Praxis: A Writing Center Journal • Vol. 17, No. 2 (2020)
The State of Writing Center Research Across the Atlantic: A Bibliometric Analysis of a German Flagship Journal, 2010-2016
Pam Bromley
Scripps College
pbromley@scrippscollege.edu
Andrea Scott
Pitzer College
Andrea_Scott@pitzer.edu
The number of writing centers in German-speaking countries has grown rapidly since the first center was established in 1993. The increase in centers has been accompanied by substantial growth in writing professionals, scholarship, and professional activities in the region. Indeed, many are calling this a new field: Schreibwissenschaft, a direct translation of the term writing studies. This article presents a bibliometric analysis of citations and authorship from the first twelve issues of JoSch: Journal of Writing Consultation, the first and premier peer-reviewed journal of writing center studies published in Germany. Founded in 2010, JoSch is now affiliated with the largest German organization for writing professionals, making it particularly influential. Examining who publishes and what is cited in JoSch highlights what this emerging field values and what it omits. Replicating Neal Lerner’s methodology from The Writing Center Journal, we directly compare our findings to WCJ, including other bibliometric studies when relevant. In JoSch, we find a similarly strong ethos of collaboration through increasing co-authorship; authorship, as in the US, is largely female though they may be underrepresented in proportion to writing center community. JoSch pieces also reference a more disciplinarily diverse cluster of highly-cited authors and sources, forming a broader core of knowledge than in WCJ. If JoSch is any measure, writing centers are driving disciplinary conversations about writing research and administration in the region. Our findings are particularly relevant to readers of Praxis because they illuminate trends in scholarship in a region with the largest number of writing centers outside North America.
Introduction
The first writing centers outside of North America were established in Germany in the early 1990s (Girgensohn, “Exciting”; Universität Bielefeld Schreiblabor; Ruhmann). While writing centers in the region were initially slow to take off, the past decade has seen exponential growth in writing centers, writing professionals, academic conferences, and scholarly publications (Girgensohn, Innovation; Ruhmann; Scott), so much so that the field is now beginning to see itself as a discipline —or “interdiscipline”—with distinct regional traditions and networks (Call for Papers; Brinkschulte and Kreitz, 11-19; Steinhoff, Grabowski, and Becker-Mrotzek, 9). Yet there are few empirical studies examining how this disciplinary conversation is constituted and what it values (Scott and Bromley). Bibliometric analysis, which began in the natural sciences and has extended to the social sciences and humanities (Nederhof), provides useful insights into these questions. Our study utilizes this method to examine the authors and the sources cited in the first twelve issues of JoSch: Journal der Schreibberatung [JoSch: Journal of Writing Consultation,¹ hereafter JoSch], the premier journal of writing studies published in Germany. Founded in 2010 at the writing center of the European University at Viadrina in Frankfurt Oder, JoSch is the second German-language publication dedicated to research on writing and its administration in German-speaking countries, after Zeitschrift Schreiben (European Journal of Writing²) was founded in Switzerland in 2006. In 2015, JoSch was named an official affiliate of Germany’s Gesellschaft für Schreibdidaktik und Schreibforschung [Society for Writing Didactics and Writing Research], the association of the country’s broad range of writing professionals. Members of the organization now automatically receive a journal subscription, making it an increasingly important venue of scholarly publication (Gesellschaft). Our quantitative analysis of citation and authorship practices in JoSch provides insight into the shape of Germanic writing studies at this important juncture, in which the field is deeply engaged in discipline-building. This discipline-building serves as as a strategy for securing the long-term future of writing centers while funding continues to remain precarious at most universities (Girgensohn, Innovation; Girgensohn and Peters; Lahm). The emergence of disciplinary organizations and journals and the first tenured and tenure-track professorships in the past year (Hochschulteam) are developments that promise to help secure the standing of the discipline in the higher education landscape.
