Faculty Status and the Publication Impact of ARL Librarians

by Horowitz, Stephanie A.

For over 40 years, academic librarians have been debating whether their role in the academy is similar to that of the teaching faculty or whether it should be closer to that of other professional staff. A number of different arguments have been espoused on each side of this issue, with the opinions being fairly equally divided. By performing a citation analysis on articles published by a specific group of academic librarians, this study concludes, though the evidence is somewhat inconclusive, that librarians with faculty status are likely to have a slightly greater professional impact than those without faculty status.