When I chose the topic Politics and Controversies in Sociology, I was not yet aware of the topic of the annual ASA meeting itself. President Feagin's title of oppression, domination, and liberation underscored the degree to which politicization has come to dominate the Association's life and indeed to crowd other concerns from the Association's agenda.

Many people in the SRA dissent from this strong politicization and indeed there has been talk about activating the SRA as a possible alternative organization to the ASA, an organization focused on sociology as an intellectual enterprise rather than a political one. I am of two minds about this project. I am also, as it happens, of two minds about after dinner speeches. It is one thing to give them, it is quite another to attempt to listen to them. Much, then, as I hate to disappoint those of you who have come to hear me say something blunt and outrageous about the follies of the ASA, and much, indeed, as I would like to say something blunt and outrageous about the follies of the ASA, I have chosen instead a milder course, and that is to argue that we have taken the ASA's political shenanigans far too seriously.

We have therefore missed the fact that the spectacle of a bunch of reasonably well-heeled, sinecured academics parading around a pair of fancy hotels and talking about Oppression, domination, and liberation is fundamentally and delightfully silly. Here we are trading students and manuscripts like so many yard-sale fanatics while we bustle importantly from the oppression of women here to the oppression of Puerto Ricans there and the oppression of short people somewhere else. Can anyone in the world take this seriously as political action? Is it not the very epitome of absurdity? If we ask what would be the response of the oppressed masses to a typical sociological paper about oppression, a moment's reflection gives the answer.The oppressed masses would tell us at once, that like them, the sociologists are just trying to get by and feel good. Getting by in a fancy hotel is great, if you can manage. Beats working...

Now if one recognizes that the ASA is, prima facie, an absurd organization, one can hardly then exonerate this august body before which I now appear. When I tell people I'm a member of the SRA, they say "whazzat?" -- I should know I'm in trouble, right there..... Well, I tell them, it's kind of a secret handshake society of the movers and shakers in sociology. They ask, "what does it do?" And I say, Well, it has a dinner once a year at which people drink and eat and sleep through a talk. When I look at people's reaction to this explanation I begin realize that listing the SRA in the honors and awards section of my vita may not be too bright an idea. Maybe I should list it in the obscure achievements section, or even the why exactly do I do this section or even the administrative service section. Like the ASA, the SRA is, in fact, a largely silly organization.

In the spirit of this new approach to the SRA, I wish tonight to push the SRA to follow the ASA in yet another important way. Now one of the important things the ASA does that SRA does not is award prizes. And I have come to believe that if the SRA is to be taken seriously as an organization, it must begin awarding prizes. I have given some thought and analytic time to this problem of prizes, and so without further ado I would like to open the first annual prize session of the SRA. Most of these prizes will be awarded on highly scientific grounds, carefully researched by my assistants. I hope to get their time reimbursed by the SRA, which would solve another difference between the SRA and ASA, by raising the SRA dues to a level commensurate with its absurdity as an organization. The present piddling dues of the SRA cannot support a serious PRIZE establishment, such as we have in the SRA. And that's what a serious organization is for - not politics but prizes.

Now the ASA used to have one prize, as you may recall, the Sorokin award, also known, by the way as the MacIver award, the Distinguished contribution to Scholarship award, the Distinguished Scholarly Publication award, and soon to be known as the Scholarship of Distinguished publication Award, the Distinguished Publication of Scholarship award and the Publication of Scholarship of Distinction Award. In private, of course, it will as always be known as the Sorokin award. ASA is now up to eight awards, which if I may give them their real titles are:

best dissertation
best woman
best black
best PR person
best non-academic
best teacher
best book
most famous person who hasn't won enough prizes yet.

the ASA has in fact canceled some awards, believe it or not anybody who can guess all three of them wins - of course - a prize they are the Stouffer award, the Sydney Spivack award, and the Edeward L. Bernays Foundation Radio-Television Award. only given once, to kurt and Gladys Lang

