“Coordinating Citations and the Cartography of Knowledge: Finding True North in Five Scholarly...

T h e C h a n g i n g o f K n ow l e d g e i n C o m p o s i T i o n

14C o o R d i n aT i n g C i TaT i o n s a n d T h e Ca R To g R a p h y o f K n o w l e d g efinding True north in five scholarly Journals

BradE.LucasDrewM.Loewe

With The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (MKC), published in 1987, Stephen North took on a daring effort to map complex sets of investigations and practices under the big umbrella of composition, studying disparate sites of research on their own terms. Within a year, MKC had gained enough attention to war-rant three separate reviews (by James C. Raymond, Richard L. Larson, and Richard Lloyd-Jones) in the February 1989 issue of the field’s flag-ship journal, College Composition and Communication (CCC). For over two decades, MKC flourished as a publication central to the field’s debates about history, research, and disciplinary practices. According to SUNY-Albany, North’s home institution, MKC “is required reading in virtually every graduate writing program in the country” (Excellence Awards). Moreover, as this very collection attests, North’s work has become a part of the field’s collective consciousness: regardless of one’s opinions about MKC, North’s book is a part of the intellectual landscape and has generated conversations that continue to influence our work as schol-ars and teachers.

Of course, it is easy to support claims that a book is important to a field. However, when considering importance, questions of kind and of degree draw our attention. In other words, how important is MKC to the field we call rhetoric and composition, and how has it shaped our schol-arly conversations? As a means of invoking the crucial role of citation in scholarship, we offer a familiar passage from Kenneth Burke:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion

Coordinating Citations and the Cartography of Knowledge 265

too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (1974, 110–11)

Burke’s metaphor of the parlor debate is perhaps one of the most fre-quently cited passages from his work, and it highlights the ongoing “con-versation” that we all entered late and learned to understand while the arguments raged on.1 Our particular aim in this chapter is to explore how MKC has played a role in composition’s parlor and how it has shaped the conversation in the decades since its publication. Through citation analysis, we reveal both the erratic peaks of scholarly engagement with MKC and how those trends were to some extent shaped by publications in CCC. While we discover patterns of our collective scholarly behavior, we also conclude that most of our field’s academic “moves” are unique. Moreover, through our bibliometric analysis, we also illustrate an under-employed method for assessing the circulation and impact of scholar-ship on the field, providing a quantitative dimension to the complex qualitative discussions that have shaped the discipline’s thinking about its history and its publishing practices.

Rather than mustering an argument about North’s impact on the field or tracing how his ideas gained importance, we wanted instead to identify scholarship that cited MKC and to gain a better sense of how MKC was used and positioned in composition scholarship from 1987 to 2006. Given unlimited time and resources, we could have collected cita-tions from every publication that referenced MKC; instead, we decided to work with a set of five academic journals to provide data for bibliomet-ric analysis. Our decision was not simply one of convenience. We wanted to have a sufficient number of publications and authors to conduct our analysis, and we were interested in tracing citations with some tempo-ral regularity. For our purposes, however, we wanted to use a sample of journals that reflected the broad foundations of the discipline. After all,

1. For more on this, see Graff and Hoberek (1999).

266 THE CHANGING OF KNOWLEDGE IN COMPOS IT ION

peer-reviewed journals remain a central forum for any field’s conversa-tions. They are one of the best—if not the best—places to look for exam-ining how the conversation is taking shape and what impact any particu-lar contribution to it makes.

First, we chose CCC and College English (CE) because they are National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) publications that focus explicitly on rhetoric and composition and English studies, respectively. We also chose three others for contrast: Rhetoric Review (RR), JAC: A Quarterly Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Rhetoric, Writing, Multiple Literacies, and Politics (formerly, JAC: Journal of Composition Theory, and before that, JAC: Journal of Advanced Composition), and Composition Studies (CS) (formerly, Freshman English News). We chose these particular journals because their blend of quantity of citations of MKC and differing edito-rial aims and audiences yields a broad yet deep picture of how scholars have engaged MKC over the past twenty years. As we will discuss later, scholars could—and indeed, should—conduct studies similar to ours with scholarly books and editions or other academic journals.

