Tom Sanchez

I recently collected Google Scholar Citation Profile data for UK planning faculty to make comparisons with North American planning faculty. As it turns out, of approximately 600 faculty from 22 schools (schools listed by the Royal Town Planning Institute), only around 40 UK faculty (6.7%) have GS profiles (compared to nearly 60% for North American faculty). Due to the lack of comparable data I decided to only list what I could find, without analysis or comparison.

It would be great to hear from those on the list (or not on the list) if you have corrections and additions. Please contact me at tom.sanchez@vt.edu.

Bruce Stiftel commented, “Seeing this with Program as the unit of analysis is really interesting. It would also be of interest to see a similar analysis with the individual faculty as unit of analysis.” Below is the chart showing individual faculty data. The trajectory during the promotion and tenure period (< 20 years) is quite notable.

He also commented, “What would really be helpful to know are citation rates for a recent time period: say 5, 7 or ten years. And, especially recent citations to recent publications. I realize these numbers are a lot harder to determine, but they reflect the active impact of our colleagues better than aggregations that include citations made many years ago, and citations to research published many years ago.” This is a great idea and I’m planning to include it in my summer update. Stay tuned.

Thanks Bruce.

The 659 urban planning faculty with Google Scholar Citation Profiles (as of 12/8/2019) list 29,398 publications, an average of about 45 publications per faculty member (publications were only counted once even though approximately 2,000 were co-authored with other planning faculty). All publications currently average 44 citations (median of 10) for a total of 1,295,160 citations. The chart below shows the interquartile range (IQR) of citations for these publications by year. For most years the 25th quartile averages about 3 and the 75th quartile averages about 34. The highest two years are for publications in 1997 and 2003 (average of 64). The most highly cited publication among these is Regional Advantage by AnnaLee Saxenian with 13,247.

IQR of Citation Totals for Publications by Year

See also the updated urban planning program citation analysis and searchable database. Your comments and suggestions are appreciated (tom.sanchez@vt.edu).

The table below includes the most recent update of urban planning faculty citation activity. Also see the searchable database at: http://scholarmetrics.com/

The citation data for my analyses are primarily from Google Scholar (see most recent at: http://tomwsanchez.com/2019-urban-planning-faculty-citation-results/). For awhile now I have suspected that planning faculty with Google Scholar Citation Profiles had higher H-Indices and citation totals, but I had not yet looked at the differences. I assumed that highly cited faculty were more likely to keep track of their citation metrics, and therefore have GS profiles. This appears to be the case. But in my opinion, profiles do not increase the visibility of publications and therefore, citation activity. Publications are mostly searched through GS and not through profiles. There is also the issue of gaming GS profiles by including erroneous publications. While I have seen instances of this, most of it has to do with profiles not being properly maintained. This also includes missing publications which potentially lower citation counts and H-Indices. Anne-Wil Harzing has a very good blog post about this at: https://harzing.com/blog/2018/11/google-scholar-citation-profiles-the-good-the-bad-and-the-better.

See the comparisons below (by rank) and please send me your comments.

Table 1. Mean H-Index

Table 2. Mean citations

Figure 1. Mean H-Index by rank

Figure 2. Mean citations by rank