Berkeley is ranked #2 in the country in a new study examining the impact of faculty scholarship among 1,699 faculty at all 76 social work doctoral programs in the United States (Smith, Jacobs, Osteen & Carter, 2018). The study examined cumulative h-indexes of faculty at each school. The h-index is a metric that measures the number of articles published by a faculty member and how frequently others have cited their articles. The authors created averages for each school’s faculty.
Berkeley was ranked second just after the University of Washington at Seattle. Just behind Berkeley was our sister school, UCLA, at number three. All three are public university schools of social welfare/work on the West Coast.
Interestingly, the authors found that larger faculty sizes resulted in higher overall h-index scores. Ironically, both Berkeley (17) and UCLA (12) were less than half or a third the size of the University of Washington’s (34) faculty at the time of the study in 2016.
Full citation: Smith, T.E., Jacobs, K.S., Osteen, P.J. & Carter, T.E. (2018). Comparing the research productivity of social work doctoral programs using the h-Index. Scientometrics, in press.
Online link to article: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-018-2832-5