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Diana Hicks

Selected Works

Bibliometrics in the social sciences & humanities

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The New York Times As A Resource For Mode 2, Diana Hicks, Jian Wang Oct 2013

The New York Times As A Resource For Mode 2, Diana Hicks, Jian Wang

Diana Hicks

The New York Times receives more citations from academic journals than the American Sociological Review, Research Policy, or the Harvard Law Review. This paper explores the reasons why scholars cite the New York Times so much. Reasons include studying the newspaper itself or New York City, establishing public interest in a topic by referencing press coverage, introducing specificity, and treating the New York Times very much like an academic journal. The phenomenon seems to reflect a Mode 2 type of scholarship produced in the context of application, organizationally diverse, socially accountable and aiming to be socially useful as well as …

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Coverage And Overlap Of The New Social Science And Humanities Journal Lists, Diana Hicks, Jian Wang Dec 2010

Coverage And Overlap Of The New Social Science And Humanities Journal Lists, Diana Hicks, Jian Wang

Diana Hicks

This is a study of coverage and overlap in second generation social sciences and humanities journal lists with attention paid to curation and the judgment of scholarliness. We identify four factors underpinning coverage shortfalls: journal language, country, publisher size and age. Analysing these factors turns our attention to the process of assessing a journal as scholarly, which is a necessary foundation for every list of scholarly journals. Although scholarliness should be a quality inherent in the journal, coverage falls short because groups assessing scholarliness have different perspectives on the social science and humanities literature. That the four factors shape perspectives …

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Towards A Bibliometric Database For The Social Sciences And Humanities, Diana Hicks, Jian Wang Mar 2009

Towards A Bibliometric Database For The Social Sciences And Humanities, Diana Hicks, Jian Wang

Diana Hicks

In the social sciences, humanities or arts it is largely impossible to substantiate statements on research excellence with reliable indicators for international benchmarking of fields and institutions. To help overcome this limitation, this report examined bibliometric systems in the social science and humanities from the perspective of assessing their potential for institutional research evaluation nationally or internationally.

To assess the feasibility of an adequate bibliometric system in SSH, we must ask: how large is the SSH literature and how much of it should be counted in an evaluation? Working with limited time and resources, our efforts focused on assessing international …

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The Dangers Of Partial Bibliometric Evaluation In The Social Sciences, Diana M. Hicks Dec 2005

The Dangers Of Partial Bibliometric Evaluation In The Social Sciences, Diana M. Hicks

Diana Hicks

Social science research communities around the world face pressures for quantitative evaluation imposed from outside. Traditional methods of allocating jobs and research funding may not be seen as sufficiently merit-based to ensure research excellence and international competitiveness. In this environment, the preferred evaluation methodology tends to be SSCI-based bibliometrics, more or less exclusively. In this paper, I reflect on the merits of this approach by examining the nature of the social science literature as it relates to bibliometric evaluation. The argument is based on a thorough review of the literature of social science bibliometric methodology.

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The Four Literatures Of Social Science, Diana M. Hicks Dec 2003

The Four Literatures Of Social Science, Diana M. Hicks

Diana Hicks

This chapter reviews bibliometric studies of the social sciences and humanities. SSCI bibliometrics will work reasonably well in economics and psychology whose literature shares many characteristics with science, and less well in sociology, characterized by a typical social science literature. The premise of the chapter is that quantitative evaluation of research output faces severe methodological difficulties in fields whose literature differs in nature from scientific literature. Bibliometric evaluations are based on international journal literature indexed in the SSCI, but social scientists also publish books, and write for national journals and for the non-scholarly press. These literatures form distinct, yet partially …

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Hospitals: The Hidden Research System, Diana Hicks, Sylvan Katz Sep 1996

Hospitals: The Hidden Research System, Diana Hicks, Sylvan Katz

Diana Hicks

Using co-authored scientific papers as indicators of research collaboration the pattern of research linkages in the UK during the 1980s is analysed. All sectors collaborate with each other at a rate proportional to publishing size to a first approximation. However, there are deviations from this pattern. Analyzing these deviations, two groups of sectors are found that collaborate with each other more than expected: the GIPU group composed of government, industry, polytechnics and universities, and the HSNR group composed of hospitals, special health authorities (SHAs), non-profit organisations and research councils. This suggests that a biomedical innovation system co-exists with the more …

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