But the authors of the article I cited raise a very crucial point in demonstrating that citation practices differ across disciplines and subfields within disciplines. It surely makes no sense to rank a journal higher, or keep subscribing to it, because scholars in that subfield, like international relations, simply cite more than their colleagues in other subfields. (If this were the main criterion, I suppose law journals would always rank highly because they contain massive numbers of citations, with many pages having more footnotes than text, though of course we all know that they are not really peer reviewed, being edited by law students.) This is one among several reasons these authors put forward to argue for using reputational analysis, too, in order to make up in part for the shortcomings of pure citational analysis. The reductio ad absurdum of citational analysis would be works like "The Bell Curve," which received a tremendous amount of attention, most of it quite negative, or articles touting "cold fusion," an equally controversial topic, or "intelligent design." One would surely have to use scare quotes in describing any of these kinds of works as having "value." Sandy Thatcher Penn State University Press