Evidence Summary


 


Publication Numbers are Increasing at American Research Universities


 


A Review of:


Budd, J. (2017). Faculty publications and citations: a
longitudinal examination. College &
Research Libraries, 78(1), 80–89. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.78.1.80


  


Reviewed by:


Jennifer Kaari


Librarian


East Orange Public Library


East Orange, New Jersey, United States of America


jkaari@eopl.org


 


Received: 7 Sept. 2019                                                               Accepted:  31 Oct. 2019


 


 


 2019 Kaari. This
is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons‐Attribution‐Noncommercial‐Share Alike License 4.0
International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/),
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly attributed, not used for commercial
purposes, and, if transformed, the resulting work is redistributed under the
same or similar license to this one.




 


 


DOI: 10.18438/eblip29647


 





 


Abstract


 


Objective – To
study the publishing output and citation activity of faculty at research
universities.


 


Design – Bibliometric and citation
analysis.


 


Setting –
Academic citation databases.


 


Subjects –
Institutions in the United States that are members of the Association of
Research Libraries (ARL).


 


Methods –
This study builds on three previous studies conducted by the author looking at
faculty publication productivity, which were conducted for three different time
periods beginning in 1991. For the present study, the author searched Scopus by
institution to collect the total number of publications and citations for the
faculty of more than 100 Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member
universities, covering the years 2011 to 2013. The author acquired the total
number of faculty at each institution from the ARL website. The faculty number
from the ARL website and publication and citation data from Scopus were used to
calculate the per capita publication and citation numbers for each institution.
The author calculated the total mean number of publications and the mean number
of per capita publications per university. Chi tests were used to compare the
means for statistical significance. 


 


Main Results –
The number of both total and per capita publications for each institution went
up over the course of all three studies. The mean number of total publications
per university for 1991 to 1993, the first time period studied, was 4,595.8;
for the time period of the current study, 2011 to 2013, the mean was 9,662.0.
For per capita publications, the mean for 1991 to 1993 was 3.56 and the mean
for the present study was 5.96. Based on chi-square tests, the results were found
to be statistically significant.


 


Conclusions – The
study found that the number of total publications increased significantly over
time, exceeding the author’s statistical expectations based on previous work. 


 


Commentary


 


The adage “publish or perish”
points to the well-known pressure academics face to publish in the scholarly
literature to receive tenure or promotion. This environment can lead to the
perception that scholars are emphasizing quantity over quality in their
publication output (Fanelli & Larivière, 2012).
Examining the total number of scholarly publications overtime can provide
valuable insights into the validity of these perceptions. Many studies looking
at scholarly productivity focus on an individual discipline (Walters, 2016;
Griffin, Bolkan, & Dahlbach,
2017; Ford, Richman, Mayes, Pagel, & Bartels,
2019). By looking at total publication numbers across disciplines and
institutions, this study provides a valuable, high-level look at the wider
field of scholarly publications.


 


When
assessed using Glynn’s critical appraisal tool for library and information
research, this study has an 86% validity rating (2006). A major strength of the
study is that it builds on years of previous studies conducted by the author.
The statistical analysis is well-described, and the tables provided present the
results clearly. However, the author presents the publication numbers for only
the top twenty institutions; future researchers would benefit from having
access to all of the data for all the universities analyzed for the study.


 


A
potential limitation of this study did emerge while examining the study
methodology. The author presents this study as an examination of faculty
publications and citations, but it is unclear how faculty and non-faculty
publications and citations were differentiated in the data collection process.
If Scopus has a functionality that allows for filtering between faculty and
non-faculty publications, this should have been mentioned in the study text. If
there was no differentiation, this is a serious limitation regarding how useful
this data is in considering faculty productivity specifically. The data would
still be useful as a look at the publication output and citation numbers for
the institution as a whole but not when it comes to examining faculty output
specifically.


 


This
study is more informative than it is a basis for actionable practice for
librarians. It would be of interest to analyze these results in the context of
other studies on scholarly productivity that use different methods or are
discipline specific to determine how strong the evidence is for a substantial
increase in scholarly productivity over time. The results of the study also
provide a foundation for potential future research as noted by the author,
including further exploring the relationship between increasing publication
numbers and institutional pressures, how publication quantity relates to
quality, and the value of citation metrics as evaluation criteria, all of which
are vital issues for academic librarians. 


 


References


 


Griffin, D., Bolka, S., & Dahlbach, B.J.
(2018). Scholarly productivity in communication studies: Five-year review
2012-2016. Communication Education, 67(1), 88–101. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2017.1385820


 


Fanelli
D., & Larivière V. (2016). Researchers’
individual publication rate has not increased in a century. PLOS ONE 11(3): e0149504. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0149504


 


Ford, D. K., Richman,
A., Mayes, L. M., Pagel, P. S., & Bartels, K.
(2019). Progressive increase in scholarly productivity of new American Board of
Anesthesiology diplomates from 2006 to 2016: A bibliometric analysis. Anesthesia & Analgesia, 128(4), 796–801. https://doi.org/10.1213/ane.0000000000003926


 


Glynn,
L. (2006). A critical appraisal tool for library and information research. Library Hi Tech, 24(3), 387–399. https://doi.org/10.1108/07378830610692154


 


Walters,
W. H. (2016). The faculty subculture, the librarian subculture, and librarians’
scholarly productivity. portal: Libraries
and the Academy, 16(4), 817–843. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2016.0054