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264 14 Does Editing Core Anthropology and Sociology Journals Increase Citations to the Editor? Over the course of the twentieth century, formal citations of others’ work has become more common in social sciences, including anthropology. Franz Boas and his early students cited others’ work rarely in comparison to the numerous citations in a current anthropology journal article. Prominent sociologists such as Robert Park, also German-trained, cited more work than Boas and the Boasians, but Columbia sociologist Frank Giddings did not do so more notably than his Columbia colleague Boas. Academic administrators (who are often not members of the discipline ) increasingly look at quantitative measures of the impact of faculty members’ publications—even though there are many motivations for citing a publication other than (or in addition to) recognizing the importance and quality of work that is cited. For the quality—or at least the importance—of work, frequency of citation of published work is increasingly used in evaluating faculty research production. Not only those seeking tenure or merit pay increases are interested in being cited. Most of us like our work to be recognized. We would prefer that it be cited with approval by someone who seems to understand what we have done, but as Mae West said, it is better to be looked over (critically) than to be overlooked. Generally, grudging and ambivalent recognition seems better than invisibility. Indeed, in more a third of a century of observing anthropologists, sociologists, and linguists, I have yet to encounter anyone who thought his or her work was too well appreciated or too often discussed. An extreme example is Noam Chomsky , one of the most cited authors on the planet, who claimed that hardly anyone has ever been interested in his ideas. Over the years I have heard various social scientists comment that this or that editor seemed to be getting cited in the journal she or he edited suspiciously often. From what I know of the amount of work that Does Editing Increase Citations to the Editor? 265 editing a journal requires, undertaking it strikes me as a very labor-intensive and not economically rational way of gaining recognition for one’s research. Surely, doing interesting research is a better and more efficient road to citation, and I find it impossible to believe that increasing citations is even a secondary motivation for anyone deciding to edit a journal. In my personal, extensive experience of the review process, I have never received even indirect pressure to mention or take account of any work by the editor of the journal to which I have submitted a paper. In contrast, I have more than a few times received suggestions amounting to demands from referees to discuss their work, even their unpublished work that I could not reasonably be expected to know of. In more than a few instances I have not seen the relevance of the work in obscure or prenatal locations pointedly called to my attention by someone making decisions about publishing mine. (More generally, see Scollon 1995.) More plausible to me than editors coercing citations to their work is that those who are working in areas (both geographical and specialty areas) close to those in which the editor has worked might expect a more hospitable reception and handling of their work in the journal than when an editor with quite different interests is in charge. For general-interest American sociology journals during the 1970s and 1980s, Richard Wright (1994a, 1994b) found a statistically insignificant decrease in work within the journal editor’s primary research specialty and a statistically insignificant increase in citations to work by the editor both in the journal he or she edited and in the two other core sociology journals. For the American Anthropologist and the American Ethnologist, citations in the journal that they edited fell during the editor’s tenure for slightly more than half the editors, in comparison with rates in the three years preceding their editorship. At the same time, total citations (in the Social Sciences Citation Index [SSCI]) of American Anthropologist editors have increased and those of American Ethnologist editors have remained more or less constant. (The replacement of the printed SSCI with its online incarnation would have made extending this analysis very cumbersome .) In the official journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI before and after being titled Man), citations to only two of its ten editors between 1965 and 2001 increased during the editor’s tenure; the total citations of nine of...

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