Evaluating Scholarly Productivity and Impacts of Landscape Architecture Faculty Using Citation Analysis

Abstract

The academic field of landscape architecture has taken an increasing interest in scholarly productivity and the impact of faculty research. Quantitative measures of academic output and reputation are important assessment tools used by many academic disciplines, especially for promotion and tenure evaluation. Citation analysis, one approach used for these purposes that combines metrics for productivity and impact, is seen as an effective way to assess scholarly activity in related fields such as urban planning and tourism. Universities are increasingly employing metrics of this kind to measure faculty members’ scholarly productivity and impacts alongside their teaching and service records.

This article applies citation analysis to the landscape architecture faculty inNorth America. UsingGoogle Scholar data, we analyzed four citation measures (total citation counts, h-index, hI,norm, and hI,annual) for tenure-track faculty. The results show that citation activity is correlated with rank (assistant, associate, or full professor), degree type (doctorate vs. non-doctorate), and number of years since first publication, with no detectable differences between male and female scholars.We found that landscape architecture faculty ranking in the top 20% according to total citation counts accounted for 87% of total citations, and 15% of the tenure-track faculty in the field have no citation records.Webelieve that our methods and findings can be used as a complementary measure to assess the level of scholarly contributions at the individual and program levels.