The 100 Most-Cited SSCI Authors, 1969-1977. 1. How the names were selected

As promised previously l-z here is the list of authors most cited by social scientists. This list is based on data taken from our Social Sciences Citation Index ‘m (SSCI’U) from 1969 to 1977. We have arranged the list by discipline. Psychology (including psychoanalytic theory) is by far the largest field and is thus subdivided into specialties. Arranging the list categorically should prevent invidious comparisons across disciplines. In a few cases, however, authors involved in interdisciplinary research may feel they have been misclassified by our system. For each name we have also provided the birthdate, the total number of citations, and the average number of citations from 1969-77. In addition, the citation counts for 1976 and 1977 are also provided. This gives an idea of the continuing interest in the areas involved. For those readers unfamiliar with citation analysis, let me recapitulate the selection procedure. Authors of scholarly papers acknowledge the work of other authors through citations. To compile the SSC1, we created an entry for each of these explicit citations. For the period 1969-1977, we processed nearly 8 million citations appearing in 800,000 source items. Once the basic .SSC1 is compiled, we sort the file by number of citations received by each author. The list shown in Figure 1 is the tip of an enormous iceberg of cited scholars. Limiting the list to 100 authors is arbitrary and based on cost and the lack of space and energy. It is important to point out that this list is based on primary author data. In this study, citations to a publication with two or more authors are credited only to the first author. Readers familiar with our recent study of the 300 most-cited scientists will appreciate the potential shortcomings of a list that doesn’t account for co-authors.J However, as seen in the earlier parts of this study, co-authorship in the social sciences is by no means as significant as in the hard sciences. Nevertheless, in the future we will