We document the patterns of citation across these five journals over twenty years, noting not only the number and frequency of references to MKC, but also the types of engagement with MKC. In short, our study provides some empirical evidence of the exigence from which this col-lection arises. The types of engagement in these five journals range from superficial “scholarly nods” to frequent citations. Some articles engage only North’s concept of practitioner “lore” or his nomination of 1963 as the birth date of the discipline, whereas others take on sustained chal-lenges to North’s methods and conclusions. We evaluate the spectrum of critical responses to MKC from over 130 articles that cite it in these journals over a two-decade span, composing an aggregate evaluation of the book’s influence from the published work of scholars who used North’s work and shaped the conversations of our discipline.

Researchers can conduct such work not just for historical aims, but also for more immediate concerns. By measuring the circulation of MKC, we are also calling attention to a way of seeing our current schol-arship as it unfolds—recognizing that even the most influential books make limited and erratic appearances in composition scholarship. In other words, our analysis of MKC not only sheds light on the impact of North’s publication, but it also illustrates the methodological benefits of bibliometric analysis, especially for a discipline that has only recently moved beyond its status as an “emerging field.”


baC K g R o U n d f o R m a p p i n g n o RT h ’ s i n f l U e n C e

Our study is in the tradition of bibliometrics; that is, the quantitative study of published scholarly work intended to reveal evolving patterns, trends, and values in any given discipline or field. Bibliometrics has been a useful practice in the sciences for over a century (Pritchard and Witting 1981), but gained disciplinary interest in other fields in the 1960s, including psychology (Garvey and Griffith 1964), sociol-ogy (Crane 1967), and communication (Parker and Paisley 1966). Communication scholars, in particular, took great interest in bibliomet-rics in the mid-1980s, conducting several studies and even dedicating a special issue of Communication Research to bibliometrics in 1989. As L. Miles Raisig explained in 1962, bibliometrics is used “to demonstrate historical movements, to determine the national or universal research use of books and journals, and to ascertain in many local situations the general use of books and journals” (450). Bibliometrics can be used to measure differing characteristics of scholarship during a particular period (Reinsch and Lewis 1993), a discipline’s interaction with other fields (Forman 1993), or the circulation of particular ideas or concepts and their “impact rating” (Funkhouser 1996). Emerging from decades of research in information science, bibliometrics offers tools useful for asking different questions than composition scholarship usually asks, thereby providing new avenues for historical and transdisciplinary research.

As Éric Archambault and Étienne Vignola Gagné explain, bibliomet-ric methods particularly relevant to social sciences and humanities can be classified along three broad sets of indicators—that is, along three particular types of criteria around which analysis clusters. The first of these types of indicators is publication count, which, as the name suggests, involves counting publications to examine trends in research areas or patterns of specialization. The second type of indicator, citations and impact factor, aims to measure citations in terms of influence and circu-lation, which involves making judgments about the impact of a particu-lar scholarly contribution by examining citations to that contribution. Finally, the third type of indicator is cocitation and coword analysis, which examines relationships between authors and selected terms (2004, 2). Cocitation maps evolve when an author cites two other authors together (Andrews 2003, 47), while coword analysis examines texts in which pairs of selected terms occur together (Qin 1999, 133). These bibliometric methods can be blended to, as Archambault and Gagné put it, “build


multifaceted representations of research fields, linkages among them, and the actors who are shaping them” (2004, 2). In a Burkean sense, bibliometric analyses aim to observe, trace, and map the published con-versations after they occurred, and as they moved from parlor to parlor.

Our approach follows closely a line of bibliometric inquiry that traces the impact of one scholarly work, an approach similar to Katherine W. McCain and Laura J. Salvucci’s study of Frederick P. Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month (2006). Their project—famously, in bibliometrics circles—analyzed 497 articles (1975–1999) that cited Brooks’s collec-tion of essays about the development of the first large-scale computer operating system. Similarly, Eugene Garfield (1985) traces citations to Derek John de Solla Price’s book Little Science, Big Science, mapping the surge of interest in and circulation of de Solla Price’s ideas throughout the scientific community. Our project, though smaller in scale, takes on a similar aim: it traces MKC over two decades of scholarship in academic journals, and ours is one of the few studies in rhetoric and composition to take this approach.

