During the past 3 decades dozens of studies have ranked schools of social work using faculty productivity or program reputation to gauge program quality. These studies are often controversial because they rely on only a few dimensions of schools' performance. This study used publicly available admissions data from the past 15 years to examine how…

The recommendations of the National Institute of Mental Health task force on social work research are reviewed and discussed. It is proposed that as a means of forwarding reform and building an infrastructure for research, doctoral education in social work should be expanded and focused in selected institutions. (MSE)

A decade-old study concerning academic affiliation of social work authors is updated, extended, and refined. The current study looked at 1,602 articles in different types of scholarly journals (n=16) in social work and examined how a college or university's productivity varied by journal type, by faculty size, and over time. (Author/MSE)

A 1994 "U.S. News and World Report" ranking of professional schools of social work is examined and compared with the findings of 8 other attempts to rank social work schools in the last 20 years. Results indicate that the assessment measures used were primarily faculty products (for example, articles published), and that the reputational studies…