Citation counts, prestige measurement, and graduate training in social psychology

Potential graduate students can use quite a lot of information in selecting a graduate program, and most often undergraduate faculty advisors provide that information. All too often, faculty advice to students comes in the shape of prestige of programs, and sometimes the prestige of the overall department determines this advice. While general impressions of programs and departments are useful, there is no substitute for specific information. How can students (or potential faculty) learn about the relative merit of a given program? One source is the rankings from popular media such as U.S. News and World Report’s America's Best Graduate Schools, or Gourman Report of Graduate Programs, available at the newsstand or on socialpsychology.org. Students may also make decisions based on the placement history of a program—programs that place their students in the jobs a potential graduate student is seeking will seem more attractive than a program without such a track record. Of course, students can select to attend only those programs that admit her or him. To a student interested in top-quality research training, the citation counts of faculty at various programs might provide an additional indicator of the potential for research training (e.g., Endler, Roediger & Rushton, 1978). If the number of citations a given work has is one indicator of the quality of that work, then programs with greater overall citation counts may be generating work that is evaluated positively. Such data must always be treated with caution (e.g., fads, salesmanship, self-citation, difficulty of the work), but they may also be informative