Abstract
A literature on the relationship between race and publication productivity in academia is under-developed. Using the field of sociology, we present publication and related career data from the CVs of 539 tenure-line faculty who work in one of three tiers, indicated by National Research Council rankings, and who belong to one of three professional cohorts, constructed by the year in which they earned their Ph.D.s. The study examines the publication patterns among four groups: whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asians. African Americans and Latinos publish peer-reviewed sole-authored articles in smaller, but not substantially smaller, proportions than whites and Asians, a pattern manifest across organizational tiers but which attenuates the younger the cohort. Whites and Asians are substantially more likely to co-author article work. Whites and faculty of color publish academic books in roughly equal proportions. Race differences in publication in two general journals, the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology, are more sharply graded by race but not as substantially as one might expect given the identified specialty areas in which members of these groups predominantly work. We rely upon work on the relationship between race and the academic profession to situate the analysis. We identify methodological preferences of work as a key source to account for the observed patterns associated with publication and race. We also discuss our findings in relation to work on racial inequality in higher education.
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Notes
Of particular relevance is the norm of “universalism,” which holds that knowledge should not be influenced by personal or social attributes of the contributor and that rewards should be conferred in ways commensurate with contributions. Universalism is set in contrast to particularism, which refers to factors such as race, age, gender, religion, political affiliation, or sexual orientation, said to be irrelevant to social-institutional functioning (Long and Fox 1995).
Individuals identified as Afro-Latino were coded as 2) Latino/Hispanic.
There were two individuals who indicated that they were biracial. Both of these individuals had one white parent and one Asian parent. For the purposes of this research we classified these individuals as Asian.
Top ten departments as compiled by the NRC rankings (Goldberger, Maher, and Flattau 1995), in rank order: Chicago, Wisconsin, California-Berkeley, Michigan, UCLA, North Carolina, Harvard, Stanford, Northwestern, and the University of Washington. The terms department and program are used interchangeably.
Top tier press was coded for academic publishers that the sociological community generally construes as “the best” in the field. The presses included in the measure are California, Cambridge, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Oxford, Princeton, and Stanford.
In most cases coding reflected self-identification. In some cases, an individual may not have belonged to the American Sociological Association. In such cases, the first area of interest as listed on the CV was used. Where no areas of interest were listed, a main area of interest was determined by considering the CV as a whole.
“Predominant” is operative. Some sociologists utilize both quantitative and qualitative methods. In certain specific work, mixed methods are used. And, of course, there are different types of methods within these two large umbrella categories. We coded by making a judgment about the totality of sociologists’ published work, as thus predominantly of a qualitative sort or predominantly of a quantitative sort.
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge Britta Girtz for research assistance over the course of the project, and Jaden Devine-Brilliant, Idhalia Howard, Wesley Johnson, Annelies Van Linden, and Kendyll Washington for important work on coding.
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Hermanowicz, J.C., Clayton, K.A. Race and Publishing in Sociology. Am Soc 51, 197–214 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09436-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09436-2