North was, of course, interested in a variety of research methods, yet rhetoric and composition scholarship has too often foregone the ben-efits of examining its own scholarly conversations using the tools of bib-liometrics. In one of the very few bibliometric studies in rhetoric and composition, Christopher G. Hayes (1988) examined four years’ worth (1971–72 and 1976–77) of CCC and CE, two of the journals we exam-ine in our own study. Hayes’s aim was to determine whether articles published in those journals during those years used a core of canonical works or concepts to define and argue about the relationships between composition and literary studies and composition and psychology (4–5). However, Hayes’s project is a CCC presentation, necessarily limited in its scope, and available only through the ERIC database. Other schol-ars (notably Sue Hum [1994] and Maureen Daly Goggin [2000]) have traced the history and development of ideas in academic journals, but our aim is less to comment on the discipline during a historical period and more to document the path of a book that is clearly central to the history of the discipline.

Probably more familiar, and certainly more readily available, to read-ers of this collection is Charles Bazerman’s Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. In one chapter, Bazerman uses bibliometrics to analyze eighty-seven years’ worth of sci-entific articles about spectroscopy published in the venerable journal


Physical Review (PR). Bazerman shows how PR authors positioned them-selves relative to one another’s arguments and traces changes in argu-mentative and generic moves across a broad sample, concluding that PR authors cited previous work to establish a tradition and eventually used more references, resulting in longer and more complex articles (1988, 165–67). Bazerman argues that such citation trends reflect a “traditional view that science is a rational, cumulative, corporate enterprise,” but more importantly, that citation practices reveal patterns reflecting the making of knowledge “through linguistic, rhetorical, and social choices” (183). In another context, Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas N. Huckin explain,

The use of citations is intrinsic to scientists’ [and we would add, all scholars’] story making because it contextualizes local (laboratory) knowledge within an ongoing history of disciplinary knowledge making. Such contextualization is essential because it is only when the scientist places his or her . . . find-ings within a framework of accepted knowledge that a claim to have made a scientific discovery—and thereby to have contributed to the field’s body of knowledge—can be made. (1993, 111)

Examining the use of citations helps illuminate the linguistic, rhe-torical, and social contexts of how scholars put particular works (in this case, MKC) to use in shaping ongoing conversations.

To put it another way, bibliometric methods offer ways to examine what Howard D. White and Katherine W. McCain call “the patterned behavior of human beings—the authors, editors, and indexers on the production side of learned publication” (1989, 123). As Burke’s parlor metaphor suggests, different actors will make different moves in citing a source, such as aligning themselves with or against a premise, marking out the scope of a claim, or connecting themselves to those who have also “put in their oar” on a particular issue. Indeed, Shirley K. Rose calls scholarly citation “a courtship ritual designed to enhance a writer’s standing in a scholarly discourse community” (1996, 34). We examine five journals of our field for evidence of the different communities’ courtship—and other—rituals centering on MKC.

C i TaT i o n s o f M K C , 1 9 8 7 – 2 0 0 6

Selecting (or blending) particular types of bibliometric indicators involves making choices about what one wishes to find out. In this case, we wanted to know how MKC has been used—and how frequently—in CCC, CE, RR, JAC, and CS over the last twenty years. We began by search-ing the journals for any references to MKC and compiled a data set of


citations from 131 articles. Based on our initial reading of the citations, we each worked independently to determine a coding scheme to classify the articles according to what particular MKC content was used. We then compared our classification codes, finding them quite similar, and we synthesized them into the six categories for Indicator 3 (listed below). We then determined it would be useful to include two other indica-tors—to note how MKC was used (Indicator 2), and to what extent it appeared in the article (Indicator 1).

For Indicator 1 (Attention Given to MKC), we decided to use a variation of Blaise Cronin’s (1994) “tiered citation” typology, in which citations are categorized by Oeuvre (complete works of North); Motif (North and other writers like him); Opus (MKC); Chunk (section/paragraph/chap-ter); and Quantum (formula/phrase). For our purposes, however, the categories of Oeuvre and Motif went beyond the scope of our study, so we decided to break down Chunk and Quantum into four categories, rang-ing from summary to extended engagement.

