Prestige Versus

How closely does stature (reputation) correspond to objective measures of actual performance? In the following article, reprinted from Social Science Quarterly, 1 James A. Christenson, Department of Sociology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, and Lee Sigelman, now dean. Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, compare impact-factor data from the Social Sciences Citm”on Indexm (SSCF ) with prestige rankings of journals in sociology and political science. These journal hierarchies were obtained in previous studies in which sociologists and political scientists were asked to rank journals on the basis of their importance to their respective fields. Christenson and Sigelrnan, comparing these rankings with SSCI data, noted a nonlinear relationship between reputation and impact, particularly at the low and high ends of the prestige ranking, or “pecking order. ” In other words, the authors concluded that some journals have a reputation that is disproportionate to their impact, while other, newer joumrds are presumably not rewarded with the reputation that their impact warrants. The reprinted paper is reminiscent of other studies that have attempted. through both subjective and unobtrusive “objective” means, to establish or examine hierarchies based on prestige. For example, in 1970 Kemeth D. Roose and Charles J. Andersen, American Council on Education, Washington, DC, published their report based on a survey of some 6,000 scholars. They measured the quality and effectiveness of gradSeptember 21, 1987