Some Unobtrusive Indicators of Psychology’s Shift from the Humanities and Social Sciences to the Natural Sciences

Günter Krampen, Lisa I. Trierweiler

Abstract


Unobtrusive indicators of the status of psychology within the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences were outlined and examined from a historical perspective. Specifically, the unobtrusive indicators considered to differentiate between the three branches included the (1) dominant scientific publication type (e.g., books vs. journal articles), (2) number of coauthors of journal publications, (3) number of references in journal publications, (4) length of journal contributions, and (5) linguistic features of scientific papers (e.g., Genera Verbi, length of sentences). These indicators were measured in two psychological databases (PsycINFO: 1900-2014; PSYNDEX: 1980-2014), random samples of psychological publications from the Web of Science, and in content analyses of publication guidelines of psychology journals. Scientometric results clearly show that psychology started at the beginning of the 20th century as a book science and shifted rapidly in the 1920s in a rather unidirectional way to a journal science in the domain of the natural sciences.

Keywords


psychology; branches of sciences; state of sciences; humanities; social sciences; natural sciences; methodology; scientometrics; unobtrusive measures; history of psychology

Full Text:

PDF

References


Allesch, C., Allolio-Näcke, L., Billmann-Mahecha, E., Eid, M., Fitzek, H., Guski-Leinwand, S., …Wolfradt, U. (2015). Memorandum zur Lage und zur Zukunft des Faches Geschichte der Psychologie [Memorandum on the situation and the future of the discipline history of psychology]. Psychologische Rundschau, 62(3), 176-177. doi:10.1026/0033-3042/a000255

American Psychological Association. (1974). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

American Psychological Association. (2010). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Appelbaum, M., Cooper, H., Maxwell, S., Stone, A., & Sher, K. J. (2008). Reporting standards for research in psychology: Why do we need them? What might they be? American Psychologist, 63(9), 839-851. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.63.9.839

Beaver, D. D. (2001). Reflections on scientific collaboration (and its study). Scientometrics, 52(3), 365-377. doi:10.1023/A:1014254214337

Behrens, H., & Luksch, P. (2011). Mathematics 1868-2008: A bibliometric analysis. Scientometrics, 86(1), 179-194. doi:10.1007/s11192-010-0249-x

Blagus, R., Leskosek, B. L., & Stare, J. (2015). Comparison of bibliometric measures for assessing relative importance of researchers. Scientometrics, 105(3), 1743-1762. doi:10.1007/s11192-015-1622-6

Bühler, K. (1927). Die Krise der Psychologie [The crisis of psychology]. Jena, Germany: Gustav Fischer. Retrieved from https://nasepblog.files.wordpress.com/ 2012/08/buehler-karl-die-krise-der-psychologie-kant-studien-31-1926.pdf

Cronin, B. (2001). Hyperauthorship: A postmodern perversion or evidence of a structural shift in scholarly communication practices. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(7), 558-569. doi:10.1002/asi.1097

Danziger, K. (1994). Does the history of psychology have a future? Theory & Psychology, 4(4), 467-484. doi:10.1177/0959354394044001

Danziger, K. (1995). Neither science nor history? Psychological Inquiry, 6(2), 115-117. doi:10.1207/s15327965pli0602_2

Ebbinghaus, H. (1908). Abriß der Psychologie [Outline of psychology]. Leipzig, Germany: von Veit & Comp. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/abrissderpsycho01ebbigoog

Gallagher Tuleya, L. (Ed.). (2007). Thesaurus of psychological index terms (11th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/pubs/databases/psycinfo/index.aspx

Haggbloom, S. J., Warnick, R., Warnick, J. E., Jones, V. K., Yarbrough, G. L., Russell, M., . . . Monte, E. (2002). The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Review of General Psychology, 6(2), 139-152. doi:10.1037//1089-2680.6.2.139

Herrmann, T. (1996). Psychologie und Gemüsehandel. Eine irrelevante Anmerkung zu Rolf Reber: "Die Verkaufsprobleme der deutschsprachigen Psychologie" [Psychology and produce markets. An irrelevant remark to R. Reber's article on the problem of marketing German-language psychology]. Psychologische Rundschau, 47, 216-217.

