Characteristics of the Most Productive U.S. Sociology Faculty and Departments: Institution Type, Gender, and Journal Concentration

ABSTRACT

Using data for a sample of 2,132 individuals, we examine the characteristics of the sociology faculty and departments that ranked highest on any of four measures of publishing productivity over the 2013–2017 period. While the most productive men tend to work at the top research universities, women with comparable publishing records are especially likely to be found among the most productive faculty at other types of institutions. This suggests that “striving institutions” – those that have faced the greatest competition to improve their standing relative to their peers – have benefited by hiring and retaining highly productive faculty without regard to their gender. Our results further reveal that prolific faculty are similar to other faculty in their publication outlets, although they do exhibit high levels of journal concentration. That is, they tend to publish in the same journals in which they previously published.

KEYWORDS:

• Competition
• gender
• publishing
• ranking
• research
• social closure

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the comments of three anonymous referees.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Wilder and Walters (2019) provide summary information about each of the 25 studies published before 2019 (Aaltojärvi et al. 2008; Bjarnason and Sigfusdottir 2002; Collyer 2014; Cronin, Snyder, and Atkins 1997; Doering 1972; Eckberg and Marx 2004; Glenn and Villemez 1970; Hartley and Robinson 2001; Jones, Lindzey, and Coggeshall 1982; Kaba 2015; Keith and Babchuk 1994, 1998; Larson, Petrowsky, and Vandiver 1972; Leonard and Schmitt 1974; Logan 1988; Oromaner 1972, 1973, 1980; Ostriker, Kuh, and Voytuk 2011; Phelan 2000; Rau and Leonard 1990; Roche and Smith 1978; ShanghaiRanking Consultancy 2018; Smith, Roche, and Snizek 1980; Sturgis and Clemente 1973), and two more recent papers (Korom 2020; Perrucci, Perrucci, and Subramaniam 2019) can be added to the list.

2. Although it is possible to combine book and article counts based on the citedness or perceived scholarly impact of each (Clemente 1972; Nakhaie 2007; Stack 1994a; Tien 2007), we feel that books and articles differ not just in value, but in character. In particular, the distinction between “book departments” and “article departments” cannot be examined if both books and articles are represented by a single index of publishing productivity.

3. Our definition of “high-impact” may be biased, since journals in subfields such as demography and medical sociology are generally cited at higher rates than those in areas such as historical sociology and sociological theory. Moreover, the relative impact of a particular article may be significantly different from that of the journal in which it appears (Larivière et al. 2016; Lozano, Larivière, and Gingras 2012; Seglen 1994, 1997; Smith 2004).

4. The total is greater than 80 because there are more than 20 individuals in the books category, which has 26 individuals tied for 15th place, and in the HI books category, which has 6 individuals tied for 19th place.

5. Table 3 also demonstrates the insular nature of the American sociological community. The three most prominent general sociology journals published in the U.K. – the British Journal of Sociology, Sociological Review, and Sociology – all have article citation rates higher than that of Social Forces, but all three together account for just 20 papers by the 2,132 sampled faculty over the five-year study period. In this respect, sociology is dramatically different from some other social science disciplines (Walters and Wilder 2015, 2016).

6. This finding might also reflect the relatively high proportion of faculty in the most productive group at TopLA and B institutions. That higher proportion, in turn, can be attributed to the fact that for Table 5, most productive status accounts for both articles and HI articles. At research universities, the same individuals tend to appear on both the article and HI article lists, while at TopLA and B institutions the most prolific article authors are not necessarily the same as the most prolific HI article authors – so for those undergraduate institutions, the most productive authors include a higher percentage of all authors.

7. Because we used random sampling for two of the six institution types, our data include just 47% of all sociology faculty at R1 universities and just 27% of all sociology faculty at M institutions. The 22 R1 faculty on our “most productive” list therefore represent about 47 individuals nationwide, just as the 5 M faculty represent about 19 individuals nationwide.

8. O’Meara and Bloomgarden (2011) cite more than two dozen papers that support this assertion.

9. Perrucci, Perrucci, and Subramaniam (2019) use a similar argument to explain why authors from elite universities are overrepresented within four top sociology journals – but while social closure excludes “outsiders” from the pages of American Sociological Review and the ranks of Harvard faculty, it does not limit their publishing productivity in the same way.

10. Normally, the overrepresentation of female faculty at OD, TopLA, and B institutions would suggest a preference for hiring women. Given the underrepresentation of women in the TopR group, however, the overrepresentation of women elsewhere may simply reflect the fact that the best male candidates – those that would ordinarily compete with the best female candidates at the OD, TopLA, and B institutions – are instead working at the TopR universities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Esther Isabelle Wilder

Esther Isabelle Wilder, professor of sociology at Lehman College, The City University of New York, is the principal investigator for two National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded projects that aim to increase students’ quantitative reasoning skills. She is the author of Wheeling and Dealing: Living with Spinal Cord Injury and coauthor of Voices from the Heartland: The Needs and Rights of Individuals with Disabilities. Her scholarly work has appeared in more than a dozen journals including Scientometrics, Studies in Contemporary Jewry, Milbank Quarterly, Social Science Research, Teaching Sociology, The Gerontologist, and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

William H. Walters

William H. Walters is executive director of the Mary Alice & Tom O’Malley Library at Manhattan College. His interests include scholarly communication, scientometrics, library collection development, and nonprofit management. His research has appeared in nearly 40 journals including those of the Royal Geographical Society, the American Library Association, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for Information Science and Technology, the Gerontological Society of America, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the Regional Science Association International, and the International Cartographic Association.