An Evaluation of the Scholarly Productivity of Doctoral Graduates

Abstract

Scholarly publication is becoming increasingly important in social work. Not only does publication reflect the knowledge development effort of the profession, but it apparently positively affects the careers of the authors. In the current study, the authors evaluated the scholarly productivity of 284 randomly selected doctoral graduates from 30 social work programs. The authors accumulated and aggregated for each program counts of publications appearing in the Source Index of the Social Sciences Citation Index.Findings indicated that the level of article productivity among doctoral graduates was normative. In addition, the productivity of doctoral program faculty was found to be related to the productivity of the program’s doctoral graduates. The authors suggest that perhaps productive faculty provide positive role models to their students; this mentoring relationship contributes to graduate productivity outcomes.