Editor's Notes

• Author: Mark A. Hager
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Date: 01 March 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21265

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N M  L, vol. 27, no. 3, Spring 2017 © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/nml.21265

Journal sponsored by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences, Case Western Reserve University.

EDITOR ’ S NOTES

NONPROFIT MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP welcomes four new members to its editorial

board: Silke Boenigk (University of Hamburg, Germany), Georg von Schnurbein (University

of Basel, Switzerland), Cleopatra Charles (Rutgers University-Newark), and Young-Joo Lee

(University of Texas at Dallas). Members of the editorial board serve a three-year term (and

usually a second successive term); they are tasked with providing advice and guidance to the

editorial team, representing the journal in their various venues, and a heavier slate of manu-

script reviews. In selecting these four new members, my goal was to increase both the non-

North American representation and racial diversity of the editorial board. I look forward to

working with these new editorial board members in the coming years.

In my Winter editorial (volume 27, no. 2), I discussed the impact factor and my attention to

increasing Nonprofit Management & Leadership ’ s score on this popular metric. I also pointed

to one of its limitations: it is calculated from citations only in other recognized academic

journals. It does not include citations in books, research reports, and working papers. And,

particularly important in light of Nonprofit Management & Leadership ’ s roots and commit-

ments to practice, the impact factor does not consider the visibility of the journal ’ s articles in

field publications such as Nonprofit Quarterly . Fortunately, alternatives exist for capturing the

broader visibility of journal articles. Concurrent with the rise of the impact factor, internet

search engines have become increasingly sophisticated. One search engine in particular has

risen to popular prominence: Google.

Google as a Measure of Scholarly Output

Scholars use measures like the impact factor to document the status of their contributions to

the academic community. A publication in a journal with a high impact factor is a feather in

that scholar ’ s cap, which is important in tenure and promotion reviews, hires, and other com-

petitions. In reviews at my university, Arizona State, Google is now routinely used as another

measure of the impact (or value) of a particular publication. I suspect that it has made inroads

at many other universities as well. Use Google to search for virtually any scholarly publication

(whether from its primary interface, or its “Google Scholar” chamber), and Google will return

not only a link to the reference but also a notation of how many times Google has found it

to be cited in other works to which Google has access. Whereas the impact factor might be

seen as an elite measure of an article ’ s penetration into academic literature, the Google cita-

tion count is an egalitarian measure. The strengths and weaknesses of one are balanced by the

strengths and weaknesses of the other.

Google Scholar provides a space for each author to build a profile that aggregates all of that

author ’ s works and citation counts, populates an “h-index” (largest number h such that h

publications have at least h citations), and tallies the number of his or her publications that