How to Use Citation Analysis for Faculty Evaluations, and When Is It Relevant? Part 1

Number 44. Every year, in hundreds of universities and colleges throughout the world, thousands of academic administrators go through the painful process of evaluating tens of thousands of candidates for promotion. In most cases, their decisions are based on a faculty committee's appraisal of the candidate's teaching ability, research performance, and involvement in the scholarly community. Although this process has been used to evaluate and promote faculty for some 80 years, 1 many people now challenge the validity of this system. Some authors claim that personality and research biases play too great a role in faculty peer reviews.z Much the same is said about peer review in connection with research funding. s Others find the faculty review process somewhat capricious. Douglas Need-ham, Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, claims that the subjective nature of faculty evaluation often results in the use of inconsistent criteria to evaluate different individuals.q Presumably, it's only fair that all candidates in a department be judged by consistent criteria-at least for the same position. The economic and social significance of these evaluations should not be underestimated. Tenure, for example, involves a substantial investment for the university. By granting tenure, a university commits itself to one million dollars or more over the life of a career.z In effect , a well-researched tenure evaluation is insurance against an unwise in-October 31.1983 vestment. For an individual under consideration , an unfair evaluation can make an enormous difference in career goals. This essay reviews some of the criteria used in faculty evaluations. More to the point, it explains how citation data can augment these somewhat subjective evaluations. The goals of citation analysis should be an increase in objectivity and certainly an increase in the depth of analysis. Numerous issues and techniques should be considered in citation analysis, so this essay is necessarily longer than the average Current Com-ment~E essaY, Consequently, the essay has been split in two consecutive parts. Although I've discussed citation analysis in estimating creativity many times,5~ I have generally avoided discussing its use for the kind of personal, individual evaluation implicit in promotion decisions. That is not only because citation analysis is controversial. Those of us who use citation data reguIarly realize that they are easily misinterpreted or inadvertently manipulated for improper purposes. Furthermore, certain techniques that don't interfere with the use of citation indexes for literature searching, or bibliometric/scientomet-ric analysis, may introduce disproportionate problems in the use …