For Indicator 2 (How MKC Used), we borrowed an annotation scheme from Simone Teufel, Advaith Siddharthan, and Dan Tidhar (2006), who used categories based on “contrast, weaknesses of other work, similari-ties between work, and usage of other work.” Our use of the category “lateral citation” for Indicator 2 comes from David Franke’s study of the essays published in the collection Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. Franke examined how the contributors positioned themselves relative to the scholars whose work they were engaging. Franke reported being “surprised” by “the way that the writers identified their antecedents. . . [using] a particular rhetoric of attribution” that he found to be “less hierarchical” and which cen-tered on “collaboration and connection over argument and defense.” To draw the distinction between agonistic and collaborative citation practices, Franke dubbed these practices vertical and lateral, respectively (1995, 376). Lateral citation does not involve abdicating the scholar’s role in evaluating or critiquing the work of others; however, a lateral citation foregrounds citation as conversation, with participants in the conversa-tion “borrowing from others who have gone before . . . and extending the discourse beyond” the individual (381). In short, we use the lateral citation category to identify articles that make a citation connection to MKC, but not for any particular argumentative aim or purpose beyond identifying the article with North’s work.

Thus, we used these bibliometric indicators:


Indicator 1. Attention Given to MKC (that is, the extent of each particu-lar article’s engagement with MKC, ranging from cursory to extended), with the following categories:

MKC listed in Works Cited but not cited in text

MKC referenced as a whole

Term(s)/concept(s) summarized or paraphrased

A passage from MKC cited

A sentence or more from MKC cited

Extended use/engagement with MKC

Indicator 2. How MKC Used (this characterizes the primary uses to which an article puts MKC; for example, to show contrast or to connect rather than to critique), with these categories:

MKC cited to show contrast

MKC cited to show similarity

MKC cited to critique

Lateral citation (to connect)

Perfunctory (only in Works Cited)

Indicator 3. Content from MKC (this characterizes the subject matter of the citation), with these categories:

Historical

Status of composition as a discipline

Mapping composition’s research sites

Lore/practitioners

Research methods defined/explained

North’s contribution to the field

Working independently, we each reread the 131 citations to MKC in CE, RR, JAC, and CS from the years 1988 through 2006, using the coding scheme and placing each article into one of the categories for each of the three indicators. For example, in her 2005 article for JAC, Margaret M. Strain summarizes North’s historical content, specifically North’s


dubbing of the Braddock report as composition’s “charter,” which she uses for purposes of showing similarity (coded as 1C, 2B, 3A using the indicators above):

Not a few of our disciplinary histories have identified the 1960s as a period of foment and growth, noting the power of research to authorize writing studies as an intellectual pursuit. Stephen North calls Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer’s Research in Written Composition the field’s “charter” (135). James Berlin credits the authors along with the editors of NCTE publications such as Research in the Teaching of English as contributing to the “creation of a discipline” (131). (2005, 514)

Other articles invoke a term from MKC for support, as in this passage from James N. Laditka’s 1991 RR article:

But why ask of theory what might be its implications for changes in our prac-tice? Why, indeed, should we not rather interrogate theory from the perspec-tive of our daily experience as teachers, celebrating what Stephen M. North has called our Practitioner’s “lore,” our private knowledge of what seems to work in the day-to-day of our classrooms? (1991, 298)

Often (about one in five instances), however, only the title and author invoke MKC in its entirety. Consider Russell K. Durst’s 1990 arti-cle in CCC:

Research on composition is a growing and seldom-charted terrain. In recent years, several studies have begun to chart that terrain. Anne Herrington’s “The First Twenty Years of Research in the Teaching of English” looks at the growth of a research community in composition by analyzing the articles on writing which appeared in RTE from 1967 to 1986. George Hillocks’s Research on Written Composition examines the research on writing instruction appear-ing between 1963 and 1983. And Stephen North’s The Making of Knowledge in Composition examines composition studies as a whole, categorizing different types of inquiry and discussing the theoretical and methodological frame-works of the various approaches. (394)

