Research productivity in the areas of child abuse and domestic violence

Research productivity in the areas of child abuse and domestic violence was reviewed for the years 1990-1996 by examining articles published in Child Abuse and Neglect, the Journal of Family Violence, and the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. To examine productivity across institutions, quantification of productivity was based on ordinal position of authorship as previously used. Productivity across these three journals was also summed based on the 1987 composite productivity index formula of Howard, et al., and the data were compared with a productivity assessment based on a search process in the PsycLIT database. Rank-order correlations between the raw productivity total, the composite measure, and productivity based on first-authored publications in PsycLIT were all significant. The findings suggest that the composite measure represents a good estimate of productivity across the three journals and that publication in these three journals provides a good representation of research in the general areas of child abuse and domestic and interpersonal violence. The findings, along with implications regarding the relative utility of such information for selection of graduate programs that have a strong research focus on child abuse or domestic violence, are discussed.