Faculty publication project. (Letters To The Editor).(Letter to the Editor)

To the Editor:

We were dismayed to discover the omission of the journal Social Work With Groups from Green, Baskind, and Bellin's article on doctoral faculty publications (JSWE, Winter 2002, pp. 135-152). Social Work With Groups is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its publication this year. It is a quarterly journal that is solidly grounded in social work practice, policy, and theory. It has an advisory board of more than 40 distinguished social work educators and practitioners, including some from the universities identified in the article as having high publication rates and some who are also on the boards of journals that were included in the study.

Social Work With Groups was founded because all too frequently our profession's then-existing journals contained a dearth of articles about group work. Since 1978, the journal has served to fill that gap. The omission of the journal from the research that was reported unfortunately reinforces once again the neglect of group work.

Group work is a crucial area of social work. Social Work With Groups well represents the thinking about group work practice that is both clinically and community oriented. To omit it from a study of faculty publication in social work journals is unacceptable and a sad commentary on the view of our profession

 
ROSELLE KURLAND 
ANDREW MALEKOFF 
Editors, Social Work With Groups 

To the Editor:

We are writing to express concern regarding the exclusion of several social work macro-practice journals from the sample used to assess doctoral faculty productivity in the article by Green, Baskind, and Bellin (JSWE, Winter 2002, pp. 135-152).

We assume that the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) and by extension JSWE intend to represent the entire profession of social work as does the National Association of Social Workers (NASW). Therefore it is of concern to see an article which (although it acknowledges that it does not include all social work journals) excludes several journals listed as Core Social Work Journals by NASW in Social Work Abstracts Plus. Most particularly we are concerned that core journals Social Work With Groups and the Journal of Community Practice, among a number of others, are not indexed by Community of Science (COS), the commercial indexing service that the authors used to select their sample.

As a commercial index, COS cannot be expected to represent the profession and its scope of research, and this index seems not to have added newer social work journals in quite some time. While COS may claim to be the most extensive citation source for social work literature, there is no independent documentation (or research validation) of that claim. It would seem much more useful in presenting an analysis of social work graduate faculty article publication …