Here, Durst refers to MKC as a whole as a means of showing similarity and signifying North’s contribution to the field (scored as 1B, 2B, 3F). A 1989 RR article by Lester Faigley also invokes MKC as a whole, but with a more critical angle, and regarding disciplinary mapping (scored as 1B, 2C, 3C):

The study of writing must be at some level the study of written language. Yet some recent overviews of the field suggest otherwise. One apparently


noncontroversial aspect of Stephen North’s controversial survey of writing research, The Making of Knowledge in Composition, is the omission of linguistics as an important disciplinary subfield. North does not even include language or linguistics in the index. (240)

Conversely, many of the other articles (again, about one in five) make extensive use of MKC (code 1F), citing lengthy passages and summariz-ing vast portions of MKC, so they are too lengthy to include here.

Table 1

Number of articles citing MKC in the journals Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, College English,

Composition Studies, and JAC (1988–2006)

RR CCC CE CS JAC Total

1988 3 1 0 0 1 5

1989 4 9 1 1 1 16

1990 1 4 0 1 3 9

1991 4 1 5 2 2 14

1992 2 0 0 2 5 9

1993 1 7 2 1 2 13

1994 2 1 0 0 2 5

1995 4 2 2 1 4 13

1996 1 1 0 0 0 2

1997 2 3 2 1 0 8

1998 0 4 0 2 0 6

1999 0 4 1 0 2 7

2000 0 3 2 1 1 7

2001 0 0 1 2 3 6

2002 0 0 0 0 1 1

2003 0 0 1 0 1 2

2004 0 0 1 0 0 1

2005 0 1 0 1 1 3

2006 0 1 0 1 0 2


Examining each of the 131 articles for our bibliometric indicators yielded 393 scores (three per article), of which our separate coding of the data resulted in only twenty-three discrepant readings, a 99 percent inter-rater reliability rate. (We adjudicated the discrepant readings to provide the findings we present below.) We attribute this extraordinarily high rate not to our reading prowess but instead to the ease of using the categories we created together. Ultimately, we believe the coding scheme was reliable because the indicators of attention, use, and content were easy to iden-tify, and this facility makes bibliometric analysis particularly well suited for compositionists. After all, compositionists are the faculty who are the most thoroughly well versed in the teaching, critical reading, and evaluation of citation practices and academic argumentation, so we are confident that other scholars could carry out similar work for other purposes.

The number of articles with citations (see figure 1) to MKC is itself revealing. Not surprisingly, MKC is cited frequently in the years immedi-ately after publication, but there is an erratic pattern of appearance with peaks in 1989, 1991, 1993, and 1995. In the individual journals, a similar pattern is discernible, with some years registering multiple citations and other years carrying no references at all to MKC. (Interestingly—and perhaps because of North’s attention more toward composition than rhetoric—there are no references to MKC in Rhetoric Review after 1997.) It might be tempting to make claims about the causes behind these ebbs and flows, and we could speculate that the pattern is due to trends in research or the dialogic nature of scholarly publishing, but such conclu-sions are difficult to support.

What can be gained, however, is the straightforward—but nonethe-less significant—understanding that an influential work, even one as canonical as MKC, will most likely circulate differently at different times in different journals. If this understanding holds true for other works across other publications in our field, then we can begin to imagine its practical impact on our considerations of current scholarship, especially if motivated by tenure and promotion decisions. In other words, a schol-ar’s output cannot easily—or validly—be summed up by measuring cita-tions in a journal or two for only a few years. We believe, instead, that a more expansive view that crosses multiple publications reveals a rich portrait of a work’s circulation and longevity and, thus, of a scholar’s contributions to particular conversations.

The need for an expansive view is even more pressing for scholarship in new media environments, such as electronic portfolios, blogs, digital films, websites, and podcasts. Many compositionists’ home departments


are ill equipped to evaluate such scholarship (Modern 2007, 11, 41–45). What’s more, new media tools make possible new ways of measuring the influence of a scholar’s work. Such tools include online archives, materials digitized by commercial entities such as Google, online syllabi, tracking of website visits and downloads, archives of meaningful contri-butions to discussion forums (such as the writing program administra-tors’ listserv, WPA-L), and “peer-evaluated online communities” such as Slashdot, The Pool, and others (Blais et al. 2007).

