High-Ranked Social Science Journal Articles

Full description

Do citations accumulate too slowly in the social sciences to be used to assess the quality of recent articles? This data supports research that shows that it is no more difficult to predict the future citations that social science journal articles will receive than it is to predict the future citations of articles in some natural sciences. The research uses citations accumulated in the first few years after publication and journal impact factors to predict the future citation ranks of all economics and political science articles in the Web of Science published in 2006. I find that citations in the first two years after publication explain more than half of the variation in cumulative citations received over a longer period. Journal impact factors improve the correlation between the predicted and actual future ranks of journal articles when using citation data from 2006 alone but the effect declines sharply thereafter. Also, more than half of the papers in the top 20% in 2012 were already in the top 20% in the year of publication (2006). A comparison The data includes citation data in each year from 2006 to 2012 for the 2006 articles and the impact factors of the journals that the articles were published in. The data also includes citations in each year from 1999 to 2012 for all economics articles in the Web of Science published in 1999.

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Significance statement

This data supports research that argues that citation analysis could be used more widely in research assessments in the social sciences.