Because we believe that comparative analysis would be valuable, we consciously replicate the methodology of Neal Lerner, who evaluated citation and authorship patterns in The Writing Center Journal (67; hereafter WCJ). While not an exact match in focus, these two journals have a similar orientation and are leading journals in their regions. We also compare our findings to relevant global and US-based bibliometric studies in order to further contextualize our study. The study published here is the second half of a two-part comparative study, drawing on the same dataset. In the first part, published in June 2019 in JoSch, we focused on categories not included in Lerner’s study in order to capture what we hypothesized would be unique features of the Germanic case (Scott and Bromley). Our data from that study provided empirical evidence confirming emerging disciplinary self-understandings represented in the growing number of genesis narratives published in the region (Breuer and Schindler; Frank and Lahm; Girgensohn, Innovation; Lahm; Ruhmann). In JoSch we found the Germanic scholarly conversation was indeed regionally distinct, with German-language sources constituting the overwhelming majority of all citations since the very first issues. At the same time, the transatlantic history of the field was also represented insofar as US-based sources constituted the second largest body of research cited. Furthermore, we found evidence to support the field’s sense of the growing importance of peer tutoring to the field’s ethos. Overall, peer tutors published more often in JoSch than appears to be the case in WCJ. And finally, unlike WCJ, where the article (and particularly articles published in WCJ) predominate, we found that materials published in book form (including single and co-authored books, edited collections, and guidebooks) are the principal genre for citations in JoSch, with guidebooks, which have been central since the field’s founding in the region, appearing to grow in importance (Scott and Bromley 85-6).
In this article, we focus on the categories directly captured in Lerner’s 2014 study, finding important differences and similarities in both regional scholarly conversations.³ We examine citation frequency and source type as well as author collaboration and sex, as these were among the most striking of Lerner’s findings about WCJ. In JoSch, we find a more disciplinarily diverse cluster of highly-cited authors and sources, forming a broad core of knowledge suggestive of the field’s interdisciplinarity and the expansive missions of writing centers in the region. We also find a stronger ethos of collaboration as seen through robust co-authorship and strong representation of female authors. If JoSch is any measure, Germanic writing centers are driving interdisciplinary conversations about writing and its administration, making them less siloed than their US counterparts. Our findings are particularly relevant to readers of Praxis because they illuminate trends in scholarship in a region with the most writing centers outside North America (Bromley) while adding to the growing body of research investigating non-US-based writing centers that has long been of interest to this journal’s readers (e.g., Chang; Kyle; Scheiber and Đurić; Turner).
Background
To situate our study, we begin with a brief overview of the history and role of writing centers in German-speaking countries. Since the first center outside North America was founded in Bielefeld, Germany in 1993, writing centers have experienced exponential growth in this region in the past decade, with over 70 centers and initiatives currently operating. In tandem with this growth, the founding and expansion of three professional organizations based in Austria (2009), Germany (2013), and Switzerland (2005) has fostered national and international exchange through conferences, workshops, special interest groups, publications, and position papers (Call for Papers; Girgensohn, Innovation; Universität Bielefeld Schreiblabor).
According to Katrin Girgensohn (Innovation), one of the newly appointed tenured professors in the emerging field of Schreibwissenschaft (writing studies), these developments have contributed to the growth of writing centers for a number of reasons. The region’s three professional organizations have raised consciousness for writing center work. Furthermore, the growing demand for university degrees in the current economy and the opening of universities to a larger and more diverse student body has increased demand for academic support resources. These resources are easier to fund in the wake of the Bologna Reforms, whereby universities have shifted their missions “from teaching to learning,” emphasizing the kind of agentive, student-centered learning fostered in writing centers and their writing-in-the-disciplines partnerships with departments. Most universities have identified writing as a key competency, which means it must be explicitly taught and supported. Finally, the shortening of degree programs in Europe and revision of curricula to include shorter writing assignments along the way means that student struggles with writing are often visible sooner and likely to lead more quickly to attrition, motivating universities to address perceived problems sooner (see Girgensohn, Innovation 54). All of these changes in the higher education landscape have strengthened the institutional role of writing centers. It’s important to remember that, as Tracy Santa, a founding member of the European Writing Centers Association, once put it, “the writing center is the writing program” in the region (3). Typically, the lack of general education requirements like first-year writing and the absence of departmental structures for the emerging field of writing studies have made writing centers institutional homes for advancing research and practices about the teaching, tutoring, and administration of support for writing across the curriculum.
