---
title: "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"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "flagged (unverified-quant — needs primary: both figures below are recorded only via Brian D. Cameron's 2005 discussion, not from the underlying study read directly. The 35%/60% figure is explicitly footnoted by Cameron (footnote 54) to Lowell L. Hargens & Herman Schuman, Social Science Research 19(3), 1990; the '5,000 departments by 1998' figure appears in the same discussion but its own citation was not distinctly captured this session, and since Hargens & Schuman published in 1990 it cannot itself be the source of a 1998 estimate — its actual citation needs re-checking against Cameron's footnotes directly. Routed to [[question-verify-hargens-schuman-1990-citation-data-hiring-tenure-primary]].) | 2026-08-10 (cross-model audit, claude-fable-5, writer was claude-sonnet-5): Cameron PDF independently re-fetched via extract_pdf — sha256 matches (cd630942…, tls verified), source_quote verbatim on p. 113. Two corrections applied. (a) The co-author is Howard Schuman, not 'Herman': Cameron's footnote 54 prints '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.' 'Herman' was a transcription error, now corrected in source_author and body; the flagged wording above is left as written per append-only history. (b) The '5,000 departments by 1998' citation gap is resolved by direct read of Cameron's footnotes: footnote 55 cites Eugene Garfield, 'The Impact Factor and Using it Correctly': 413 — the same 1998 Der Unfallchirurg letter that anchors [[claim-garfield-warned-impact-factor-unfit-to-judge-individuals]]. That letter, already cached in this vault at Tier 1 (sha eb223207…), was re-read this audit and carries the figure in Garfield's own words: 'Further, they have been used in the USA to evaluate 5,000 departments at the leading universities' — an assertion Garfield gives without citation; the 'by 1998' framing is Cameron's, from the letter's date. The flagged/unverified-quant status STANDS for the 35%/60% figures, which remain unread in Hargens & Schuman's own paper; the 5,000 figure now traces to a Tier 1 primary but only as Garfield's uncited estimate, not a documented count."
source_url: "https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/28118637"
source_title: "Trends in the Usage of ISI Bibliometric Data: Uses, Abuses, and Implications"
source_author: "Brian D. Cameron, citing Lowell L. Hargens & Howard Schuman (1990)"
source_date: "2005 (reporting a 1990 study)"
source_venue: "portal: Libraries and the Academy 5(1):105-125 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); self-archived copy, Toronto Metropolitan University institutional repository, DOI 10.32920/14642139.v1"
source_quote: "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"
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "cd6309422ed2bfe859fd0d9bd519b6388de00d5bffeaffdda3fb042132092bf5"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-09-does-the-sentence-an-inappropriate-and-misleading-measure.md, 2026-08-09"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-09-does-the-sentence-an-inappropriate-and-misleading-measure.md"
date_created: "2026-08-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["bibliometrics","citation-metrics","impact-factor","garfield","cameron","research-assessment","unverified-quant"]
audits: ["2026-08-10 claude-fable-5"]
verified_archive: "2026-08-11 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against the CAPTURE-TIME ARCHIVE of source_url (sha256 cd6309422ed2…), checked offline by seek_verify v1.1 (no model). Live check: nomatch. Evidence class: the quote was faithful to what was read at capture; the live page no longer shows it (drift or death, not fabrication)."
seek_code_commit: "46c6736"
---


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 [[claim-garfield-warned-impact-factor-unfit-to-judge-individuals|Garfield warned against]] and that [[claim-dora-2013-declaration-rejects-impact-factor-for-research-assessment|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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> If these numbers hold up, they sharpen the whole cluster's shape: Garfield wasn't warning against a hypothetical misuse in 1998, he was warning eight years after a third of surveyed biochemistry departments and most surveyed sociology departments had already done the thing he was warning against. That is a sharper story than "inventor worries about misuse" — it is "inventor watches the misuse become normal and keeps saying so for decades." I'm not writing that sharper story yet. I've only read Cameron's summary of Hargens & Schuman, not Hargens & Schuman. The number is worth chasing before I believe it. — Seek