College and Research Libraries 86 College & Research Libraries ening skills, promotion of potential candi- dates. She concludes that mobility for these individuals is severely limited by the way in which academic administrators are chosen. Selection from the ranks of faculty may well not be the best way to acquire competent administrators. Similarly, movement from community college ad- ministration to a college or university, or from a black college to a comprehensive university is very limited, and is particu- larly discriminatory to women and minor- ities whose administrative credentials might otherwise qualify them for serious consideration. The editors list the following five-point agenda for the future. (1) Commitment to the advancement of women and minori- ties has diminished; new intervention strategies need to be designed. (2) Finan- cial support for new strategies is crucial; where it is to come from must be ad- dressed. (3) Longitudinal studies of both men and women administrators are needed to provide information about fac- tors which hinder or promote advance- ment. (4) The reward structure and the status structure of higher education may change dramatically as the issue of compa- rable worth is addressed. (5) The first gen- eration of leaders of the organized move- ment to advance women and mi- norities-among whom are the contribu- tors to this volume-have largely moved on to other stages of their careers, and a new generation of leaders has yet to be identified. This is an important source book on the status of organized efforts to advance women. It is essential reading for women and other library administrators who want to further their understanding of col- leges and universities as social organiza- tions. As a librarian, one finds that the po- sition of women in academic admin- istration, in general, is not unlike their po- . sition in libraries, and that the barriers and the strategies for overcoming them are much the same.-foanne R. Euster, San Francisco State University, California. Cronin, Blaise. The Citation Process: The Role and Significance of Citations in Scien- January 1985 tific Communication. London: Taylor Graham, 1984. 103pp. £10. ISBN 0- 947568-01-8. The use of citations is a crucial part of the creation and dissemination of information in both the natural and social sciences. Some sociologists of knowledge (the nor- mative school) have held with Robert K. Merton that the citation process, like other aspects of scholarly communication, is conducted with widespread adherence to commonly accepted standards. But more recent work has contended that scholars, in their lust for rewards and recognition and with normal human carelessness and inconsistency, usually fail to adhere to standards. (The latter view is called the microsociological or positivist.) Blaise Cronin's The Citation Process re- views the controversy between the nor- mative and microsociological schools. Most of the book summarizes theoretical arguments and perspectives that have been brought to bear on various aspects of the controversy. While many of the argu- ments of the opposing sides are backed by powerful rhetoric, none are fully persua- sive. All finally fail, Cronin reminds read- ers several times, because no student of the citation process can ascertain the moti- vation that inspired a citation at the mo- ment it was made. In his review of the literature, Cronin re- counts some interesting research. He points to studies that high citation counts of the work of individual scientists have correlated positively with recognized quality indicators such as honorific awards and Nobel laureateships. At the same time, he describes research that con- tends that between one-fifth and two- thirds of citations are not essential to the papers that refer to them. Perhaps most revealing is his own experiment that tests for the degree of commonality of views on when an author should cite. In his experi- ment he distributed ''unpublished journal articles denuded of their original citations to carefully selected samples of readers, asking them to suggest where citations were required." This resulted in "some evidence of a shared understanding as to how and where citations should be affixed to a scholarly journal article.'' The experi- ment, however, did not support the spec- ulations that citation practice is universal enough to allow for future assignment of citations to papers by some automated mechanism. Of particular interest to librarians is a discussion of the work of Ben Ami Lipetz, of Carolyn 0. Frost, and of E. B. Duncan et al. who have attempted to classify the dif- ferent functions of citations in order to en- hance the effectiveness of citation indexes . in information retrieval. Cronin points out their classifications do not include a cate- gory of citations that are perfunctory or unessential. In view of the extensive liter- ature covered, it is somewhat surprising that Cronin does not treat the work (most of it done by librarians) that shows that ci- tations are among the most important means by which scholars learn of the doc- uments that they read in the course of their research. Questionable organization lessens the book's impact. In the next to last chapter Cronin proposes that citations be studied in terms of the quality controllers (journal editors and referees), educators, con- sumers, and producers who are involved in the citation process. This is an original proposal, and the book would have been much stronger had it concluded with this rather than with its reiteration, more or less, of opposing views in the normative- microsociological dispute. But despite its deficient organization and repetition, this is a thorough review of a large body of lit- erature. It explicates a wide variety of viewpoints about the complexity of the ci- tation process, a central aspect of the use of information by scholars.-Stephen E. Wiberley, Jr., University of Illinois at Chicago. Melvil Dewey: The Man and the Classifi- cation. Ed. by Gordon Stevenson and Judith Kramer-Greene. Albany, N.Y.: Forest, 1983. 210p. $10. LC 83-1607. ISBN 0-910608-34-2. The seven papers and one reminiscence contained in this volume were delivered in 1981 at a seminar held at the School of Librarianship and Information Science of the State University of New York at AI- Recent Publications 87 bany. The seminar marked the fiftieth an- niversary of Melvil Dewey's death, and was sponsored by three agencies that were significantly influenced by Dewey himself: the Library School, the New York State Library, and the Forest Press Divi- sion of the Lake Placid Education Founda- tion. Although the processes of publication that cause proceedings to be issued two years after the event they record are gen- erally to be deplored, this is one case where a delay may actually have been beneficial. The papers, which are predom- inantly historical in focus, are not at all de- valued by the passage of time, and classifi- cation, a topic of relatively low interest in 1981, is now in the ascendant, as present and potential uses of classification access in an online context are capturing the at- tention of library professionals. This work is not, however, just about classification. It is neither procedural nor theoretical. The first two sections ("Back- ground" and "Dewey: The Man, the In- novator, the Organizer'') are quite simply history: Dewey's personal history, the place of libraries in American society, the changes envisioned by librarians for li- braries, the evolution and growth of the profession, the early years of ALA, and so forth . The papers in Part ITI ("Dewey: The Classification'') are also historically ori- ented, covering the development and dif- fusion of the Decimal Classification sys- tem and the relationship of close classification to open shelf access. They also remind the reader of such basic mat- ters as the place of classification in subject retrieval, and of the battle fought between the classified and dictionary catalogs for predominance in library subject retrieval. The papers are all of high quality and in- terestingly written. Many (especially Dee Garrison's ''Dewey the Apostle,'' Francis Miksa' s ''Melvil Dewey and the Corpo- rate Ideal,'' John Comaromi' s ''The Foun- dations of the Dewey Decimal Classifica- tion: The First Two Editions," and Gordon Stevenson's ''The Classified Cat- alogue of the New York State Library in 1911") achieve the rare feat of informing and engaging, and also inspiring further