The rise in motorcycle injuries and fatalities over the past decade has placed greater emphasis on the role that State motorcycle safety programs may play in making roadways safer for riders. From programs targeted at motorcyclists to comprehensive training for law enforcement and court personnel, State programs are tasked with implementing and monitoring a range of safety policies and procedures. This report describes the current efforts States are undertaking to promote motorcycle safety, drawing on a survey received from State Highway Safety Offices (SHSOs) and State motorcycle safety administrators (SMSAs) in 45 States. The results presented in this report provide a picture of recent accomplishments made by States related to motorcycle safety. The data presented are based on State-level, self-reported information.

PROBLEM:After decreasing to a historic low in 1997, motorcycle crash-related fatalities are increasing. Although causes remain unclear, motorcycle rider education and licensing play key roles in reducing motorcycle crashes and injuries. Yet, little is known about what constitutes effective rider training and licensing. This study develops a model of best practices in motorcycle rider education and licensing and combines primary and secondary data to identify states that most closely adhere to this model. Evidence on the validity of the model is also examined.METHOD:States were rated along three areas of best practices: (a) program administration; (b) rider education; and (c) licensing based on 2001 data collected for a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)-sponsored study.RESULTS:Results indicate wide variation in states' adherence to best practices; several states meet most, others very few. When the areas of best practices are considered separately, a state tends to behave similarly on all three. Initial evidence supports the validity of the model, with high best practices states having the lowest rates of motorcycle fatalities.IMPACT ON TRAFFIC SAFETY:As motorcycle-related crashes increase and state and federal support for rider education programs diminishes, it is critical that states identify deficiencies in their program and learn from successful states about efficient, cost-effective strategies for increasing best practices in motorcycle rider education and licensing.

Irwin Kirsch, Kentaro Yamamoto, Norma Norris, Donald Rock, Ann Jungeblut, and Patricia O’Reilly Educational Testing Service Anne Campbell Dine College Lynn Jenkins Wordsworth Writing and Editing Andrew Kolstad National Center for Education Statistics Martha Berlin, Leyla Mohadjer, Joseph Waksberg, Huseyin Goksel, John Burke, Susan Rieger, James Green, and Merle Klein Westat, Inc. Peter Mosenthal Syracuse University Stephane Baldi American Institutes for Research

I assess competing arguments on the determinants of scientists' citation patterns by developing a new approach to the multivariate study of citations that builds upon a network-analytic model. Using data on articles about celestial masers, an astrophysics research area, logistic regressions with robust standard errors examine the extent to which characteristics of both potentially citing and potentially cited papers influence the probability that a citation exists between the papers. The results identify significant positive, effects of cited article cognitive content and cited article quality, providing support for a normative interpretation of the allocation of citations in which citations reflect payment of intellectual debt. In contrast, indicators of an author's position within the stratification structure of science fail to significantly improve the fit of the model, and thus provide no support for the social constructivist claim that citations are rhetorical tools of persuasion. Furthermore, the lack of effects of social ties between citing and cited authors provides little support for the argument that authors who know one another are more likely to cite one another's work. Overall, these results suggest that authors are likely to cite those articles most relevant to their work in terms of intellectual content, and seem little concerned with the characteristics of authors who write them.

In his influential article `Networks of Scientific Papers', Derek Price used data on the N-rays reference network to exemplify his argument that natural science research literatures overcite recently published papers. In subsequent work, he further argued that this tendency is weaker in social science literatures, and may be entirely absent in scholarly literatures in the humanities. We report results from a replication of Price's N-rays analysis and data for three additional reference networks: special relativity theory, spatial diffusion modeling and role algebra analysis. Our analyses indicate that the N-rays reference network provides little support for Price's conjectures, but that those for the other three areas are generally consistent with them. We find, however, that the two social science literatures exhibit structures more closely resembling the pattern that Price claimed to be characteristic of the humanities, and suggest that the variety of structures that reference networks exhibit may be greater than Price anticipated.

A central assumption of much of the previous research on race differences is that the process by which Blacks and Whites advance in the workplace is race blind so that if Blacks and Whites had the same amount of education and job experience and were located across the same bureaucratized structures, the gap in Black-White attainment in the workplace would disappear. The authors argue that to understand the systematic differences in Black-White outcomes in the workplace, we need to reexamine this assumption. The authors develop a theoretical argument for the existence of race-specific models of attainment that builds on Kanter's concept of “homosocial reproduction.” They then test this argument by estimating whether the determinants of promotion differ by race, using a nationally representative sample of U.S. workers and their employing organizations. Their findings indicate that the determinants of promotion systematically differ for Blacks and Whites.

In this article I argue that quality ratings can be conceptualized as reflecting the extent to which departments are visible to outside raters. Using cross-sectional as well as panel data on sociology departments from the two latest surveys of graduate education published by the National Research Council in 1982 and 1995, I explain departmental quality ratings in terms of measures that reflect a department’s visibility, such as its faculty productivity, size, age, and location at an elite-status university. While the results of the cross-sectional and the longitudinal models tell different stories, the two are not incompatible. Specifically, both models suggest strong effects of departmental size and age. By comparison, the estimated effects of faculty productivity and location at an elite-status university are weaker and significant only in the cross-sectional model.