Of course, most of the prizes in the ASA are given by the sections, which are now, I believe, authorized to give three prizes apiece. There are now 40 sections, for a potential total of 120, of which the sections give an actual total of 68 awards. So there is plenty of room for expansion. From the quantitative point of view I can't help pointint out that that's 68 award committees, with perhaps seven members apiece, which means that about one out of every twenty members of the ASA is on a prize committee. - so be nice to the person next to you. Put another way, if you count the big eight, that's 76 total awards, which, if we assume that most award committees follow the populist tradition and like to avoid repeat awards, means that about every tenth person you meet at the annual meeting has probably won an award in the last decade. The ASA is nothing if not a feel good association. But the SRA needs its own awards, and I am starting out to establish a list that can guide future SRA members in their search for methods of renown.

So we start outwith some awards based on articles produced by SRA authors in

AJS, ASR, and SF in 1999-2000

The Excessive Productivity Award to Brian Powell for getting an article in each of the three journals in the last year.

The who-wrote-this-article-anyway award for most coauthors five total - to Richard Alba, John Logan, Brian Stults, Gilbert Marzan and Wenquan Zhang for "immigrant groups in the suburbs" June 99 ASR by the way in average number of coauthors, ASR narrowly beat out SF 2.5 to 2.4. That extra .1 author accounts for ASR's tremendous citation impact factor. He's the guy who bribes everybody else to cite the piece

I need to interrupt here with one of our participation awards -- the ED LAUMANN award, annually given to that member of the SRA who is the first person to fall asleep during the after dinner talk, and I'll just take nominations from the floor if anybody has any dozers..??????? If there isn't anybody, you know this award is annually given to Ed as a default, because if he isn't asleep yet, he'd probably rather be....

Andd while I'm stopped I might as well announce also that the Douglas Massey Award for political incorrectness was won this year by Alex Portes and, of course, Doug Massey.

The throw-it-all-in-the-hopper-and-see-what-works award for largest number of variables in a reported regression to Arne Kalleberg, Barb Reskin and Ken Hudson for 57 big ones in "Bad Jobs in America" (April 2000 ASR)

The lets-make-it-all-contingent-so-we-can't-interpret-anything-at-all award for the largest number of interaction terms to Brian Powell and collaborators for Nature, Nurture, Neither, Nor; black white difference in beliefs about the cause and approapriate treatment of mental illness. SF March 2000

I should note this paper also won several other awards, among them the Obscurity award for the title with the least specifiable relation to anything at all, you could write a lot of different articles on the title nature nurture neither nor.....
the all-right-already award for total length of title/subtitle, for which it tied (18 words) with Walder and Treiman's - Politics and life chances in a statesocialist regime,: dual career paths into the chinese elite 1949-1996. (ASR Ap 2000)

By the way the shortest title was four substantives - a five way tie Glen firebaugh's empirics of world income inequality May 99 AJS Mirowskiy/ross Economic hardship across the lifecourse Aug 99 asr you could count that as three.... Molm's Power in negociated and reciprocated exchange.Dec 99 asr Nielsen et alderson's income inequality, development and dependence. Aug 99 ASR and of course nature nurture, etc which wins everything. A word to the wise, then, if you want to win next year - only three substantives in the title

The I'll help all my friends get tenure award to that article with the largest number of citations: to Francois Nielsen and arthur alderson for "income inequality" with a whopping 110 references. I might note these guys were very altruistic, because a mere 5 references were to themselves. Later on in the program will be seeing what real self-citers can do.

The oh-I'm-so-cute award for the best play on words in a title to Jeremy Freese, Brian Powell, and Lala Carr Steelman (Powell's winning everything, isn't he) for Rebel without a cause or effect in Ap 99 ASR

The most frequently used words in titles, by the way are income, inequality, and class, and Erik Wright wins a special honor for using the word "class" three times in the same title. in working class power, capitlist-class interests, and class compromise in Jan 00 AJS. You know what Erik? we get the point.