Given this history, what might citation and authorship practices reveal about this regionally distinct field? In terms of authorship, we wanted to learn more about who is driving scholarly conversations in the field and how collaborative this highly-networked research culture is, as measured through the frequency of co-authorship. In addition, authors’ citations are the “mechanism which both demonstrates the advance of knowledge and distributes credit for priority, emphasizing that research is embedded in a literature and that writers are linked into wider social networks,” as Ken Hyland and Feng Jiang argue (1). We agree about the value of exercising what Chris Anson and Christiane Donahue call an “almost anthropological sensitivity to context and the cultural and national sources of practice” (23) when engaging in transnational research, Yet, we find that comparative bibliometric research is a valuable method because it allows us to engage in a “distant reading” of the field (e.g., Moretti), identifying the outlines of broader trends in disciplinary cultures we might otherwise miss.
Methodology
While bibliometric analysis is commonplace in the sciences, such analyses are much less often undertaken in the humanities (Ardanuy 751), the result, perhaps, of so much humanities scholarship encapsulated in books rather than articles, which lend themselves more readily to such analysis (Archambault and Larivière 251).While evaluating a journal’s authors and their citations quantitatively highlights a field’s key features, many scholars undertaking this work use unique methodologies, making it difficult to replicate or compare results across studies (Bornmann and Daniel 45). Because we wanted to see what a comparative study would reveal, we use Neal Lerner’s methodology for evaluating author and citation practices in WCJ (68) in our study of JoSch, adding categories to capture this context’s unique features.⁴ We present here the data we believe of most interest to Praxis readers: our replication of some of Lerner’s key findings on citation number, type, and frequency and author collaboration and sex.⁵ We examined every piece appearing in JoSch from issue 1 (2010) to issue 12 (2016). Each issue includes four types of articles—tutoring methods and techniques, writing and writing tutoring research, field reports, and book reviews – as well as editors’ introductions, conference calls, and announcements. Using a single Excel spreadsheet, we recorded every article and every author. For each article, we recorded every citation in its references, including the author(s), title, location where it appeared, press, and year. To do the counting featured in the results below, we used Excel’s Pivot Table function. We focus here on the 100 pieces with sources, which contained 818 citations; 26 pieces did not include citations, including editors’ introductions, calls for papers, and field reports. To determine each JoSch author’s sex, we examined the short biography at the end of their contribution (where we often were able to determine sex through the use of the author’s own pronouns or, as most articles were in German, via the use of noun suffixes), while internet searches enabled us to determine the sex of cited authors; though this method is very obviously limited, we adopt it from previous studies, recognizing the need for the development of more nuanced and inclusive methods for capturing sex and gender identities.
Results and Discussion
Below, we share highlights about both JoSch authors and their cited sources, drawing on literature examining citation patterns and authorship, comparing our findings to Lerner’s 2014 WCJ study as well as other bibliometric analyses when relevant. We note that our study (of 100 articles and 818 sources cited over seven years) is far smaller than Lerner’s study (of 241 articles and 4095 cited sources over thirty years). In JoSch, we uncover a field with disciplinarily-diverse authors and sources; central, primarily book-based texts; growing co-authorship; and strong representation of female authors.