The aggregate data from the five journals also provides us with an overall trajectory that enables us to test some hypotheses about scholarly publishing. According to one study of twelve journals in information sci-ence over two decades (White and McCain 1989), citation data “gener-ally take the form of a negative exponential distribution” in which there is a peak period during years two and three (for most articles, but up to six for very influential ones) and then there is a steady decline (perhaps 10 percent annually for science, less for arts and humanities) (155–56). We can see these trends with MKC as well, and by this reasoning, it quali-fies as an influential work for sustaining an overall increase in citations for the first six years after publication, as seen in figure 2.

Citations of MKC in these five journals show an overall decline of roughly 10 percent a year from 1994 to 2006, as depicted in figure 3.

20

15

10

5

0

Total

Trend

JAC

CS

CE

CCC

RR

19901988 1994 1996 1998

Number of Citations to MKC, 1988–2006

2000 2002 2004 20061992

Figure 1. Number of articles citing MKC in the journals Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, and JAC (1988–2006). Total number of citations and trendline included.


Other studies using bibliometric approaches like ours may allow the field to assess whether other assuredly influential works follow similar patterns of circulation and use. There is also a predictive component of this analysis that might hold promise to counterbalance the subjec-tive evaluations of peer reviewers, many of whom have a stake in the subject matter. For example, in most tenure and promotion decisions, external reviewers play a vital role in evaluating to what extent a scholar

20

15

10

5

Total

Trend

1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993

MKC Citations, First Six Years

15

12

9

6

3

0

Total

Trend

1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006

MKC Citations, Years After First Six

Figure 2. Trendline for articles citing MKC 1988–1993.

Figure 3. Trendline for articles citing MKC 1994–2006.


Figure 4. Influence of CCC on other publications.

CCC

Other journals

19901988 1994 1996 1998

CCC “Echo Effect”

2000 2002 2004 20061992

15

12

9

6

3

0

contributes to the field. While these evaluations are necessary and use-ful, a bibliometric analysis demonstrating how a work is influential could also be brought to bear on such decisions. Of course, like any evalua-tive measure, such quantification has the potential to be abused, but we think that such metrics could give us an additional way to evaluate the impact of scholarship on our work. After all, with further studies to determine the reliability of this pattern, or evidence of other patterns, it could be possible to assess a book’s status as influential in the field—and have citation evidence to support it. Furthermore, such research could be useful for academic publishing decisions, in which sales alone may not reflect a book’s influence.

Another compelling pattern that warrants further study is what we call the “CCC echo effect”: our data suggest that the rise and fall of cita-tions to MKC in CCC articles precedes a similar rise and fall in the other four journals (as a whole). Two discernible periods, 1988 to 1992 and 1992 to 1996 (see fig. 4), show an almost identical two-year lag time between the peak of citations to MKC and a similar peak of citations in the other journals.

Such a pattern suggests that the discipline’s flagship publication, CCC, drives—to some extent—what scholarship is produced and pub-lished in other venues. If this echo effect holds true for other citation data sets, then the leadership role of the CCC editorial board may not


be just to influence what CCC publishes but also what is published in the field more generally.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the data regarding the cita-tions of MKC confirmed our initial expectations and provided some sur-prises, as Table 2 sets out.

Table 2

Content and usage frequencies

Indicator#1:AttentionGiventoMKC # %

A. MKC listed in Works Cited but not cited in textB. MKC referenced as a wholeC. Term(s)/concept(s) summarized or paraphrasedD. A passage from MKC citedE. A sentence or more from MKC citedF. Extended use/engagement with MKCNo scoreTotal

52548101627

0131

3.8219.0836.64

7.6312.2120.61

0.00100

Indicator#2:HowMKCUsed # %

A. MKC cited to show contrastB. MKC cited to show similarityC. MKC cited to critiqueD. Lateral citation (to connect)E. Perfunctory use (only in Works Cited)No scoreTotal

8692823

51

134

5.9751.4920.9017.16

3.730.75

100

Indicator#3:ContentfromMKC # %

A. HistoricalB. Status of composition as a disciplineC. Mapping composition’s researchD. Lore / practitionersE. Research methods defined / explainedF. MKC’s contribution to the fieldNo scoreTotal

