PUBLICATION AND CITATION ANALYSIS OF SELECTED NURSING FACULTY IN AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION

Other academic programs in higher education have utilized publication and citation counts to determine quality programs, but nursing has not attempted to do so. The purpose of this study was to determine the publication and citation records for selected faculty of nursing and to compare these results with the subjective ratings of Blau and Margulies (1974-75) as well as the Hayter and Rice (1979) objective ratings of nursing programs.; The 10 quality institutions identified by Blau and Margulies were matched with a randomly selected sample of accredited baccalaureate institutions not so identified. Faculty names were obtained for all 20 programs for the academic year 1974-75 in order to coincide with the time framework of the Blau and Margulies study. These 678 names were then utilized for a publication search using the Social Sciences Citation Index for 1975, 1976, and 1977. The resulting publications were then utilized for a computerized citation search reviewing both the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Science Citation Index from 1975 until 1982.; Results after utilizing the Mann-Whitney test showed that faculty in the 10 quality institutions had more total and mean publications (p = .0140, p = .0284 respectively); more faculty that published both in proportion to size and as a whole (p = .0312, p = .0113 respectively); and total citations (p = .0494). Mean citations were marginally significant (p = .0696). Total publications and the number of faculty who published best discriminated between the quality and non-quality institutions. Strong correlations were shown to exist between publication and citation data. However, when examined from an individual faculty standpoint no significant results were obtained between faculty in the 10 quality and non-quality institutions.; The conclusion reached was that publication data best described institutional quality while citation data pointed out individual eminence. The fact that the groups could be differentiated by total publications and the number of faculty that published supported the development of nursing as an academic discipline while challenging nursing authors to produce quality work.