The and-let-me-tell-you-about-my-third-cousin award for the largest number of people thanked, to Erin Kelly and Frank Dobbin , for Civil Rights Law at Work (Sep 99 ajs) in which they thank 16 people personally plus a whole workshop and the AJS reviewers. The average number of people thanked, by the way, is 5.

The please-dean-do-it-again award for most institutions thanked, a tie between Randy Hodson and Tom DiPrete who both thank five institutions - the average is 2.

The do-you-get-the-picture award, for largest number of figures, to Eric Wright for 15 figures in Working class power, capitalist class interests, and class compromise" the average number is 2, by the way, and if you count all the subportions of erik's figures , there are actually 30 separate graphics. Once again, Erik is ahead of the curve - he's already gone visual.

the just-how-many-tables-do-you-need award for the most tables in a paper toWilly Jasso for 9 tables in "how much injustice is there in the world; two new justice indexes." (that's 4.5 tables per index, of course) average number of tables is 4, by the way.

The I-couldn't-get-it-into-the-article-but-by-God-it's-going-to-get-into-printaward for largest number of appendices:

three way tie with three appendixes in each.
Glen Firebaugh in empirics of world income inequality, Peter Evans Bureaucracy and Growth, Willy Jasso How much injustice

The Isn't-this-over-yet award for longest article:
always done by journal, since they vary so much. the SF winner - Brian powell and coauthors for Nature nurture at 30 pp. the ASR winner - Willy Jasso at 34 pages for How much injustice answer is 34 pages worth, I guess the AJS and of course the grand winner is always in AJS Rob Sampson and Steve Raudenbush systematic social observation of publicspaces. at 48 pages in Nov 99 that's pretty short by AJS standards, I think. so come on SRA members get out there and grind out those pages!

We also have some awards for the book people:

The Didn't-you-say-that-already award? given to that member of the SRA with the largest single total of books - authored, edited, coauthored, engraved, printed on toilet paper etc. My research assistant missed a few, but that's just error variance, so if the total doesn't match what you claim on your vita, just chalk it up to experience. Here it is. You ahve to have ten or more total tobe a serious competitor here:

Alex Portes 10
Craig Calhoun 11
Gary Fine 11
John Shelton Reed 11
Jeff Alexander 12
Randy Collins 12
Rosabeth Kanter 13
Theda Skocpol 15

And walking away with it - Bob Wuthnow at 24.

I should note that Bob has published at least one book in every year since 1987 except 1988 and 1997 - I would assume, by interpolation that that means we'll get another year off in 2006.

My advice? Chill out, bob

Well, the real issue isnt how much you said, it's how many paid to see the game. And in this case our favorite unobtrusive indicator is bookshelf space. But in order to have some kind of measure in there for substance, we are measuring the net WEIGHT of all books of particular authors on the shelves of one of America's finest social science bookstores, the seminary cooperative at 58th and University. By the way, the official sociological weight standard is known as the suicide, after emile durkheim's book, which has the honor to weigh exactly one pound. But I've left the data in traditional units, and you can convert them at leisure, suffice it to say that the heaviest single book in our data is worth over three suicides.

Some serious contenders here?

Jeff Alexander - with 6lbs 7 OZ of verbiage
Randy Collins, also a contender at 5 lbs 7 ozs of talk.
Peter Evans at 6 lbs 5 oz, narrowly underweight to Jeff -
perhaps he needs to give up materialism, it sounds
like postpositivism is where the weight really is
Gary Fine checks in with 6lbs 3 oz of diaphanous ethnographic chit chat,
Bob Wuthnow slips in this category, to 5lb 6 oz. Quantity is not
winning out over weight. I'd go for sheer avoidrupois next time
And finally, the winner, rockingthe scales at 9lb 6 ozs,
Theda Skocpol. now THAT is talking for you.

But there remains the Theories of Society prize for the heaviest single book. Theories of society in fact weighs 5 lbs 3 oz of mind-numbing prose, at least my hardback copy does, I supposeit's a little less in paper.

