Comparative citation rankings of authors in monographic and journal literature: a study of sociology

A recurrent criticism of commercial citation indexes is their failure to cover citations found in monographic literature. There exists the possibility that citation‐based surveys of scholarly communication and influence which ignore references in monographs may produce partial results. The study examined the scholarly literature of sociology. Tens of thousands of references from monographs and leading academic journals were analysed. The relative rankings of authors who were highly cited in the monographic literature did not change in the journal literature of the same period. There is, however, only a small overlap between the most highly cited authors based on the journal sample and those based on the monograph sample. The lack of correlation suggests that there may be two distinct populations of highly cited authors.