When I compare citation activity for urban planning faculties (i.e., departments), I usually use the median of total faculty citations. Faculties are generally small and there tends to be an outlier among them. A question that arises is whether more experienced faculties have higher citation levels because they have a larger base of publications which had a longer time to accumulate citations. Of the 120 urban planning programs that I track in North America, the average years of program faculty service is about 19 years and the median number of citations is 593 (ln(593) = 6.38). The cluster of planning programs averaging between 13.5 and 24.5 years of service represents nearly 85% of all programs. As shown on the graph below, there is virtually no change in the trend line for these programs. In other words, age does not appear to be a significant factor. As would be expected the youngest faculties do in fact have fewer citations, but the oldest do not show a marked increase.
Note: The Ohio State University (shown with the red square symbol) is actually one of the younger faculties but has a faculty-wide citation level near the average for all programs.
Your questions and comments are greatly appreciated.
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.
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.
Thank you, Tom Sanchez!
Bruce