Social work practitioners must act every working day in the face of uncertainty. This uncertainty arises in part because knowledge is often difficult to locate or sometimes lacking regarding: the systems context the population being served; the particular client system; the set of problems the client system is experiencing; as well as the various interventions that could be selected. It seems reasonable to explore ways to reduce the experience of uncertainty, and narrow, if not eliminate, the knowledge gaps that arise in such situations.
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January 2006
The authors conclude this special issue by responding to the commentaries of their colleagues and reviewing relevant scholarship that appeared in the bibliometric literature since their literature reviews for the initial three articles in this issue were completed. They conclude, in part, that examination of bibliometric data regarding the entry of an article into the profession's knowledge base, and its ongoing life therein, may provide insights about the scientific communication process that lead to improvements of that process.
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January 2006
The assessment of scholarship assumes a central role in the evaluation of individual faculty, educational programs and academic fields. Because the production and assessment of scholarship is so central to the faculty role, it is incumbent upon decision makers to strive to make assessments of scholarship fair and equitable. This paper will focus on an approach to the assessment of the quantity and impact of the most important subset of an individual's scholarship-peer-reviewed journal articles.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScholars spend a considerable amount of time reflecting upon their professional work. When individuals decide to communicate their professional thoughts beyond informal venues, the penultimate expression of their reflection is the peer reviewed journal article. The study reported here entailed a bibliometric analysis of articles appearing in the journal Social Work in Health Care during the 1990s, in order to better understand what happens to our ideas after they appear in a peer reviewed journal article.
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January 2006
Bibliometrics is a field of research that examines bodies of knowledge within and across disciplines. Citation analysis, a component of bibliometrics, focuses on the quantitative assessment of citation patterns within a body of literature. Citation analysis has been used in social work to examine the quantity and the impact of the work of individuals and academic institutions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSex, material possessions, and race have long been associated with prestige or status in American society, yet little research has examined this idea. Little is known about the effect of cell phones on first impressions. In a 2 (cell phone: present, absent) x 2 (clothing: jacket, no jacket) x 2 (sex) between-subjects design, 160 women from a predominantly Black college rated stimuli of older, African Americans on 15 items measuring perceived power on three power subscales: expert, legitimate, and coercive.
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