An analysis of doctoral programs of health education

American Journal of Health Studies, Spring, 2004 by Stephen J. Notaro, Thomas W. O'Rourke, James M. Eddy

CITATIONS RECEIVED BY PROGRAM FACULTY (9.9%)

Citations received were collected from the 81 journals identified by laflin et.al., (1999). The numbers of citations received were based on the sum of the five faculty members provided by each program by the use of an automated library index. Citations were obtained from the Social Science Citation Index in the Web of Science index that contained 68 of the 81 journals, which accounted for 84 percent the total journals. Citations from the remaining 13 journals were not included.

The wide range of citations received (see Table 1) makes the median (156.5 citations) a more valid measure of central tendency than the mean (271.2 citations). The faculty of the top two programs were the only faculty to receive over 1000 citations, while the faculty at the bottom nine programs each received fewer than 100 citations. The wide range of citations was an expected finding based on the wide range of articles published as these two variables are highly correlated (Notaro, O'Rourke, & Eddy, 2000). This simply means that if faculty don't publish they can't be cited in the literature. Faculty that publish in more socially popular fields may receive more citations than others publishing in new areas of study. Therefore citations may not be an accurate measure of the quality of re search and contribution to advancing a field of study but may, in part, be more related to the popularity of the article relative to current topics in the mass media or on agenda of the university's administration. In addition, the presence of a star faculty with numerous publications may result in a program having a large number of citations that may not be reflective of the overall productivity of the programs faculty. Finally, it also may be that programs with larger numbers of faculty may be able to spend more time on research activities as the administrative duties can be spread over a greater number of researchers.

EDITORSHIPS (9.2%)

Editorships by program faculty were collected from the 81 journals identified by Laflin et.al., (1999). Editorships were obtained for 92 percent of the 81 journals by reviewing the appropriate journal editions. Results are presented in Table 1.

Despite the wide range of editorships from a high value of 32 to a low value of zero, the similar value of the mean (9.9) and the median (9.5) shows the results for editorships were not as skewed as other variables. All the programs except the lowest seven had at least five faculty editorships with the top two programs exceeding 30. Editorships were moderately correlated with articles published (.31) which may mean that faculty who publish more frequently are more visible to journals and may result in the opportunity of an editorship (Notaro, O'Rourke, & Eddy, 2000).

STUDENT SUPPORT (9.0%)

To measure student support for assistantships and research, three items of self reported information were used with the first two items being mutually exclusive; (1) Percent of doctoral students receiving a 50 percent or more teaching or research assistantship received a weight of 0.50, (2) Percent of doctoral students receiving a 24-49 percent teaching or research assistantship received a weight of 0.25, and (3) Percent receiving internal or external financial dissertation support received a weight of 0.50. The greatest total weighted score was considered the highest raw score.