Logo image
Back
Examining academic ranking and inequality in library and information science through faculty hiring networks
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Examining academic ranking and inequality in library and information science through faculty hiring networks

Yongjun Zhu and Erjia Yan
Journal of informetrics, v 11(2), pp 641-654
May 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2017.04.007

Abstract

Academic inequality Library and information science LIS ranking Faculty hiring networks Placement
•Examined academic rankings from LIS faculty hiring networks.•Studied academic inequality in LIS through faculty hiring networks.•High correlations between measures of faculty hiring networks and U.S. News ranking.•Revealed faculty placement inequality in LIS from a variety of aspects. In this study, we examine academic ranking and inequality in library and information science (LIS) using a faculty hiring network of 643 faculty members from 44 LIS schools in the United States. We employ four groups of measures to study academic ranking, including adjacency, placement and hiring, distance-based measures, and hubs and authorities. Among these measures, closeness and hub measures have the highest correlation with the U.S. News ranking (r=0.78). We study academic inequality using four distinct methods that include downward/upward placement, Lorenz curve, cliques, and egocentric networks of LIS schools and find that academic inequality exists in the LIS community. We show that the percentage of downward placement (68%) is much higher than that of upward placement (22%); meanwhile, 20% of the 30 LIS schools that have doctoral programs produced nearly 60% of all LIS faculty, with a Gini coefficient of 0.53. We also find cliques of highly ranked schools and a core/periphery structure that distinguishes LIS schools of different ranks. Overall, LIS faculty hiring networks have considerable value in deriving credible academic ranking and revealing faculty exchange within the field.

Metrics

9 Record Views
15 citations in Web of Science
16 citations in Scopus

Details

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Web of Science research areas
Computer Science, Interdisciplinary Applications
Information Science & Library Science
Logo image