‘Mass Communication Scholars’ Revisited and Revised

Abstract

Schweitzer's article in the summer, 1988, issue of Journalism Quarterly provides two major pieces of information.1 First, he identifies mass communication research productivity at an institutional level, and second, he creates a listing of the 50 most published names. Both of these are derived from a set of nine key communication journals for the period 1980-1985. In doing so, he adheres to one previously-used method of quantifying publication rate-assigning partial credit to institutions and to individuals for multiply-authored works, modeling Bowers and Cole, among others.2 Acknowledged is the absence of any qualitative measures of these works, or of book publication, monographs, research reports, other prestigious academic journals, etc.; it is a one-measure assessment. This kind of information is widely used for internal and external purposes by institutions which find themselves highly rated. It is used to recruit students and faculty, to impress central administration at budget hearings, and to seek external funding. Since it is one of the rare studies in which individual researchers are named, it would not be surprising if those who found themselves highly placed were to use that as leverage for enhancing their current position or seeking another. The question raised here is the merit and need for the arduous and error-prone task of dividing up credit among two or more authors. At face value, it is more tedious to calculate and allocate partial credits of .2, .25, .33, .5, etc. than to assign each name one unit of credit each time it appears in an authorship role. Empirically it is more prone to error.3 Furthermore, it can be argued that articles which have a team of authors are likely to originate from larger projects with larger data sets, or from longtime projects in which several persons have become involved, or from cross-cultural projects involving initial collaboration across international boundaries, or from institutions with Ph.D. programs where the doctoral students form a vital part of the research enterprise. All these origins might qualify the separate or interdependent contributions of several authors for full credit. The original article also pointed out that multiple authorship was inversely related to rank which suggests more senior faculty may serve more often as 'mentors' to junior faculty and graduate students. More basically, does the process of allocating partial credit make a difference in the final reporting of outcomes? To answer this, Schweitzer provided the raw number of citations found for each institution and each individual identified in his originally published tables and as corrected since his original article was published.4 Rank order correlations between his original listings and the new information received were computed.5 Results. Table 1 yields a correlation of .80 between the author credit measure used by Schweitzer and the total number of citations attributed to each institution. Nine of the top 10 schools originally identified remain in the top 10, although most of them are in a new position. The original first-place equivalence between Wisconsin and Michigan State is quite different when total citations are presented-Wisconsin articles averaged 1.67 authors/article and MSU averaged 2.47. Similarly, the largest gains in rank are found for those institutions where research partners or teams were operative-Central Florida to 9th (1. …