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Departments Ranked by Journal Publications
by Barry Markovsky
The Sociology program at the University of Iowa is not unique in its constant struggles to garner scarce resources from its higher administrators. Among our approaches this academic year was to present quantitative evidence of the department's productivity. We knew from John Logan's 1988 article in The Southern Sociologist that, in the 1980's at least, Iowa Sociology ranked among the "elite" sociology programs insofar as its rate of publishing in top journals. We thought that it may be useful to update this information. With the help of two of our graduate students-Will Kalkhoff and Wes Younts-I tallied recent publications by department in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology and Social Forces. Our analysis covered the last three years worth of ASR, AJS and SF issues that were "on the shelf" as of September 15, 1999. All refereed articles were counted, including research notes, comments and rejoinders. In tallying each department's number of publications, we assigned a weight of 1.0 to each article and allocated value equally among co-authors. Thus, if an article had two authors affiliated with University A and one affiliated with University B, then A would receive a value of .67 for the article and B would receive .33. To control for the size of departments, our spreadsheet (available upon request) also included information on the number of full-time and part-time members of each department, based on the 1999 ASA Guide to Graduate Departments of Sociology. Table 1 lists the 40 highest-ranked departments in terms of the raw number of publications. The U.S. News and World Reports offers an alternative ranking based on a 1997 reputation survey, and these ranks are shown in the right-most column of the Table. (The full report is at www.usnews.com.) Table 2 includes the number of full-time faculty and shows the calculated rates of publications per faculty. Table 3 further includes part-time and emeritus faculty in calculating rates, the rationale being that their publications are credited to their respective departments and so they should be included in the faculty counts. There is a moderate correlation (r = .55) between the two rankings in Table 1. However, the correspondence between publication ranks and the U.S. News reputation ranks is considerably weaker with Table 2 (r = .29) and Table 3 (r = .24). It is not surprising that Table 1 correlates most strongly with reputations because these data reflect the departments' scholarly impact via the top journals. In contrast, Tables 2 and 3 more closely reflect the scholarly impact of the typical faculty member from each department-a property that we would expect to correspond somewhat with department reputations, but not necessarily very well. Granted that many other factors are involved, but the reputation of some highly-efficient departments such as Iowa and Vanderbilt probably suffer due to their smallness, while larger sizes may help to account for the higher reputations of some of the larger but less-efficient departments. Whatever the actual forces at play, we thought that others may be interested in this analysis. q Table 1: Total ASR, AJS and SF Articles by Department, with 1997 U.S. News & World Reports Rankings
Table 2: Controlling for Number of Full-Time Faculty
Table 3: Controlling for No. of Full- time + part-time Faculty
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