Turns out that Any body can write a book weighing 1lb 8 oz. indeed, your typical "big book" actually weighs 1lb 6 oz getting beyond 1 . 8 is a big deal Peter Evans made 1.9 in Double edged diplomacy as did Neil fligstein in transformation of corporate control (so you can do it with regression too) numbers can add up the pounds, too Theda skocpol falls a bit here, with 2lb 2 ozs of soldiers and mother I think they needed biggerr pensions to put on more weight Michael Mann has a serious entry at 2lb 5 OZ of social power indeed weight ofauthority he really has runner up is Ed Laumann with 2 lbs 9 oz of tables telling how many of us had sex with sheep in the second trimester, is Ed awake by the way?

of course I don't need to tell you who the winner is, with 3lbs and one oz of philosophies, Randy Collins. Winner of the Theoriesof Society award at a level few may attempt but probably no one will soon equal.

another audience participation award - open nominations

DAVID FREEDMAN award for underidentification. Freedman award annually to the least identified equation published by an SRA member in the recent past. We had problems on this one. my rsch assistants took a bunch of data from likely articles and our machine locked up on the third one, so we had to give up. The move to maximum likelihood estimation has made underidentification a much more exciting competition, too. So we'll have to take nominations from the from the floor

You can write this on a piece of paper
(take some cards)

While we're collecting the nominations
I'll tell you the origins of this award also explaining to you why roger gould is REALLY leaving chicago two years ago, Roger and I began arguing over whether an equation in a paper of Lee Lillard's about sevententh births in Sweden was identified or not Needless to say I was the believer in undertidentification we ended up debating whether it was legitimate to include height and height in shoes in an equation predicting something or other particularly if you were using maximum likelihood estimation with its presumption of independence of events Now this debate took so long, and my ten year old got so bored listening to it that every time he saw roger he would yell "height in shoes is not a legitimate variable." And that is why Roger is leaving, because having a cherubic eleven year old running around after you yelling "height in shoes is not legitimate variable" is a very difficult way to live. so he's moving to New Haven, where variables aren't underidentified, the ...... well, we won't say what's underidentified in NH

Just be sure, when you see Roger around the meetings to say, Height in shoes is not a legitimate variable.

The JAT award

The JAT award has an interesting history. The initials JAT stand for Journal of applied tenure, a journal randy Smith and I planned when we were assistant professors at Rutgers. The journal of applied tenure was going to consist entirely of reference lists. Each article would have a title, abstract, and an author name. It would then have a long reference list, for which there would of course be page charges proportional to its length. We were going to do well, by doing good. All articles would be accepted as long as they contained citations to Randy or myself. We figured we could make tenure on citation counts alone in about four years' time.

Unfortunately, the journal of applied tenure bogged down while Smith and I wasted our time doing research and getting rejection letters from other journals. Nonetheless, we did manage to sneak a number of bogus articles on Vacancy chains among college coaches into the journals - thereby giving Randy a chance to watch the tube all day and call it research. This made it clear to me that, unbeknownst to us, there already WAS a journal of applied tenure, it just had a different name - you know, social forces, ASR, Demography, something like that.

So we have here an award for that journal which has done the most to get tenure for aspring young sociologists by citing them a lot. Here we don't praise papers for the useless, selfish attempt to get cited a lot, but for the altruistic act of citing everybody else a lot. Now of course there are two ways to look at this. We can think about the actual weight in citations per article, or we can just think about sheer citation space. Where there is a lot of citation per article, we have AUTHORS working hard for their friends' tenure. But the JOURNALS that are in the lead are those giving the largest sheer counts.

Of course a disturbing proportion of these citations are to people who already have tenure - Weber, Marx, Duncan, people like that - but still these authors are trying hard. Now before I go on, I should recognize the Parker point, as I call it. That is our indicator COULD be measuring something else besides altruism. In particular, huge numbers of citations COULD be measuring learning. Perhaps these authors are deep and serious scholars, mean and women of wide learning and thoughtful reflection, bringing their vast store of knowledge to bear on problems if great import. Third, maybe they're just pretentious jerks. But in the good old "assume a can-opener" spirit I will treat citations per article as indicating what I am calling tenure altruism,

So first of all we have the journals providing homes for altruistic authors - alternatively learned authors, alternatively pretentious authors - those who average the highest number of citations per article.