Most Commonly Cited Authors
We begin by examining the authors of the 818 sources cited in JoSch, to provide a window into whose ideas and which texts are most influential in this field, before investigating the authors themselves. This is the reverse of Lerner’s presentation, but as the authors and sources most often cited in the region may be new to some readers, beginning with the larger disciplinary conversation provides useful context for readers. Evaluating which authors are most commonly cited may be particularly useful in the German context, where authors publish more frequently than their international peers (Aiston and Jung 209)—so perhaps writers in this region consider citing specific individuals rather than specific pieces. We highlight below the ten authors most frequently cited in JoSch (see table 1). We note that the top seven authors—Gerd Bräuer, Otto Kruse, Katrin Girgensohn, Kirsten Schindler, Nora Peters, Gabriela Ruhmann, and Franziska Liebetanz—appear, as authors or co-authors, in more than 2% of all citations. Pieces by the top ten authors cited in JoSch comprise 26% of all sources cited in the journal, while pieces written by the top 20 authors comprise 37% of all citations. In comparison, Lerner (with his much larger and longer dataset) finds that the top ten authors cited in WCJ comprise just 15% of all cited sources, and the top 20 authors account for only 22% of all citations (86).
At first blush, then, JoSch authors seem to rely more strongly on a core set of cited authors than WCJ authors. However, with further investigation, we see that in WCJ, there are a three authors that dominate: Muriel Harris (with 2.9% of citations), Stephen North (2.7% of citations), and Kenneth Bruffee (2.3%), while the rest of the top authors have 1.2% or fewer of citations (calculated from Lerner 86). Works by these key authors play an outsized presence in WCJ articles. While each of these writers contributed multiple pieces that are meaningful for writing center work, each has a single most-cited piece through which we can see their impact. North’s 1984 foundational article, “The Idea of a Writing Center,” is cited in 29% of all WCJ articles, while Bruffee’s 1984 “Peer Tutoring and the Conversation of Mankind” is cited in 11% WCJ articles; Harris, who has published many well-cited pieces, is cited in at least 9% of WCJ articles, with the most often cited piece her 1986 Teaching One-to-One (calculated from Lerner 87). Lerner demonstrates that North, Bruffee, and Harris have strongly influenced the work of WCJ authors (84-86). In JoSch, though, we find a broader cluster of highly-cited authors and sources, forming a bigger core of researchers whose work authors can draw from. The cited authors also have a wide range of disciplinary training, coming to writing research from fields like education, psychology, cultural studies, linguistics, philosophy, literary studies, creative writing, and German as a foreign language.
Number and Frequency of Citations
Moving from highly cited authors, we investigate how many citations each article includes and how often specific sources are cited. While we see a growing number of citations per article and most sources cited just once, we also see a shared core of authors and texts emerging.
As in WCJ, in JoSch, the number of citations per article over time has expanded. The first issue of JoSch (2010) has an average of 3.7 sources cited per article, while the last issue of JoSch that we examined (2016) has an average of 10 sources cited per article—a 170% increase. In WCJ, Lerner finds an 84% increase in the number of sources cited per article, from 11.6 in 1980 to 21.3 in 2009 (78). Derek Mueller likewise finds more than double the average number of citations in College Composition and Communication (CCC) from 1987 to 2011 (199). We note that there is a real distinction in length of articles between WCJ and JoSch: for JoSch, the longest article accepted in 2016 (when our study concludes) was 22,000 characters including spaces—about 3,000 words, akin to the length of The Writing Lab Newsletter (WLN) articles, while WCJ accepts submissions up to 8,000 words. Comparing the percentage increase (rather than the number of sources cited) allows us to see commonalities despite this difference. A potential explanation for the shorter length pieces in JoSch is the need of a new field wanting accessible information for a range of experience levels, analogous to the early years of WLN. JoSch recently extended the length of its research articles to 38,000 characters including spaces—a bit over 6,000 words (JoSch). This shift to longer-format pieces reflects the growing professionalization and the maturation of research in the field, where more practitioners are engaging in research and other professional activities; this change certainly makes it likely that the number of cited sources will continue to increase. The increase in the number of citations in both journals over time may signify the maturation of the field; authors are expected to engage a scholarly conversation as they pose and answer questions and theorize practice.
