INFLUENTIAL PAPERS IN CHILD-ABUSE

A survey was conducted among professionals expert in the held of child protection to determine which papers or book chapters they felt had b een the most influential. From their responses, a list of the 50 most mentioned papers and chapters was compiled. This list was sent to a la rge group of child protection professionals with the request that they rank the 15 publications which they considered most important. To com pare the views of child protection professionals with the number of ti mes these publications had been cited in the literature, a citation se arch was carried out. Kempe, Silverman, Steele, Droegemuller, and Silv er's (1962) paper ''The Battered Child Syndrome'' and Summit's (1983) paper ''The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome'' received the h ighest ranking from the professionals. ''The Battered Child Syndrome'' also achieved the highest ranking in the citation search. Although th ere were a number of discrepancies between the professional rankings a nd the citation search, eight papers appeared in the top 15 rankings a chieved by the professional survey and the citation search. Such a rev iew of the influence of child abuse literature has limitations, althou gh it does help to show which papers appear to have had an important a nd lasting influence. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.