The Young Scholars from the “Hit Parade”: Where Are They Now?

Abstract

The current study provides an updated analysis of the scholars who were originally identified as the top young scholars as Assistant Professors identified in earlier literature. Specifically, analysis in this study considers the publication productivity of these scholars over their entire academic career in general and by incorporating five more years of publication productivity data since the original identification and analysis of this cohort. Results from a series of publication productivity metrics including total publications, total citations, h index, and i10 index (and standardized versions of these metrics) reveal that Wesley Jennings is the number one ranked scholar in the original and updated analysis and that Allison Redlich, Abigail Fagan, Christopher Sullivan, and Chris Gibson round out the top five scholars. Study limitations and implications are also discussed.

Notes

¹ Given the volume of existing literature on the topic, it should not be a surprise that comprehensive reviews of this literature already exist, with Cohn, Farrington, and Iratzoqui’s (2014) Springer Brief being the most comprehensive and recent as of this writing. It should be noted that Rice and his colleagues have previously explored studies of top CCJ scholars, including a follow-up study to determine if top performers continued their successes. The focus of the current study is not to review these previous studies, but to continue the efforts of Copes and his colleagues of examining productivity by academic rank. Readers are encouraged to review previous efforts in scholarly productivity for broader contextualization.

² Benjamin Steiner did not have an active or available Google Scholar Citation account/profile, and as such was not able to be included in the analysis in the current study.

³ To replicate this method, simply go to http://scholar.google.com, search by author name, and find an article the author has published. His or her name should be hyperlinked below the title of the article with his or her co-authors, if applicable. Click on his or her name and you should find the author’s profile. This profile includes a publication count, h-index, i-10 index, and citation count. At this time, users have to manually check publication listings to determine accuracy.

⁴ See: https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/about.html for more information.

⁵ Google Scholar lists the following example calculation: “For example, a publication with five articles cited by, respectively, 17, 9, 6, 3, and 2, has the h-index of 3.”