Another window into seeing what a field values is how often each source is cited. Of the 818 sources cited in JoSch, 74% (607) of sources are cited just once, while 4% (32 sources) are cited twice, and 5% (40 sources) are cited three times or more. In WCJ, Lerner finds that 81% of sources were cited just once; he calls these “orphan citations,” not taken up as the field moves forward (76). Perhaps the somewhat higher percentage of sources cited more frequently in JoSch means that, even in the relatively early days of German writing studies, a core set of work informs this growing community. However, we note that both journals have a very large proportion of one-time citations. In CCC, Mueller reflects on changing patterns of author citations, drawing on those writing about items’ popularity (and lack thereof) in economics and culture, using the term “the long tail” to describe the lesser-known, extensive back catalog of artists and authors compared to the bestsellers; in his 25-year overview of CCC citations, Mueller finds that the long tail of one-time authors is getting longer over time, with 48% of authors cited just once in pieces published between 2007-2011, compared to just 32% of authors cited just once in pieces published from 1987 to 1991 (216). While Mueller is looking at authors, rather than individual sources, we note that both JoSch and WCJ may be outside the mainstream in terms of the high percentage of one-time citations.
Cited Source Types and Most Commonly Cited Sources
JoSch authors primarily draw their sources from recent books with diverse lenses, and they frequently cite authors with a range of disciplinary backgrounds. We highlight the top nine sources cited in JoSch: two journals, three edited books, and four guidebooks (see table 2). Four additional sources are cited five times, the beginning of the long, steady decline in number of citations per source. JoSch, like WCJ, is the most commonly referenced source in the journal. However, while 2.2% of citations in JoSch are of that journal, in WCJ, 12.5% of all citations are of that journal (calculated from Lerner 67, 80). This is a marked difference, which can in part be explained by the relative newness of JoSch and the longevity of WCJ. However, Lerner notes that WCJ authors, in citing the journal publishing their own work so frequently, “run the risk of casting the field as largely talking to itself, not to be taken seriously by related and affiliated fields” (68). JoSch authors, in contrast, cite sources from a wide range of disciplines, including writing center studies, discourse on writing pedagogies, German as a foreign language, and other fields. In addition to JoSch, five other sources appear in more than 1% of all citations: Writing: Foundational Texts on Theory, Pedagogy, and Consultations (edited by Dreyfürst and Sennewald); Writing Consultations, A Model for the Future (co-authored by Grieshammer, Liebetanz, Peters, and Zegenhagen); Teaching Writing, Learning Writing: An Introduction (co-authored by Girgensohn and Sennewald); Writing as a Key Competence: Concepts, Methods, and Approaches for Writing Consultations and Writing Instruction at University (edited by Kruse, Jakobs, and Ruhmann); and Zeitschrift Schreiben; of these, just Zeitschrift Schreiben is a journal, while two are co-authored books and two are edited collections, one of which is the only text explicitly focused on writing center work. All but two of these editors and authors are among the most highly cited authors (see table 1). The two exceptions are Stephanie Dreyfürst and Eva-Maria Jakobs; Dreyfürst’s co-edited collection with Nadja Sennewald, Writing: Foundational Texts on Theory, Pedagogy, and Consultations includes many oft-cited chapters, while Jakobs is a well-known scholar in linguistics and technology. In stark comparison, the most commonly cited sources for WCJ authors are journals, with WCJitself the most often cited source, followed by College English (6.3% of citations, including references to Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center”), Writing Lab Newsletter (5.4%); and College Composition and Communication (4.6%); the top three edited collections comprise just 4% of all citations, while the top four books comprise just 2% of all citations, with all but one of these texts explicitly writing center focused (calculated from Lerner 80-81).
