1 Research on Social Work Practice Volume XX Number X Month XXXX xx-xx © 2009 SAGE Publications 10.1177/1049731509332877 http://rswp.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Authors’ Note: Please address correspondence to Gary Holden, DSW, Room 409, New York University: Silver School of Social Work, One Washington Square North, New York, NY 10003; e-mail: gary.holden@nyu.edu. Research on Social Work Practice A Bibliometric Evaluation of the First Decade Gary Holden New York University Gary Rosenberg Mount Sinai School of Medicine Kathleen Barker The City University of New York: Medgar Evers College Justin Lioi New York University Good Shepherd Services Objective: This article describes a bibliometric analysis of articles appearing in the journal Research on Social Work Practice (RSWP). Method: Descriptive and predictive analyses for the sample of 322 articles are presented. Results: The typical RSWP article was 15 pages long, had two authors and 28 references, and was cited for the first time 2 years after publication. The typical article was cited in two different years and for a total of three times during the publication year and six subsequent years. The overall sample of articles received a total of 1,139 citations during the year of publication and subsequent 6 years. Additional subsample analyses are presented. Conclusion: Articles published during RSWP's first decade had an impact. Keywords: bibliometrics; citation analysis; program evaluation; practice evaluation; publication; scholarship; sociology of science; social work journals meaning of data produced by citation analysis, citations have been viewed as a potentially valid, although imperfect, indicator of the impact of a scientist, organization, country, or journal (e.g., Garfield, 2003; Myers, 1970; Oppenheim, 1997). There is a relatively long history of reports examining the features and outcomes of scholarly publication in social work extending from the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Else, 1978; Jayaratne, 1979; Lindsey, 1976, 1978; Weinberger & Tripodi, 1969) to the current decade (e.g., Barretti, 2001; Epstein, 2004, 2006; Green & Hayden, 2001; Green, Baskind, & Bellin, 2002; Green, Kvarfordt & Hayden; 2001; Holden, Rosenberg, & Barker, 2005a, 2005b; Holden, Rosenberg, Barker, & Onghena, 2006; Ligon & Thyer, 2001; McMurtry, Rose, & Cisler, 2003; Pardeck, 2002; Rosenberg, Holden, & Barker, 2005; Rothman, I f there is a foundation of knowledge upon which the field of social work depends for its forward trajectory, it would be its empirical literature published in journals (cf. Lindsey & Kirk, 1992). Although concerns about journal publications are not new (e.g., Lindsey, 1976), a number of scholars have voiced reservations about whether the current journal publication process is ade- quate to the task of communicating the production of scholarship within the field of social work (e.g., Holden et al., 2008; Jenson, 2005; Leighninger, 2006; Schilling et al., 2005). The study of scholarly communications, most frequently referred to as bibliometrics, is a compo- nent of the larger field of informetrics (Bar-Ilan, 2001; Brookes, 1990; Tague-Sutcliffe, 1992). A key technique within bibliometrics is citation analysis, which focuses on the quantitative assessment of citation patterns in a body of literature. Citation analysis is based on citation indexing—the recording of the linkages (citations) between articles (Garfield, 1979). Examples of citation indexing have been noted as far back as the 12th century (Wouters, 2000). In terms of the Research on Social Work Practice OnlineFirst, published on April 7, 2009 as doi:10.1177/1049731509332877