Paul Bourke

Publication types, citation rates and evaluation

In order to resolve questions frequently raised in the context of research evaluation about the citation rates of journal publications in relation to other types of publications, the total research output of substantial institutions or systems has to be brought under bibliographic control. That precondition has rarely been met: there are few published studies of the total range of publications of major research institutions, including books, book chapters, technical reports and published conference proceedings. The Research Evaluation and Policy Project (REPP) at the Australian National University (ANU) has established a database covering all the publications from the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), a fulltime research institution at the ANU, and has examined in detail citations in the journal literature accruing to all types of publications. The database contains a significant number of publications, nearly 30 000 items, and covers the sciences and the social sciences and humanities. This data enables us to examine whether the citation record of research publications appearing in journals indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) is a useable surrogate for the citation record within ISI journals of all model of publication. We contend that, if certain preconditions are met, the choice of citation rate is not critical.

The efficacy of different modes of funding research: perspectives from Australian data on the biological sciences

Abstract In this paper we set out to investigate whether there was variance in the impact of research publications in relation to their mode of funding. We allocated relevant publications to sectors on the basis of the institutions undertaking the research, the duties of the researchers, and the providers of the major source of funding. To undertake a bibliometric analysis, we used the Research Evaluation and Policy Project database containing all Australian ISI-indexed publications since 1981, and a database of publications constructed from the final reports of the recipients of Australian Research Council large grants in the biological sciences. Our results indicate that rather than the mode of funding, the nature of the researchers appointment appears to be the most significant determinant of impact. We found that researchers appointed to full-time research positions in the biological sciences, irrespective of their source of funds, achieved higher visibility for their research than did researchers with significant other duties, such as undergraduate teaching or clinical practice.

Standards issues in a national bibliometric database: The Australian case

In recent years researchers in the Performance Indicators Project at the Australian National University have undertaken a number of projects involving collaboration with colleagues in England or attempts to replicate results obtained by others. All projects have necessitated close scrutiny of the methodologies previously used or to be used and have made clear the urgent need for comparable standards. In this paper we have focused on two projects: one, an analysis of Australias shares of publications and citations, where we sought to learn from the debate on methodology that surrounded the question of decline in British science; the second, an analysis of astronomy publications in Australia where we sought to replicate methodology used in a previous European study.

The Status of Politics 1909–1919: The New Republic , Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks

We have learned recently from the work of a number of historians that the process of national mobilisation and the erection of unprecedented controls over industry during World War I offered to important groups of American liberals models for permanent collectivist reform and institutional renewal. The ease with which such controls were dismantled ought not to obscure the remarkable attraction they appeared to have in 1917 and 1918. It is clear that agencies such as the War Industries Board, the Railroad Administration, the War Labor Board, the Inquiry, and the National Board for Historical Service attracted not only the wartime enthusiasm of intellectuals; these agencies were seen to contain potential for peacetime use.

Comparing Individual-Level Returns with Aggregates a Historical Appraisal of the King Solution

0 ur intersection with the individual and aggregate inference problem came by way of historical electoral studies, specifically those focused on the mid-nineteenth-century United States when, as many historians have noted, the political engagement of the citizenry appears to have been remarkably energetic.’ A little more than twenty years ago, two of us-Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats ( 1978)-set out to explore that nineteenth-century political world through a remarkable set of largely unused records: the poll books. These records reveal individuallevel voter choices in a sequence of states beginning in Virginia and Kentucky and subsequently extending with the migration of constitutions and electoral rules to Illinois, Missouri, and Oregon. In those places, for substantial periods in the nineteenth century, all enfranchised voters assembled at polling places and then called out in a loud voice both their names and their political choices for all offces being contested. These individual decisions were duly recorded in the poll books not only to provide a record of the result but also to allow the aggregate count to be adjusted should the ballot of any individual be successfully challenged. We set out to retrieve and render machine readable the surviving runs of these data from the states in which viva voce voting persisted across time (Bourke and DeBats 1978).2 Unlike most of our colleagues working on nineteenth-century elections, then, we had available both individual and aggregate political data. Linking the names in the poll books to other nominal lists, especially to inventories such as tax lists, census returns, and land maps, gave us some capacity

The Social Critics and the End of American Innocence: 1907–1921

Shortly before Americas involvement in the First World War there appeared a series of works of social and cultural criticism remarkable for their range and sophistication. The familiar list includes Herbert Crolys The Promise of American Life (1909) and Progressive Democracy (1914), Walter Weyls The New Democracy (1912), Walter Lippmanns Preface to Politics (1913) and Drift and Mastery (1914), Van Wyck Brookss The Wine of the Puritans (1909), Americas Coming of Age (1915), and H. G. Wells (1915), and Randolph Bournes Youth and Life (1913), The Gary Schools (1916) and Education and Living (1917). The authors of these books were involved as well in the development of vehicles for social criticism such as The New Republic and The Seven Arts which continued and institutiona lized the preoccupations of their books. These facts of creativity and speculative ferment are obvious; what has proved more difficult is an assessment of the character and purpose of this body of social theory. While we are justified in thinking of these men as constituting a fairly coherent group?they knew and were influenced by each other and they joined in the creation of journals devoted to agreed ends?we have yet to clarify precisely what they were about. Most com monly these men are viewed as the theoretical wing of Progressivism, so that they are explained by whatever broad hypothesis is offered about the movement as a whole. Among the questions raised about them, accordingly, are those that one always asks of theoreticians in a political movement: were their formulations influential, did they shape policy, were they close to the sources of power? We have had, for example, a minor controversy about the precise influence of Crolys The Promise of American Life on Theodore Roosevelts New Nationalism. Charles Forcey has settled this point in the course of writing a book largely concerned with the relationship of the editors of The New Republic to the centres of political power.1 1 Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism (New York, 1961). Forcey cites and discusses other works which have raised the question of Crolys influence on Roosevelt. For other treatments of the social critics as Progressives writing books rather than working in politics or reform institutions, see George Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1958); Arthur Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (New York, 1954) and Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955).

Individuals and Aggregates

After more than a decades impressive achievement in the “new” social history and the “new” political history, two distinct though related problems require us to reconsider the data appropriate to these inquiries. First, recent commentators (Foner, 1974; Formi-sano, 1976) have pointed to the relative failure of research in these areas to converge, a failure made more obvious in the light of the programmatic optimism of the 1960s which held out the prospect of an integrated approach to the social basis of politics and to the political implications of social structure. Second, there has been in recent years some acknowledgment by historians (see below) of the vexing question of inferences across levels of data, a matter central to other social sciences and particularly pressing for historians of electoral behavior.