Ideational Influence, Connectedness, and Venue Representation: Making an Assessment of Scholarly Capital

Assessing the research capital that a scholar has accrued is an essential task for academic administrators, funding agencies, and promotion and tenure committees worldwide. Scholars have criticized the existing methodology of counting papers in ranked journals and made calls to replace it (Adler Singh, Haddad, & Chow, 2007). In its place, some have made calls to assess the uptake of a scholar’s work instead of assessing “quality” (Truex, Cuellar, Takeda, & Vidgen, 2011a). We identify three dimensions of scholarly capital (ideational influence (who uses one’s work?), connectedness (with whom does one work?) and venue representation (where does one publish their work?)) in this paper as part of a scholarly capital model (SCM). We develop measurement models for the three dimensions of scholarly capital and test the relationships in a path model. We show how one might use the measures to evaluate scholarly research activity.