Measuring the Quality of Peer-Reviewed Publications in Social Work: Impact Factors—Liberation or Liability?

Abstract

Systems for measuring the quality of publications in peer-reviewed academic journals have achieved importance in the ‘audit culture’ to which academia worldwide has become increasingly subjected. In the United Kingdom this debate has focused on government proposals to give greater emphasis to bibliometrics (counts of journal articles and their citations) as a measurement of research quality, in respect of publications in the emergent Research Excellence Framework (REF) which is set to replace the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). This approach impacts on social work educators who are the main producers of papers published in peer-reviewed academic journals. It affects their publishing behaviour by pressurising them to publish their work in journals that are regarded as being prestigious, for which ‘high impact factor’ journals as determined by Thomson Reuters—a private commercial information management enterprise with headquarters in the United States—has become a proxy for quality. In this paper the authors describe and critique the Thomson Reuters system as it applies to social work and propose an alternate fair, inclusive and transparent system for assessing the quality of publications based on peer evaluation and incorporating an ethical approach consistent with the discipline's professional values.

Keywords:

• Knowledge
• Knowledge Transfer
• Profession
• International
• Research

Notes

^[1] For details see: http://www.thomsonreuters.com/about/.

^[2] In the 1930s, S. C. Bradford claimed that, for any given discipline, the bulk of significant papers were published in a very small number of ‘core’ journals (Bradford, 1934).

^[3] The Thomson Reuters website claims that ‘editors performing journal evaluations have educational backgrounds relevant to their areas of responsibility as well as experience and education in information science’. It is not clear if the social work credentials of staff dealing with social work include professional qualification or education within the discipline (Testa, n.d.).

^[4] The system is still variously described as the Institute of Scientific Information Citation Indices, ISI Citation Indices or the Web of Science database.

^[5] According to the scope notes for the social work category: Social Work covers resources concerned with homelessness, social casework, social services, social work education, public welfare, family counselling, child welfare and abuse, social work administration, social work with groups, and gerontological social work (http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/scope/scope_ssci/). This is self-evidently a restricted definition of the discipline that will, of necessity, narrow the range of journals considered eligible for designation as ‘social work’ journals.