Two years ago, my colleague Stephen Woods approached me about collaborating on an article1 extending research he’d already performed about serials use in doctoral sociology work. He and another colleague, John Russell, had developed a methodology for determining “CDRank” based on the number of times a journal was citated across a dissertation dataset and the number/% of dissertations it was cited in.2 On his sabbatical, Stephen had mined citations in 518 sociology dissertations from Big...
