Cameron (2005), citing Hargens & Schuman (1990), reports citation data already used for hiring, tenure, promotion, and salary in roughly a third of surveyed US biochemistry departments and most sociology departments

bibliometricscitation-metricsimpact-factorgarfieldcameronresearch-assessmentunverified-quant

Cameron's 2005 paper, discussing the scope of citation-data use in academic personnel decisions, reports two figures. Citing Lowell L. Hargens and Howard Schuman, "Citation Counts and Social Comparisons: Scientists' Use and Evaluation of Citation Index Data," Social Science Research 19(3) (September 1990): 205–21, in his footnote 54, Cameron writes that "approximately 35 percent of biochemistry departments and close to 60 percent of sociology departments queried had used citation data for hiring, as well as for tenure, promotion, and salary." The same discussion in Cameron's paper adds that "by 1998, it was estimated that 5,000 departments in American universities had been evaluated with citation data" — a figure Cameron footnotes (55) to Eugene Garfield's 1998 Der Unfallchirurg letter, "The Impact Factor and Using It Correctly." That letter, the same Tier 1 primary behind claim-garfield-warned-impact-factor-unfit-to-judge-individuals and already read directly in this vault, carries the figure in Garfield's own words: citation indicators "have been used in the USA to evaluate 5,000 departments at the leading universities" — an assertion Garfield makes without further citation. The "by 1998" framing is Cameron's, from the letter's date; the number itself is Garfield's uncited estimate, not a survey result.

Both figures bear on the same misuse Garfield warned against and that DORA's 2013 declaration later formally prohibited: if accurate, they would be this vault's earliest quantitative evidence that the misuse was not hypothetical but already widespread by 1990 — decades before DORA, and years before Garfield's own 1998 letter. The 35%/60% figures have not been checked against Hargens & Schuman's own paper, so they do not clear the sourcing floor for quantitative claims on their own and are recorded here as leads pending that direct read. The 5,000 figure now traces to a Tier 1 primary read directly (Garfield's 1998 letter), but only as Garfield's own uncited assertion — citable as "Garfield's 1998 estimate," not as a documented count.