The CCC Top Ten
Okay, not really.
The list below is of the top ten CCC articles as measured by the number of times that they are cited by subsequent CCC articles. It's not exactly the be-all, end-all of bibliometrics, but rather a single dimension of what would have to be a much more extensive data set (if I wanted to start making substantial (and substantiable) claims).
But from my perspective, it's another of those little pieces that makes CCC Online interesting for me to work on. I've set up a page that will update as we add/index more content both forwards and backwards in time.
- (11) Ellen Cushman. The Rhetorician as an Agent of Social Change.
- (11) Susan Wells. Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from Public Writing?
- (11) Jacqueline Jones Royster. When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.
- (10) Anne Ruggles Gere. Kitchen Tables and Rented Rooms: The Extracurriculum of Composition.
- (8) David Bartholomae. Writing with Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow.
- (8) Bruce Herzberg. Community Service and Critical Teaching.
- (7) Rhonda Grego and Nancy Thompson. Repositioning Remediation: Renegotiating Composition's Work in the Academy.
- (7) Maxine Hairston. Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing.
- (6) Arnetha Ball and Ted Lardner. Dispositions toward Language: Teacher Constructs of Knowledge and the Ann Arbor Black English Case.
- (6) Gesa E. Kirsch and Joy S. Ritchie. Beyond the Personal: Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research.
If I have a little time in the next day or two, I'll add a column in the table with the year that the article was published as well, although rolling over the links will flash their month/year combo. Interesting to note, perhaps, that the most recent article on this list comes from December 1997 (Ball & Lardner). It makes sense that there would be some lag between publication and subsequent citations, but the majority of articles on this list are more than a decade old. I leave it to you to hypothesize what this might mean...
At the very least, I suppose, a list like this would be a place to begin for someone new to the field--there are worse ways of figuring out where to start.
That's all...
Comments
I like "bibliometrics." I would like to develop some for counting and measuring other things. Like, number of books checked out from public library. Number of books that need to be sold or given away. Number of times I've actually re-read Jasper Fforde's novels, as well as a network graph of the folks I've recommmended them to...
Posted by: susansinclair | July 20, 2006 10:51 PM
Don't you already have a dissertation topic? :-)
Posted by: collin | July 20, 2006 11:08 PM
I have this fantasy of setting up a citation reference database for all of our main (and some not so mainstream) journals...especially since most of them are not indexed in ISI. But I've noticed that the most oft-cited works in Kairos are from 1996-1998 as well, so your comment jibes with the work I've done over here as well (I should clarify that these are citations of Kairos articles in CCC, CE, TETYC, RTE, JAC, and TCQ -- backlinks range across the whole run of the journal).
Posted by: Doug | July 25, 2006 8:19 PM
Oh, almost forgot -- it would be interesting to look at that data and see what the most oft-cited works were regardless of venue. From combing through CCC issues from 96 - 03 looking for cites of electronic sources, and noticing some of the oft-cited print items, my money is on Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone."
Posted by: Doug | July 25, 2006 8:21 PM
I bet you're right, Doug. Based on an entirely unscientific survey of my own noticings, I do seem to see it a lot. It's one of those ideas that's widespread, but just sbove the threshold where people feel comfortable not citing Pratt when they use it.
In fact, I wonder if there's not a LT rhetoric at play there as well--past a certain point (# of uses, whatev), terms and concepts become unnecessary to cite and can just be used...
cgb
Posted by: collin | July 26, 2006 6:16 AM