Academic Visibility for Urban Planning and the Webometric Future

Abstract

This paper argues that the traditional emphasis of scholarly communications, citation analysis, and faculty evaluation, limited to books, book chapters, and journal articles is out-moded and fails to capture a significant share of scholarly activity that is now being posted online. Planning academics, as social scientists, should value the extended range of dissemination provided by the web, and should also leverage its inherent functionality to evaluate scholarship. Scholarly output is further characterized relative to productivity, visibility, reputation, and impact for the purposes of a new evaluation paradigm. An example shows that both individual and faculty metrics can be used as a meaningful element of scholarly assessment. The implications of this approach touch on issues of scholarly communications and the promotion and tenure process.

Keywords: bibliometrics, webometrics, citation analysis