Politics and Society 76.2
Law and Soc Rev 76.7
Theory and soicety 77.2
CSSH 82.1 (I think you can see which of the three theories is being sustained)
Sociological theory 84.3
AJS 87.6

special mention to the
Annual Review 115.7 of course it's a review journal and thus its JOB is to get people tenure.

Finally, the JAT award for greatest direct contribution to tenure, given annually to that journal that had the largest absolute number of citations to anything at all in the past year. The contest was tough this year, with the top journal providing nearly 9% of all references to somebody or other. There were in fact about 43,000 citations to somebody or other in the 101 sociology journals we screened, so we are talking real journalistic altruism here.

Soc problems 2008
ASR 2412
Ann Rev 3007
AJS 3065
Soc Forces 3245

and the grand winner, the most altruistic of journals, and, indeed, I think you'll agree with me, this prize signifies a return to traditional values

JMF at 3691

So one out of ten citations to anything last year appeared in JMF, and I think the editors and editorial board deserve a hearty round of applause for helping us all look really important.

I have to tell you that it was an enlightening activity to do the search for this prize. There turns out to be a journal whose ISI abbreviation is Sociol Forskin, well, actually Sociol Forsknin, but it looked good to me. If I were the Swedes at Sociologisk Forskning, I'd think seriously about asking ISI for a new abbreviation for my journal.

another audience participation award.

This is the TALCOTT PARSONS gobbledygook award, for the best piece of jargon in a recent article or book. I have to introduce this award by reading a passage from the master himself: (towards a general theory of action p 36)

We may now introduce another generalization or postulate. This is that two ormore objects whch are cathected with the same quality of cathectic significance, which in expressive terms have the same order of meaning for ego, will tend to become symbolically associated with each other. Then the cathexis of the sign object will tend to be generalized to cathexis of persons associated with it. If the sign object is, as is the most important case for us, itself a performance, then the cathexis of the performance will tend to be generalized to alter so far as the latter is interpreted as the actor, i.e., as the social object who is interpreted to be responsible for the cathected sign performance.

Now this is an audience selection event, and we have three contenders this year, including an unusual quantitative entry. So you just have to listen to all three and which one of these was really published!!!!

Contestant A:

In my earlier work, the new phase of partial disembedding of state operationsdeployed transformations of institutional apparatus. Now, I want to focus onhow these networks of implementation capture the disembedding processtransnational actors enable, indeed how complex transnational actors could enable resistance via a line of separation between normative arenas and complex interactions of transgovernmental activity. I thereby find a process terrain within the field of power that surrounds the buraucratic apparatus of the state, a terrain that shows the logic of an intermediate set of operations in a non-contestatory realm of global markets. Here, transnational actors witness legal conditionalities through which the new digitized terrain institutionalizes networked capacities and engenders institutional apparatus via normative arenas enclosing embedded boundaries of contestation. This incipient denationalizing of boundaries zeroes in on a field of power where non-contestatory agendas negotiate intersections and bound legal conditionalities governing transformations that engender privatizing and path- dependence. Through these the new phase embeds itself.

Contestant B.

In the current moment, the pseudo-process of deconstruction deploys Humanism.Such enabled deconstruction, however, constitutes a mode of thought that leads to the essentializing of women, indeed the system and the historical moment impact both power and feminist critique. We do not aim for the humanistic alliance to essentialize the deployment of power and patriarchy, or to create a way for the Other to engender oppression. Rather, the crypto-crisis of postmodernism constitutes liberation and critique, dereifies even the deconstruction of the political subject. In the work of spivak, praxis specificity constitutes positivism, just as a kind of ur-scientistic Marxism and socialism lead to protocolizing of uncanonical matters in postmodernism itself. Our aim here is to show that feminist critique and the political subject together dominate the engenderment of the historical moment, in which oppression of organic intellectuals constitutes representiation that dereifies contemporary self-hatred in an era of post-structuralism and thereby enables subversion and humanizes new modes of representation. In this way, high theory dereifies the pseudo-Other.

