Popular and/or Prestigious? Measures of Scholarly Esteem

TL;DR

This paper distinguishes between popularity and prestige in scholarly esteem by analyzing citation patterns among IR researchers, revealing different rankings and correlates for each measure.

Contribution

It introduces a dual-measure approach to assess scholarly esteem, differentiating popularity from prestige based on citation sources in IR research.

Findings

Prestige and popularity rankings differ among researchers.

Prestige correlates with honors and key publications.

Popularity correlates with citation count and organizational affiliation.

Abstract

Citation analysis does not generally take the quality of citations into account: all citations are weighted equally irrespective of source. However, a scholar may be highly cited but not highly regarded: popularity and prestige are not identical measures of esteem. In this study we define popularity as the number of times an author is cited and prestige as the number of times an author is cited by highly cited papers. Information Retrieval (IR) is the test field. We compare the 40 leading researchers in terms of their popularity and prestige over time. Some authors are ranked high on prestige but not on popularity, while others are ranked high on popularity but not on prestige. We also relate measures of popularity and prestige to date of Ph.D. award, number of key publications, organizational affiliation, receipt of prizes/honors, and gender.