The citations of JoSch authors principally come from book-based sources and encompass 72% of all citations, including edited collections (29%), single-authored and co-authored books (26%), and guidebooks (17%); journal articles comprise just 17% of sources, while online resources (7.6%) and other types of sources (4.3%) are the remainder. The most commonly cited texts by JoSch authors come from a wide range of disciplines; while they include two field-specific writing studies journals, they also include texts focused on theory and practice of teaching, tutoring, and learning writing, exploring writing from psychology, as well as working through writer’s block and strategies for professional writing. There is no one central text that dominates citations, unlike WCJ, where Stephen North’s “The Idea of a Writing Center” is cited in nearly a third of the journal’s articles, reflecting that that journals’ authors seek to “appeal to the inside reader” rather than to a more diverse audience (Lerner 92).
The work of eight of the ten most often cited authors (see table 1) is included in the most-cited sources (see table 2). The two exceptions are Gerd Bräuer and Kirsten Schindler. Bräuer, at the top of the most cited authors list, has authored chapters in several of the most cited books and journals, even though he is not among the primary authors or editors of these sources. Schindler, who has published widely in writing studies in German and English, has work included in both highly cited journals, JoSch and Zeitschrift Schreiben. One striking feature is that two of the top three most cited sources were published in the last three years investigated: Writing: Foundational Texts on Theory, Pedagogy, and Consultations and Writing Consultations, A Model for the Future. Perhaps we are witnessing early scholarly incorporations of what will become classic texts. All but one of the most commonly cited sources is written in German. Publishing in the national language for national or regionally-oriented scholarship is common in humanities and social sciences outside of Anglo-Saxon countries (Nederhof 84). Citing German sources may also reflect JoSch’s audience, which includes peer tutors. More importantly, perhaps, it provides further evidence that the scholarly conversation about writing is regionally distinct, as only one of the most frequently cited sources is published in English.
A focus on research appearing in books, edited collections, and guidebooks puts JoSch authors in good company with many humanities and social science authors: Nederhof’s 2006 review of bibliometric studies finds that books and book chapters comprise over 60% of citations in sociology, philosophy, literature, and fine arts (85). In contrast, Lerner shows that WCJ authors more regularly cite journal articles, with pieces from the top five journals comprising 30% of all citations (calculated from 76-80). While Lerner finds that a majority of citations in WCJ since 1995 draw specifically on writing center sources, with WCJ itself comprising over 40% of these citations (82-83), the most frequently cited sources in JoSch showcase a much broader perspective, focusing not only on writing consultations, but also on writing processes, writing blocks, and writing pedagogy. Both journals likewise publish pieces about writing centers and writing research generally. Because the writing center is at the heart of all things writing in this region, from consultations to instruction to research, that JoSch authors draw from diverse disciplines is no surprise.
Co-Authorship
We end our analysis by examining the authors who contributed the 100 pieces with citations to JoSch from 2010 to 2016. We found 103 unique authors for these 100 pieces. 81 authors publish in JoSch just once (79% of authors) with 22 authors publishing multiple times (21% of authors). This puts JoSch in line with WCJ, where 83% of authors contribute to the journal just once (Lerner 75). Lerner points to the publication expectations for many writing center professionals, and the concern that WCJ might not be prestigious enough for multiple pieces that lead to tenure and promotion. While there are proportionally not many permanent academic staff positions and, at the time of this article’s completion, only a few tenure-line positions situated in writing centers in the German-speaking world, it may be that other locations for publication are more beneficial to authors, including the many oft-cited edited collections and guidebooks.
Looking at co-authorship, we find potential growth in line with US and bibliometric studies. Our study also reveals a largely female field, likewise analogous to US and global studies in this area. Writing studies has long had a collaborative ethos (e.g., Lunsford and Ede; Harris; see also Schindler and Wolfe 160) and promoting exchange among diverse authors has been a focus of JoSch from the publication’s first issue (Kowal et al. 2), which included an introduction with a reflective metaphor and a collaboratively written article to showcase a range of possible approaches to publishing in the journal. Of the 100 articles with citations, we found 31% of pieces with two or more authors (see fig. 1).
