Understanding how medical students select their specialty is a fundamental issue for public health and educational policy makers. One of the factors that students take into account is a specialty's prestige which hinges partly on its focus on technique rather than whole person. We examine the potential of a psychological framework, social dominance theory, to explain why some students, and not ...

Introduction The prestige of book publishers is an important element for the assessment of SSH scholars in Spain. Until 2012, that ‘prestige’ remained based upon subjective, individual judgements from assessment committees’ members. In order to provide a more objective reference for the prestige of book publishers, ÍLIA research group developed a ranking of book publishers (so called SPI) based...

Citation analysis does not generally take the quality of citations into account: all citations are weighted equally irrespective of source. However, a scholar may be highly cited but not highly regarded: popularity and prestige are not identical measures of esteem. In this study we define popularity as the number of times an author is cited and prestige as the number of times an author is cited...

How closely does stature (reputation) correspond to objective measures of actual performance? In the following article, reprinted from Social Science Quarterly, 1 James A. Christenson, Department of Sociology, University of Kentucky, Lexington, and Lee Sigelman, now dean. Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, compare impact-factor data from the Social Science...

This study investigated whether and how imitation of sentences spoken in Liverpool English (LE) and Standard Southern British English (SSBE), affected attitudes related to these accents. LE has low prestige and low social attractiveness, while SSBE has high prestige and high attractiveness. A previous study showed that imitation positively affects social attractiveness, but not prestige, for an...