I've gone through the same type of exercise that Alex did. However I've taken it a step further. Rather than being content with the citations that have come my way, I've exploited the capabilities of the Internet to influence my citations impact.
Although some might disagree with the idea of self-promotion, I believe that the things I've done are worthy of exposure and have done what I could to get more of it for them. Also there's a lot of inaccurate information on the Internet, so increasing the relative visibility of quality materials is socially beneficial regardless of the personal benefits.
My latest publication tells how it is done. See abstract and opening paragraph below:
"If your pearls of wisdom fall in a forest..."
Full text Html:
http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1592795&type=html&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=67605853&CFTOKEN=11468144 (27 KB),
Pdf:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1592761.1592795#references (269 KB)
Source
Communications of the ACM
Volume 52 , Issue 11 (November 2009) table of contents
SECTION: Virtual extension table of contents
Pages 146-149
Year of Publication: 2009
ISSN:0001-0782
Author
Ralph Westfall California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, CA
Publisher
ACM New York, NY, USA
Bibliometrics
Downloads (6 Weeks): 190, Downloads (12 Months): 193, Citation Count: 0
Additional Information:
ABSTRACT
"Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Will that really happen? Not if the world doesn't discover your concept! Few of us work with mousetrap technologies, but many of us do have good ideas that we'd like to share with others. For academics, communicating research findings is very important for advancement. "If Your Pearls of Wisdom Fall in a Forest..." tells how to help more people find your good ideas among the hundreds of billions of web pages in the maze that is the Internet.
Introduction
The idea of doing things that can improve something is an extremely popular concept in American culture. For example, I found the phrase, make a difference, in 129 million Web pages in a Yahoo! search in July 2009. The concept typically applies to impacts at local levels because, until recently, few people had opportunities to do things that could positively affect substantial numbers of people throughout the country in which they live or even throughout the world.
After dot com bubble burst, many investors found that the slogan that "the Internet changes everything" did not apply to many of the requirements for having a successful business. However the Internet really does provide opportunities for those who create knowledge to share it with more people who can use it to advantage, and share it more quickly than through other means.
Of course, this potential capability to share materials is limited by people's abilities to find useful information in the billions of pages on the Internet. Yahoo reported indexing over 19 billion pages in 2005. (Perhaps responding to criticism of the estimates,1 the leading search engine companies no longer publish counts of pages indexed. Although no one really knows how big the "haystack" is, the simile about "finding a needle" is quite applicable to the Internet.)
Nevertheless there are two aspects of innovative materials that work in favor of their being found:
* The goals of search engine companies.
* The nature of knowledge.
Best regards,
Ralph Westfall
California Polytechnic University, Pomona
Help Save Lives in Darfur
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-----Original Message-----
From: Entrepreneurship Division Listserv [mailto:
ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Stewart, Alex
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 3:15 PM
To:
ENTREP@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: [ENTREP] Impact of writings in journals - or anywhere
First, a small aside: JSBM is no longer in the FT list. But that is an indirect, highly imperfect measure for the question, which was the impact of one's work.
The obvious answer is the SSCI. However, this misses about three in four citations, depending on one's discipline. (A colleague and I are working on the disciplinary differences.) The SSCI is like the lamp post; you look under it because it's the bright light. If you really want impact and not just a ritualistic measure, you need to be more extensive. Library Science has a literature on this. For examples, L Meho & DH Sonnenwald, 2000, J Am Soc Info Sci, 51(2), 123-138; T E Nisonger, 2004, College & Res Libraries, 65(2), 152-163, and K L Reed, Bull Med Lib Ass, 83(4), 503-508. They make really extensive searches.
If you want to do your own, here's how:
The SSCI of course.
Google Scholar AND Google Books - the latter captures more books than the former.
SCIRUS.com
ProQuest, making sure to include the UMI dissertations.
Lastly, a general purpose search engine. I believe that zuula.com is the best at the moment.
What does this get you?
Other journals, of course. SSCI only captures English ones and misses many that are good in English, especially in some fields. For example, I know I've been cited in 17 languages other than English. More prominent scholars would have higher numbers.
Doctoral dissertations.
Books.
Government, foundation, center, and institute reports.
Recommended readings from institutions (not just syllabi).
Patents.
Naturally you need to spell out what's what.
Some colleagues will only care about SSCI journals. Hard to justify in the global university world. Some will discount books but the SSCI itself shows they're among the most cited works.
Disserations: hard to know what to make of them but they ARE a kind of impact.
Personally I think one of my best citations in terms of impact in the real world is in a report for the National Institutes of Health and three of the component institutes of health. This counts for nothing in SSCI-land.
(Len Sayles and I have an IBM patent - some people would be cited in many patents.)
So your colleagues need a little time to take this in, perhaps.
This all takes time. Before long it becomes what Shapiro and Stevenson (Make Your Own Luck) call a "strategic rat hole" - highly uncertain what you'll find and marginal in impact (just one more citation). On the other hand, when I checked mine out I felt better because it has been worth the effort to publish.
Alex Stewart, Ph.D.
Coleman Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurship
Marquette University
Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881
Office: 414 288-7188
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