Because we evaluate twelve issues over just seven years, it is hard to know if there has been a shift in co-authorship in JoSch. However, we note that the first two issues had just 23% of pieces co-authored, while the last two issues had 45% of pieces co-authored. Thus, we see co-authorship increasing over a relatively short time span. This information aligns JoSch with other research on co-authorship. In US-based writing studies, Lerner found in his analysis of articles from 2000-2009 that 33% of pieces in WPA had at least two authors, as did 26% of pieces in WCJ; he also found co-authorship in WCJ increasing from 1980 to 2009 (74). In fact, increasing co-authorship is part of a broader trend across academia. Vincent Larivière et al.’s study of collaboration practices shows co-authorship increasing worldwide regardless of discipline and country; focusing on Canada, which parallels global authorship trends, this study determines that some fields have higher co-authorship rates than others (e.g. 4-18% of articles in history, literature, law are co-authored, as are 40-60% of articles in education, management, and psychology; 5-8). Co-authorship in writing studies seems be somewhere in between these humanities and social sciences fields, with about a third of pieces co-authored – not as fully collaborative as the field’s ethos might suggest but potentially moving in that direction. JoSch’s co-authorship rate, which has increased to nearly half, appears to be on the forefront of the global trend in increasing co-authorship in humanities and social sciences. However, it is important to note that this increase in co-authorship may be due, at least in part, to these authors seeking to increase their productivity in their efforts to establish the new discipline of writing studies. Whatever its roots, the robust co-authorship seen in JoSch is more reflective of the collaborative ethos in writing studies than US-based journals.
Authorship by Sex
Just as authorship differs by discipline, authorship also differs by sex (Aiston and Jung 210). While we acknowledge that gender and biological sex are distinct, and identities may be non-binary and fluid, following other bibliometric studies, we categorize authorship by male and female; this categorization also replicates Lerner’s study. When citing other studies, we use the terminology used in that study. Empirical data about writing program and writing center directors and visitors highlight the field as distinctly female in the US. The 2014 National Census of Writing finds that two-thirds of US writing program and writing center administrators are female (National Census). 1995 and 2009 studies of writing program administrators reveals similar results, with two-thirds female administrators; the earlier study shows that female administrators were less likely to have tenure than their male counterparts (Barr-Ebest 53, 61; Charlton and Rose 118). A 2004 writing center study finds 88% of writing center directors were female, only 32% of which were in tenured or tenure-track posts; in contrast, males were just 12% of writing center directors, of which 43% were in tenured or tenure-track posts (Nicolas 13). Turning to writing center visitors, a 2007 study demonstrates that two-thirds of writing center visitors were female at a school with 51% female students (Leit et al.). Together, these studies show that in the US, writing centers and writing programs are places that are largely occupied by females and led by female administrators working in positions of less prestige than their male counterparts.
Because writing center work is often seen as “gendered” work in the US (Nicolas 13), and noting that the majority of WCJ authors are female (Lerner 76), we explore the sex of JoSch authors. We find that, of the 103 individuals who contributed pieces to JoSch, 72 (70%) are female while 31 (30%) are male. Comparing distribution by authorship category between JoSchand WCJ, JoSch authors lead WCJ authors in collaboration (see fig. 1). In JoSch, females authored 62% of single-authored texts and 68% of all texts, while males authored 32% of single-authored texts and 26% of all texts. In JoSch, female authors work somewhat more collaboratively than males, similar to Lerner’s finding in WCJ (76).
The relationship between sex, gender, and authorship is complex, and we wonder the extent to which authorship in JoSchreflects membership in the field. In most fields, male authors tend to be cited more often than female authors, due to a combination of factors including males’ higher likelihood to cite themselves and fellow males compared to female authors, as well as lower publication rates among females (Tahamtan et al. 1211). As a result, there may be a higher proportion of male scholars seen in these authors compared to the field as a whole. Certainly, from our own experiences, attendance at European, US, and international conferences, workshops, and institutes highlights a predominantly female field, though we also recognize that conference attendance is likewise only the purview of a select group. A 2011 study of authorship in the social sciences exposes a paradox: in most fields, women publish less than their organizational membership would predict, but in some fields where the proportion of women was high, women author publications at similar or higher rates than their male colleagues (Bird 935). It is uncertain whether this is the case in this region. Certainly, comparing the sex of members of the three Germanic writing organizations to the sex of JoSch authors could add to this multifaceted picture.
