Citation Tracking Software

Many academics rely on the ISI Web of Knowledge to electronically search for statistics about citation counts, which are necessary for publishing performance metrics, and to know where publications are being cited for research purposes.  It’s a great service but it is not available at all universities because of the cost.  If your university doesn’t subscribe to this service you can still get this information from hardcopy publications, but it’s not as easy and efficient as the electronic service.  There is now free software that performs similar functions called Publish or Perish.  It is a Windows application that you have to install on your PC.  It searches Google Scholar for citation information, which will not necessarily give you the same results as ISI Web of Knowledge, although it is supposed to be pretty reliable for the social sciences.  I’ve just started using it and it seems to work well.  I’d be curious to hear from others who have used it.

The Myth of Immigrant Criminality

Given the current public debate about immigration in the U.S., several sociologists and criminologists have been promoting research results to dispel the myth that immigrants are more prone to criminal activity than the native-born population. The Immigration Policy Center has released a special report of these findings that presents compelling evidence in a very accessible way.  Not only is this a timely political issue, but it is also a nice example of the application of academic research to important policy questions.

Visualizing Scientific Output

I recently learned of the data visualization work of W. Bradford Paley through Eszter Hargittai’s blog.  Some of Paley’s ideas overlap with those of Edward Tufte, but his networking graphics are quite unique and compelling.  He is probably most popularly known for his map of the relationships among scientific paradigms, which was recently published in Nature and Seed magazines.  As I was exploring Paley’s Web site, I came across a similar type of map called The Strength of Nations, which uses a network analysis to show the relative strength of various academic disciplines across ten countries. 

I love this graphic because it’s a great example of the intersection of my two main research areas, cross-national criminology and informatics.  One of the challenges of cross-national crime research is the differential amount of academic resources in this field across countries.  This concept has been difficult for me to adequately convey to undergraduate students who do not have a sense of academic disciplines in different countries.  Paley uses sophisticated information presentation techniques to nicely illustrate how the social sciences in general are stronger in some countries, such as the U.S., than in others.  I plan to use this picture in my Cross-National Crime class to illustrate why the field of criminology is more developed in the U.S. than in most other countries and why it is difficult to get cross-national crime information from other countries.