Neal Caren’s list of the 52 most cited works in sociology journals in 2013 on Scatterplot was a little disappointing… to me, anyway. This isn’t a critique of Caren; I love reading his analyses of the field. But, it made me think about how to properly measure what work inspires sociologists? Caren uses citation counts as a measure of inspiration, though he jokingly comments on his own post that “we are unable to identify the mechanism by which works are cited.” And when we do that, a few things quickly become apparent: (1) of the 75 authors present on the list, 13 are women (made increasingly frustrating by recent research documenting a gender citation gap), (2) most are getting a bit dated (are we no longer producing important work?), (3) certain research topics are more heavily represented, while others seem virtually ignored.
Measuring the impact of a given piece of research is difficult to do. Citation counts are a sort of quick and dirty method, but as some have pointed out, many of these citations are better described as gratuitous than engaged. It’s more difficult to measure the quality of a citation. It’s the sort of thing that passes a “I know it when I see it” test, but is harder to imagine systematically studying. I know that on the rare occasion that my own work is cited, I’m much more interested in how it was cited than simply that it was cited. Some of those that made the list seem likely candidates for tangential citations—superficial references made to a work without any significant discussion of precisely how the present research utilizes, builds on, critiques, makes use of, etc. the work in question. And, certainly, I’d love to write something worthy of gratuitous citation. But is this what inspires? Some of Caren’s list is work that inspires me—but some of it misses the mark… or my mark, at any rate.
I was considering coming up with some other method of measuring how “inspirational” different publications were and decided that I’d simply make my own list. Following are 52 of the books, articles, and more that have inspired me in the past year. The citations are organized haphazardly, neglecting some, avoiding others, and with more than a bit of haste. I did endeavor to include some older works on the list, but the list is decidedly biased toward my own areas of interest and expertise, and my methodological, theoretical, and interdisciplinary leanings. I also included many that are (or probably will be) well cited, but others have avoided as many citations as they deserve (in my humble opinion). Others deal with topics that might make them unlikely to be cited a great deal, but deal centrally with challenges many sociologists face (methodological, research, analytical, theoretical, and in answer to the ever-present “who cares?” question). And others are simply fascinating studies that come up with clever sources of data, are beautifully written, and help us to question many of our most deeply-held assumptions.
