NCJ Number
169382
Journal
Journal of Crime and Justice Volume: 20 Issue: 2 Dated: (1997) Pages: 179-186
Date Published
1997
Length
8 pages
Annotation
The use of counts of citations in criminology textbooks as measures of the cited scholars' intellectual influence is questioned, based on an analysis of literature in the sociology of science.
Abstract
Wright and Soma recently published an article in the Journal of Crime and Justice that used citation counts as measures of the scholars' influence. Other authors, including the author of this article, have also used citations for this purpose. However, using citations as a measure of intellectual influence involves general problems, and using textbook citations for that purpose involves specific problems. Types of citations believed to contribute to the overcounting of intellectual influence include citations that are token or otherwise unnecessary, those that are based only on friendship with the citee, tangential references, negative citations, and references used only as persuasion. Factors thought to produce undercounting of intellectual influence include obliteration by incorporation, unconscious plagiarism, failure to cite the cognitive conduit, and failure to award students and juvenile colleagues authorship credit. These problems may be more acute with the use of social science textbook citations as the data source. All the sources of overcitation and undercitation combine to produce nonrandom errors of unknown direction and sometimes great magnitude. Further research seems unnecessary due to the inestimable counting biases, the reality that persons familiar with the field already know who the most important scholars are, and citation analyses' lack of surprises for important scholars. Notes and 27 references (Author abstract modified)