Two Brief Points on Publication Impact

Calculating publication impact by citations is deeply flawed, Deen Freelon argues

Pablo J. Boczkowski and Michael X. Delli Carpini have done the field a great service with “On Writing in Communication and Media Studies,” Freelon argues. He predicts the article will soon become a classic of first-year PhD proseminars given its clarity and efficacy in laying out the inner workings of the major genres of writing in which we most often participate. In this response, Freelon offers two brief points, both of which pertain to the general issue of how the impact of various forms of scholarly writing should be assessed. Questions ofimpact are inseparable from discussions of scholarly writing in any discipline, as the incentives in place for various writing genres will, to a substantial extent, determine how much of each genre is produced. First, we should consider impact primarily at the level of the writing product as opposed to the journal or outlet level. Second, and relatedly, optimally assessing impact requires knowing which values of each metric count as outstanding, a that requires distributions of impact metrics for scholars in the same subfield who started publishing around the same time. Working toward such a solution would generate an empirical basis for standards of impact, which our field currently lacks.