3.

In this portion of the paper, we taken an explicitly latent variables approach that fits the data well. In general, in the discrete case uncorrelated diagonalization is the best alternative when an LDU factorization represents the explicit model as depicted in figure 5. In the present case, the mu sub i's constitute a 4 manifold, whose gradient function specifies the conditional variance of the partial likelihood estimator. One can imagine this as a set of partial slopes, obtained by rearranging terms in the partial likelihood on the assumption of a general distribution form of some kind, here assumed gamma for convenience. Unfortunately, when it comes to estimation the resulting function is seriously underidentified. So we have here undertaken a discrete choice procedure to indicate goodness of fit. All terms loading on the same mu sub i are subjected to a likelihood ratio statistic, and whichever has the strongest effect on the univariate logit is preferred. As a result, observed outcomes can be estimated. By contrast, under an accelerated failure time model, one naively assumes shape parameters that fit the data well and dodges the 4- manifold problem with a baseline hazard function. On the assumption of global concavity, however, normalization constraints can easily handle this by explicitly solving for terms evaluated by a Bayesian information criterion.

So vote for contestant 1 2 or 3 I'll count the hands

Congratulations, all three of these were written by my jargon program written in QBASIC 4.5 and taking any vocabulary you like. But the vocabularies came from your articles. would like to thank an unnamed globaloney person, a whole conference of feminists at which I was placed - as they say - under erasure, and Sociological Methodology 1994, for providing the raw vocabulary.

Final call for the Ed Laumann Award

Final call for the David Freedman Award

ANDREW ABBOTT award

The Andrew Abbott Self-citation award is named in honor of that well-known chest-beater, Andrew Abbott, who has set standards in self-citation that few others have met. We all know that Abbott's articles customarily start with long lists of his repetitive sniveling about the evils of our current methodologies. But I have to report an important new discovery about Abbott's well known citation habits, one that confirms what many have long suspected. Historical sociologists combing the records at the Cook County building have recently discovered that Abbott's real name is O'Shea. He changed his name shortly before entering graduate school....

In any case, the Abbott award is given annually to that member of the SRA who has managed to cite him or herself the largest number of times in the recent past. I want to thank Heather MacIndoe for undertaking the research on this important matter, although I regret to report that she's taken a year off from sociology as the result of the experience.....

Lot of database issues, here, since there wasn't a cheap and dirty way to do it. So we tried the traditional sociology approach and made WHOLE BUNCH OF PATENTLY RIDICULOUS ASSUMPTIONS. But what the hell.....

Patently ridiculous assumption number one the discipline's most active self-citers are in the SRA PRA #2 The most active self-citers will probably have published in AJS, ASR, Social Forces in the last two years OR will have published a book in the last two years. PRA #3 Serious Self citers emphasize citations of recent work to make sure it gets puffed right away. That way they can start the citation rush for papers while they are still in press and nobody else has seen them yet.

So the universe of people is set by #2, and we have counted all the self citations in papers written by these authors between 1995 and 2000, including citations to ANY paper, no matter HOW old, but only in those articles that include AT LEAST ONE self-citation to a paper written in the target period of 95-00. We don't think this last is a serious restriction, but if you don't agree, you can go listen to some other after-dinner talk.

A word on the PARKER problem. As you know, I believe in Rob Parker as my great oracle on indication, and he was the stimulus for my highly self-cited paper on the ambiguity of variables, in which I argued, welll, there I go again...there's just nothing like a chance for self-citation....

Anyway the parker problem here: just exactly what is self-citation an indicator of? Two basic views here. On the one hand, we can follow Everett Hughes in thinking that scholars develop a long term body of work. They build on past thoughts and results, developing carefully the highways and byways of an argument. Self-citation chronicles this careful, cumulative reflection, one that has weighed the many problematic turns and assumptions, one that was been willing to rethink past work and to confront the challenges posed by the literature to recast and develop. And then, too, some writers are so far out ahead of the rest of us that there really isn't much else to cite.

