Banking (on) different forms of symbolic capital
Blaise Cronin, Debora Shaw · Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2002
Abstract The accrual of symbolic capital is an important aspect of academic life. Successful capital formation is commonly signified by the trappings of scholarly distinction or acknowledged status as a public intellectual. We consider and compare three potential indices of symbolic capital: citation counts, Web hits, and media mentions. Our findings, which are domain specific, suggest that public intellectuals are notable by their absence within the information studies community.