|
Post by yikes on Oct 24, 2011 12:01:44 GMT -5
I pity the poor graduate students whose mentors/profs assign only AJS and ASR articles. That was certainly not the standard practice at my top-5 institution.
|
|
|
Post by Been around on Oct 24, 2011 12:36:45 GMT -5
Did you miss the "books" part of that last post?
And, I said "typically" not "only." If you were to go back and count the proportion of all of your contemporary readings (excluding classical theory and the like) from all of your graduate courses that were either ASR or AJS articles or books from a top 5 press I'd be shocked if they weren't at least the majority, if not the vast majority, of assigned readings. They certainly were at the top 5 institution I was trained at 15 years ago!
|
|
|
Post by drbearjew on Oct 24, 2011 12:40:31 GMT -5
That was not the norm at my institution. We rarely assign those articles for readings, either for our graduate or undergraduate students.
We expect them to know the literature - but we do not kid ourselves into thinking that the only sociological work worth reading is contained in AJS/ASR, or even Social Forces and SP.
|
|
|
Post by numbahs on Oct 24, 2011 13:17:35 GMT -5
This thread has gotten silly. On journal impact factor rankings: the kind of inter-sub-disciplinary comparisons as above are not productive, both for technical and substantive reasons. Technically: it is not valid to compare impact factors across subdisciplines in the field, because citation patterns vary across sub-disciplines. Thus a journal may have an artificially high impact factor because it's from a subfield with many more citations-per-article than in other subdisciplines. Substantively: "top" journals are defined by reputation and the hierarchy is remarkably stable. AJS/ASR because they're prestige generalist journals, followed by Social Forces, Gender & Society, and Social Problems. At least that's the hierarchy at my high-R1. More generally, the entire question of "how many is enough" is flawed. I agree with some above posters: whether you get a fly-out (to say nothing of hired) is a function of the "fit" (read: local politics) with a department and the reputation of your program, work, and intellectual network. To ask whether raw publications can overcome those more salient (by profoundly obscure) factors is to submit to a myth of agency in a process that's almost completely (at the point of application and evaluation) un-agentic for the candidates themselves. On the technical part: yes, I am aware of that, which is what people in the field of scientometrics call the power law distribution of citations. As the size of an academic field increases, the number of citations per article increases exponentially. Which is why I didn't compare subdisciplines to each other (and in general this would make generalist journals more likely to get cited). My point was more on the permanence of prestige in publications (which I guess is your susbtantive point). That is, in terms of actual impact on their own subfields, top specialty journals are more visible than social forces, but because of the lagging nature of prestige people value a social forces publication more.
|
|
|
Post by aaaa on Oct 24, 2011 13:25:35 GMT -5
If one ever wondered about the importance of prestige within sociology, all one needs to do is look at this thread. Information about affiliation is completely unverifiable in this forum, and yet you have people falling over themselves to establish that their dept. is top 1/5/10/100, therefore they are right.
|
|
|
Post by scot free on Oct 24, 2011 14:30:46 GMT -5
There are only two top tier journals: asr and Ajs. End of story. Second tier social forces, theory and society, maybe there is a case for the best subfield journals as second tier. Absurd. While the impact factor and attention given to ASR and AJS is higher than other journals, and I would argue, outsized for what they publish (*yawn*), there are many other journals, both general and specialty, that routinely publish high-quality work that cannot be regarded as second-tier. Second-tier implies substantially poorer data quality, methodology, and/or research question itself and the extent to which the literature is moved forward by it. I myself use the impact factor almost exclusively as a measure of journal quality and don't send my work to journals with less than a 1.0 IF. If a journal's articles aren't being cited, it's either not being read or doesn't publish work that people are inclined to cite and I don't want my research to appear there. One ISU faculty member has one useful list of top journals that graduate students should aspire to, though it might be a bit too large (http://www.public.iastate.edu/~dschwein/sociologyresources.html), and there are always the Core Influence studies that Michael Allen of WSU publishes, which someone mentioned earlier. No one would say that Nature and Science are the only Tier 1 science journals and everything else is Tier 2. Under one model (e.g. www.advancingwomen.com/awl/spring2006/Sanacore.html), ASR and AJS could be thought of as "above tier 1" but Gender & Society, JMF, Social Forces, Social Problems, and others are all easily Tier 1. This article views Tier 2 journals as containing many articles that remain uncited 5 years later: www.springerlink.com/content/r1601w1nx453281n/. Some commentary from OrgTheory here: orgtheory.wordpress.com/2009/01/26/lets-talk-about-third-tier-journals/
|
|