both groups.
Citation impact calculator: Use the citation impact calculator to update scientists from the sample, or compare others who were not in the original sample.
Who is in a social-personality program? Considerations on defining inclusion criteria and the list of institutions and researchers included in the analyses for this article
Conducting citation searches with Publish or Perish: Supplement describing the search process - assorted instructions and tips (for an excellent discussion, visit the Publish or Perish site).
Highly-cited scientists and social-personality programs: Reproduction of the article appendices showing top 10% of the sample for cumulative and career-stage impact, and the top 50% of programs on cumulative and career-stage impact (all in standardized scores).
[Note: It is easy to forget that these rankings are not definitive or comprehensive. The ranking derive from the data collection and analyses conducted in Nosek et al.'s citation analysis article. Here are some considerations for interpreting the results: (1) the dataset included 97 social psychology programs and 611 members of those programs, faculty had to be tenured or tenure-track and not emeritus or retired (i.e., there are other contributors to social psychology that are not included), (2) the authors generated lists of primary area faculty and then emailed a member of each department for confirmation or revision, (3) the data comprise a snapshot in time - as soon as a faculty member leaves or joins a program, the department-level estimates change, possibly dramatically, (4) people who are not ordinarily be thought of as a "social pscyhologist" could be in the sample because of our inclusion criteria (core affiliation with the social-personality program), (5) individual scores are more prone to errant data if Google Scholar missed an important article, double counted citations, etc. (i.e., if you are interested in someone in particular, you should reanalyze their citation impact with Publish or Perish), and (6) many of the scores are very similar suggesting that even slight unreliability in measurement could alter the relative rankings.]
Highly-cited articles with at least one author from the present sample of scientists: Articles cited at least 1500 times as of August 2009.
Formulas for calculating cumulative and career-stage citation impact indices to compare new searches with results in the article.
Reproduction of Figure 1. Total citations for individual scientists by years since PhD.
Notes: Thicker line is estimated regression line calculated with log(total citations) and converted back to raw units. Thinner line is estimates of +/- 1 SD of residuals around the log(total citations) regression line, such that approximately 68% of scientists are estimated to have total citation counts between those lines.
Reproduction of Figure 2. Total citations for individual scientists with 10 or fewer years since PhD.
Notes: Regression lines are estimates from entire sample. Thicker line is estimated regression line calculated with log(total citations) and converted back to raw units. Thinner line is estimates of +/- 1 SD of residuals around the log(total citations) regression line, such that approximately 68% of scientists are estimated to have total citation counts between those lines.
Figure 3. h-index for individual scientists by years since PhD.
Notes: Thicker line is estimated regression line calculated with log(h) and converted back to raw units. Thinner line is estimates of +/- 1 SD of residuals around the log(h) regression line, such that approximately 68% of scientists are estimated to have h values between those lines.
Figure 4. Plot of career-stage impact (Dcs) by cumulative impact (Dcumulative) across 97 social-personality programs
SAS Script of data analyses conducted for the article.
Brian Nosek's Website