Saturday, October 13, 2012

Vanity Cite Searching

I admit to running vanity searches.  You know, Googling yourself.  I do it for two very good reasons.  First, when you're quoted as often as I am in stories and such, it's good to know what people are saying about you.  The other is, of course, it builds self esteem.  Or you hope it'll build self esteem.

Anyway, I had a few minutes today to see who is citing some of my research.
  • My 2005 study on whether young people learn from Jon Stewart, etc.  This was among the first studies of its kind and it gets cited a lot, most recently in Chinese Journal of Communication, Journal of Intercultural Communication, and of course the flagship journal in my field, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly.  This article has been cited 63 times, or so says Google Scholar.  This includes a bunch of international journals.  Bite me, college promotion committee.
  • My 2010 Obama/Muslim study has been slow to get cites, mainly because it's in a small journal that didn't make content available easily online until the last year or so.  But it's now cited in a book and a couple of journals, including Communication Studies and Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy.
  •  My media fragmentation piece in JMCQ a few years ago didn't get cited much because somehow the databases had it all messed up and combined with another paper.  That's apparently now fixed, at least as of this year, so it's getting cited in places like Communication Theory, Journal of Communication and the Journal of Media Economics.
  • In 1995 I published a JMCQ piece on perceived vs. actual knowledge and it still gets cited, including a 2012 book on media literacy.
Not great, but not half bad either.  Luckily there's a BA Hollander out there in the hard sciences who apparently cranks out the stuff, so if I skim a few off the top there, my numbers look all the better.

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