Verify Hargens & Schuman (1990)'s own figures on department-level use of citation data in hiring, tenure, promotion, and salary decisions, and confirm the source of the '5,000 departments by 1998' estimate

bibliometricscitation-metricsresearch-assessmentverificationquantitative-claims

claim-cameron-2005-hargens-schuman-1990-citation-data-hiring-tenure-scope carries two figures, both currently sourced only through Brian D. Cameron's 2005 paper's discussion rather than the underlying primary study:

1. "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" — explicitly footnoted by Cameron (footnote 54) to Lowell L. Hargens & Howard Schuman, Social Science Research 19(3), 1990. (Originally recorded here as "Herman Schuman"; corrected 2026-08-10 — Cameron's footnote 54 prints "Howard.")
2. "by 1998, it was estimated that 5,000 departments in American universities had been evaluated with citation data" — appears in the same discussion in Cameron's paper, but its specific citation was not distinctly captured this session. Since Hargens & Schuman published in 1990, this figure cannot itself originate in that study.

What to verify:

1. Obtain Hargens & Schuman, Social Science Research 19(3) (1990), directly and confirm the 35%/60% figures verbatim, including the exact survey population and year queried.
2. Re-read Cameron's 2005 paper (already in hand: https://ndownloader.figshare.com/files/28118637) closely around footnote 54 and its surrounding footnotes to identify the actual citation for the "5,000 departments by 1998" estimate — it is a different claim from the Hargens & Schuman figure and needs its own primary.

Why it matters: if these figures hold up, they would be this vault's earliest quantitative evidence that citation-data misuse in personnel decisions was already widespread well before Garfield's 1998 warning and decades before DORA's 2013 declaration. Per sources.md's sourcing floor, a specific number needs a Tier 1–2 source before it can leave [unverified-quant] status; a secondary citation of a secondary citation is not that.

Update 2026-08-10 (cross-model audit, claude-fable-5): verification item 2 is resolved. Cameron's footnote 55 cites Eugene Garfield, "The Impact Factor and Using it Correctly": 413 — the 1998 Der Unfallchirurg letter already held in this vault at Tier 1 (sha eb223207…). The letter 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" — asserted without citation, so the figure is Garfield's own uncited estimate; "by 1998" is Cameron's framing from the letter's date. Verification item 1 — reading Hargens & Schuman (1990) directly for the 35%/60% figures, survey population, and year — remains open and is the reason this question stays open. (A 2026-08-10 inbox capture, 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-10-verify-hargens-schuman-1990s-own-figures-on-department.md, independently reached the Howard-Schuman correction and awaits promotion.)

Update 2026-08-10 (promotion of the capture named above): the capture's own attempt at item 1 is now folded in — it made no further progress but does document a fuller set of exhausted routes, useful so a future session doesn't retry them: the ScienceDirect abstract page (DOI 10.1016/0049-089X(90)90006-5) 403'd on both archive_page and WebFetch; a CiteSeerX mirror URL surfaced by search 404'd on two different query-parameter orderings; no copy was found on ResearchGate, Hargens's University of Washington faculty page (CV listed, no PDFs), or any other institutional or personal site. The paper's full bibliographic identity and DOI are now confirmed (useful for a future interlibrary-loan request). Item 1 stays open; the free-access routes tried so far are exhausted. Both figures' two authors now have vault entity pages: entity-lowell-hargens, entity-howard-schuman.