Scholarly Productivity and Impact of School Psychology Faculty in APA-Accredited Programs

The primary objective of this study was to conduct a normative assessment of the research productivity and scholarly impact of tenured and tenure-track faculty in school psychology programs accredited by the American Psychological Association (APA). Using the PsycINFO database, productivity and impact were examined for the field as a whole and by faculty rank and gender between 2005 and 2009. Results of our study reflected considerable variability in scholarly impact and productivity. For example, on average, school psychology faculty published slightly more than one refereed journal article per year, with productivity rates ranging from zero to eight articles per year. Similar variability in results was observed for scholarly impact. Results of this study also revealed no significant differences in productivity and impact by scholarly rank. Significant differences were observed for gender, however, with higher productivity and impact for men than women. A secondary objective of this study was to rank the most productive and impactful faculty by total authorship credit, number of publications, and number of citations, and to examine the relationships among these different rankings. Implications and limitations are discussed.