Of course there's always the alternative theory, self-citers are egomaniacs.

Well, without further ado...

As with the many such awards, we need both a overall level award and a rate award.

To begin with the overall award honorable mentions to those in places 11-15
Nancy Chodorow, John Mirowsky, Duane Alwin, Barbara Reskin, Jim Baron
at number ten - a strong perennial - jeff alexander we saw him earlier in the weight competition

# 9 - showing why this award got its name - yours truly
8 keeping it all at Chicago Rob Sampson
7 the Ohio State effect - Randy Hodson
6 I mean OHIO STATE - Catherine Ross
5 Victor Nee by one extra selfcite over Ross - next year you want to add those extra puffs
4 Alejandro Portes at a splendid 49 self-citations
3 Ron Burt - if I knew where he was I'd tell you.... but certainly ALWAYS a contender in self-citation - at 60
#2 The runner up, Willy Jasso, at 77,
and #1, the big winner, showing you why he's the big tuna, the incoming ASA president DOUG MASSEY - with 82 total

I want you to notice that we learn something important here - the way to become ASA president is to CITE YOURSELF. We've got three out of the last four presidents in this group, and I supposeif Joe Feagin were a member of the SRA he would have turned up in this list too.....

Also a very impressive Ohio State effect here, BUT as we'll see, when we tune up the measures and go for rates, that effect just washes out. You can't become a first rate self-citer on article quantity, you have to up that density of citations.

OK so that's just the sheer muscle award, let's go for RATES to be a contender here, you had to publish at least 2 articles in the reference data base, which ruled out one nameless self-citer YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE who managed to cite himself 13 (get that THIRTEEN) times in one article

a serious self citation rate is 5 or more lines in that bibliography referring to one's sweet self and 9 people made it this year.

at 5 self-citations per recent article - Paula England and Jim Baron
at 5.3 perennial self-citer and solid competitor Jeff Alexander,
at 6, - well, I put out a good effort this year, but I just haven't got what it takes, I thought 6 would be serious, but here I am in 6th place, well 6 for sixth, you know.....
at 7.45 combining quality with quantity Doug massey, scattering his 82 self-cites across 11 articles.
at 7.5 that true perennial, Ron Burt - somebody said we ought to improve the measure by dividing through and getting an odds ratio that a given cite would be a self cite - we all know who'd win at that
at 8.0 #3 Nancy Chodorow with a fine 16 self-cites in two articles
Then the runner up, scattering an astounding 37 self-citations across 4 articles - Victor Nee with a 9.25.

And the Winner, showing that maybe the first view of our indicator does make a difference - maybe you're just way out ahead - bursting previous records, with 77 self-citations in 7 articles, for a truly impressive 11 citations per article, WILLY JASSO

That's the roundup of SRA awards this year I'd like to summarize and look ahead a bit

We have had to retire a few awards, among them my favorite the low R squared award, given annually to that scholar who got the lowest Rsquared into a major journal. Unfortunately, the rush to logit has made it much easier to make a lot of heavy weather about not much at all, so we'vehad to retire this one. But we should see some new awards

Roger Gould award for the person with the largest number of outside offers who actually moved.

As yet Unnamed award for the person who got the largest number of outside awards and didn't move, but got the largest raise from an outside offer Stan Lieberson award for most universities worked for in a lifetime.

I hope then that I have persuaded you that the SRA is an organization big enough to laugh at itself and its absurdities. The real problem with the ASA is not politics, but that it has lost that ability to laugh at itself. The present sillinesses of the ASA should not worry us. The tradition of inquiry we represent will have no difficulty surviving an open encounter with folly. In the meantime, let us enjoy the absurd spectacle we put on for ourselves in this silliest of all disciplines. Whom the gods would destroy, they make very, very serious. Thank you.