JBHE’s Annual Citation Rankings of Black Scholars in the Social Sciences and the Humanities

Each year Thomson Scientific (formerly the Institute for Scientific Information) in Philadelphia enters information on more than 30 million citations from more than 1.3 million published papers in a wide variety of academic fields. Citations from 8,500 academic journals are routinely read, counted, and analyzed. JBHE, in turn, searches this database to determine how many times the works of a particular black scholar have been cited in any given year.
This well-established, though controversial, computerized citation counting system proceeds on the premise that it is possible to measure the impact of a scholar, an academic department, or even an entire university by the number of times scholarly research papers are cited by academic peers. In this way, proponents of citation analysis contend, it is possible to rank the world’s physicists, chemists, or even black studies scholars by the number of citations their works generate in the research papers of their academic peers.
In our current “publish or perish” academic world, the citation-analysis technique, although not as positively regarded as it was several years ago, is still used by deans and department heads as a tool to help them make decisions on academic promotions, compensation changes, and tenure votes. More...