Conclusions
Our bibliometric analysis of author and citation patterns in JoSch reveals that writing research in this journal includes increasing collaboration in authorship, fewer “orphan” citations, more diverse central texts, and more focus on the book than WCJ. Together these findings suggest JoSch showcases a capacious understanding of what constitutes writing centers and writing studies in a scholarly conversation driven largely by females. As seen in the analysis of the most frequently cited sources, the journal features a diverse range of research on writing centers, pedagogies, practices, and administration. It does not, as its title suggests (JoSch: Journal of Writing Consultation), focus exclusively on tutoring sessions. This is a notable departure from the US, where conversations about writing programs and writing centers are often siloed in separate journals and practitioners attend separate conferences, despite calls for more collaboration (e.g., Balester and McDonald; Ianetta et al.). Our study suggests that this siloing of disciplinary conversations in writing centers is not universal, but rather a feature of the disciplinary history of writing administration in the US. We suspect that we would find a similar expansiveness if we conducted a bibliometric analysis of the first Germanic journal dedicated to writing research, Zeitschrift Schreiben.
Our study raises a larger question. JoSch is not only driving conversations about writing in the region as Germany’s flagship publication; its cited themes and status as an affiliate journal of the German Society for Writing Didactics and Research place it at the very center of disciplinary conversations in the emerging field of Schreibwissenschaft, or writing studies. If one value of transnational research, as Donahue has argued, is that it has the potential to “adapt, resituate, [and] perhaps decenter our contexts” in the US (215), what might it mean for writing professionals in the US to reimagine writing center research as not just inclusive of research on writing centers, but as at the very core of the discipline of writing studies? Our colleagues, published and cited in the German journal JoSch, offer one possible model, inviting readers to imagine the ways in which writing center research, broadly defined, can generate perspectives central to the identity and increasing institutionalization of writing studies as a field.
Notes
1. All translations are the co-authors’ own unless otherwise indicated.
2. This is the journal’s own translation. A literal translation of the title would be Journal of Writing.
3. We thank the editors and reviewers of this piece for suggesting that we better situate our findings about authors in broader disciplinary conversations, that we strengthen connections between our findings and our conclusions, and that we nuance our discussion about gender, sex, and authorship.
4. These additional categories include the language of the piece cited, whether the piece was translated from another language, the location of the press, as well as the author’s institutional affiliation and whether authors were peer tutors at the time of publication. See Scott and Bromley for these findings and further information.
5. Lerner’s study, written in 2014, uses the term “gender” to define the authorship category he is investigating, but uses male and female when describing and categorizing authors’ contributions. Lerner notes that his “method for determining an author's gender is admittedly crude,” based on an author’s name and whether he had met them personally; he acknowledges that his “gender assignment might not reflect the reality of these authors’ self perceptions” (75). Because we sought to replicate Lerner's methodology for comparative purposes, we use his method here, while acknowledging that this way of categorizing authorship is binary and thus misses important information. In this piece, we update the terminology to reflect that Lerner’s method categorizes authors by sex (male and female), not by gender identity (men and women). When we reference other bibliometric studies, we replicate the terminology used in those pieces. In cases of bibliometric reviews, which capture a variety of studies, we also use the terms used by the authors, though we note that these overviews include studies that use different categories. Sometimes, especially in earlier studies, gender (e.g., women and men) and sex (e.g., female and male) are used interchangably. In these cases, we use sex for consistency.
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Appendix
Table 1: Authors cited most often in JoSch, 2010-2016
Table 2: Sources most often cited in JoSch, 2010-2016 (translations are co-authors, except as needed)
Fig. 1: Type of authorship by sex in JoSch (2010-2016) and Writing Center Journal (1980-2009) %
