Accountability Report
Appendices
The Committee discussed many possible ways of capturing the number of publications, number of peer-reviewed publications, number of publications weighted according to prestige of the journal, and number of publications divided by FTE faculty, perhaps by department or college within the University. There are no datasets of these kinds available.
However, there is an independent, private-sector service known as The Citation Index, compiled by ISI, the Institute for Scientific Information, based in Philadelphia. For a large, but not universal, array of peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals more or less correlated with the output from various academic fields, ISI counts in the published literature the number of articles published and the proportion which other authors use in their references in new publications. They calculate a "citation index", the number of other's articles "citing" (referring to) the original work per article published--by an individual or an institution. The UW can buy the output from ISI for all journals/all fields and for a wide variety of fields such as art and architecture, agricultural chemistry, biochemistry & biophysics, chemistry, economics, literature, mathematics, physics, psychology, public health and health care science, sociology and anthropology. The reliability and breadth of the output varies field by field.
The literature reviews are a very complex procedure, with five-year periods from the date of publication covered; of course, there would normally be very few citations the first year, since people would have to read the article, use it in their work, include in their manuscripts for publication, and then wait 6-18 months for the new publication to actually appear with the reference. Nevertheless, for the UW as a whole and possibly for certain well-defined units, we believe the citation index is applicable as a measure of productivity and impact, particularly when compared with peer institutions. The UW has ranked second among the 25 peer institutions (24 plus the UW - see Appendix I) in overall citation impact continuously since 1981.
The proposed Advisory Board on Accountability may wish to refine this tool to better capture the diversity of UW scholarly activity and its impact.
Accountability Report
Appendices