403134523325

4219

18.2614.1615.5323.7415.0711.42

1.83100

Citations summarized there show that MKC has been used most often in this way: a term or a concept from North’s book is summarized or paraphrased (37 percent) to show similarity to—or support for—an author’s position (51 percent), and it is usually about lore or practi-tioners (24 percent). These aggregate numbers indicate how MKC has most commonly been used, but they should not be understood to indi-cate that there are perfunctory gestures simply repeated in our schol-arship—what North in MKC imagines as “strictly ceremonial” “ritual salutation[s]” (340). Of the 131 articles, only eleven (8.4 percent)


demonstrated the three traits exclusively, suggesting that even though our scholarly conversations might demonstrate collective patterns, they are generally unique in their individual motives and structures.

C o n C l U s i o n s

After collecting the citations from the journals, we had anticipated data that would show an emphasis on lore-practitioners, but we did not expect that the remaining content categories would be so evenly distrib-uted: historical (18 percent), status of composition as a discipline (14 percent), mapping composition’s research (16 percent), research meth-ods defined/explained (15 percent), and MKC’s contribution to the field (11 percent). The distribution suggests that MKC’s primary influ-ence might be in articulating a perspective about practitioner knowl-edge making, but the other concepts in the book hold substantial—and similar—importance.

Ultimately, bibliometric studies like this one can generate empirical evidence to support (or challenge) our thinking about the circulation, influence, and impact of scholarship, even extending to fundamental questions about, for example, which scholarship is crucial for graduate students in their coursework and exam preparation. With the continued growth of rhetoric and composition as a discipline, and an increasing worldwide interest in research on writing, we should embrace biblio-metric approaches for the historical insights they provide—as well as the empirical support that can augment personal perspectives or “com-mon knowledge” about scholarship in the field. As Robert Connors argued, the “rhetoric of citation systems” has “silently undergirded the enterprise of Western intellectual activity” but has “largely gone unre-marked,” and our “citation choices have always seemed so formalized that they have remained submerged, little discussed” (1999, 242; italics in original). Robust analyses of the complexity of citation practices in rhetoric and composition can infuse the field with empirical support for theoretical claims about importance, influence, and longevity—and to what extent the field coheres.

Critiques of bibliometrics are to be expected: after all, quantitative measures of complex discussions in the Burkean parlor are bound to be reductive. We do not aspire to create a perfect model with predictive capabilities, but we do hope to bring additional tools to our discussions of the history and scholarly activity of the discipline. For example, a more expansive study of MKC that included citations from our scholarly


books and edited collections, and from additional journals, might reveal different patterns or provide additional support for the findings we have shared here. Furthermore, we might benefit from similar studies of other decidedly influential books in the field. For example, did the use of Shirley Brice Heath’s Ways with Words follow a pattern similar to MKC? Did Peter Elbow’s Writing without Teachers or James Kinneavy’s A Theory of Discourse circulate through our scholarship in similar ways?

Providing methodologically sound maps of scholarship would enable us to examine, with greater precision and transparency than is typical, how the knowledge we produce takes life in the pages of our publica-tions. Richard Haswell, for example, has already made a compelling case that NCTE/CCCC has systematically excluded research that is “rep-licable, aggregable, and data supported” (2005, 201). Haswell cautions that when composition’s influential professional organizations show a wholesale aversion to a fundamental approach to making knowledge, such an aversion may be the field’s undoing: “When college composi-tion as a whole treats the data-gathering, data-validating, and data-ag-gregating part of itself as alien, then the whole may be doomed. Even now, the profession’s immune system—its ability to deflect outside criti-cism with solid and ever-strengthening data—is on shaky pins” (219). Just as North startled readers in 1987 by asserting that there had been no replication studies in the field (159), Haswell urges us to rethink our research energies, and he does so by providing evidence that our research energies are misdirected, or at the very least, severely imbal-anced. Bibliometric studies certainly are one tool that can provide us with depictions of our publishing practices—the ways in which knowl-edge is inscribed, impressed, negotiated, resisted, and often assimilated in the Burkean parlors of a field. Such portraits may be invaluable as we leave our “emerging field” status behind and continue moving forward into our disciplinary future.

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