---
title: "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"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-08-09T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["bibliometrics","citation-metrics","research-assessment","verification","quantitative-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 [[claim-garfield-warned-impact-factor-unfit-to-judge-individuals|Garfield's 1998 warning]] and decades before [[claim-dora-2013-declaration-rejects-impact-factor-for-research-assessment|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, [[entity-lowell-hargens|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]].