Herrmann, T. (2009). What’s next? Continuity and discontinuity in psychology. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 217(2), 95-102. doi:10.1027/0044-3409.217.2.95

Huang, D.-w. (2015). Temporal evolution of multi-author papers in basic sciences from 1960 to 2010. Scientometrics, 105, 2137-2147. doi:10.1007/s11192-015-1760-x

Krampen, G. (2009). Introduction and some ideas as well as visions on an open access European Psychology Publication Platform. Psychology Science Quarterly, 51(Suppl. 1), 3-18. Retrieved from http://www.journals4free.com/link.jsp?l=15099544

Krampen, G. (2016). Scientometric trend analyses of publications on the history of psychology: Is psychology becoming an unhistorical science? Scientometrics, 106, 1217-1238. doi: 10.1007/s11192-016-1834-4

Krampen, G., Huckert, T., & Schui, G. (2012). The impact of anglicizing former German-language psychology journals on authorship and citation frequencies. European Psychologist, 17(3), 190-198. doi:10.1027/1016-9040/a000074

Krampen, G., von Eye, A., & Schui, G. (2011). Forecasting trends of development of psychology from a bibliometric perspective. Scientometrics, 87, 687-694. doi:10.1007/s11192-011-0357-2

Krampen, G., Schui, G., Ferring, D., & Bauer, H. P. W. (2014). Charakteristika der meist zitierten englischsprachigen Zeitschriftenbeiträge der Publikationsjahre 1981 bis 2010 aus der Psychologie der deutschsprachigen Länder [Characteristics of the most cited English-language journal articles of the publication years 1981-2010 from the German-speaking countries]. Psychologische Rundschau, 65(3), 159-168. doi:10.1026/0033-3042/a000196

Krampen, G., Weiland, P., & Wiesenhütter, J. (2015). Citation success of different publication types: A case study on all references in psychology publications from the German-speaking countries (D–A–CH–L–L) in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Scientometrics, 104, 827-840. doi:10.1007/s11192-015-1573-y

Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). Chicago, MA: University of Chicago Press. Retrieved from http://projektintegracija.pravo.hr/_download/repository/Kuhn_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions.pdf

Lee, R. M. (2000). Unobtrusive methods in social research. Buckingham, UK: Open University Press. Retrieved from http://www.mheducation.co.uk/openup/chapters/0335200516.pdf

Levitt, J. M. (2014). What is the optimal number of researchers for social science research? Scientometrics, 102(1), 213-225. doi:10.1007/s11192-014-1441-1

Liu, X. Z., & Fang, H. (2014). Scientific group leaders’ authorship preferences: An empirical investigation. Scientometrics, 98, 909-925. doi:10.1007/s11192-013-1083-8

Margraf, J. (2015). Zur Lage der Psychologie [On the situation of psychology]. Psychologische Rundschau, 66(1), 1-30. doi:10.1026/0033-3042/a000247

Paulus, F., M., Rademacher, L., Schäfer, T. A. J., Müller-Pinzler, L., & Krach, S. (2015). Journal impact factor shapes scientists’ reward signal in the prospect of publication. PLos ONE 10(11): e0142537. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0142537

Persson, O., & Glänzel, W. (2014). Discouraging honorific authorship. Scientometrics, 98(2), 1417-1419. doi:10.1007/s11192-013-1042-4

Persson, O., Glänzel, W., & Danell, R. (2004). Inflationary bibliometric values: The role of scientific collaboration and the need for relative indicators in evaluative studies. Scientometrics, 60(3), 421-432. doi:10.1023/B:SCIE.0000034384.35498.7d

Puuska, H.-M. (2014). Scholarly publishing patterns in Finland. A comparison of disciplinary groups (Doctoral thesis). University of Tampere, School of Information Sciences, Tampere, Finland. Retrieved from http://tampub.uta.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/95381/978-951-44-9480-2.pdf?sequence=1

Puuska, H.-M., Muhonen, R., & Leino, Y. (2014). International and domestic co-publishing and their citation impact in different disciplines. Scientometrics, 98(2), 823-839. doi:10.1007/s11192-013-1181-7

Robins, R. W., Gosling, S. D., & Craik, K. H. (1999). An empirical analysis of trends in psychology. American Psychologist, 54(2), 117-128. Retrieved from http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/54/2/117/

Rychlak, J. F. (1981). A philosophy of science for personality theory (2nd ed.). Malabar, FL: Krieger.

Schui, G., Müller, J., & Krampen, G. (2015). ZPID-Monitor 2013 zur Internationalität der Psychologie aus dem deutschsprachigen Bereich [ZPID Monitor 2013: Internationality of psychology from the German-speaking area]. ZPID Science Information Online, 15(5). Retrieved from http://www.zpid.de/index.php?wahl=IuD&uwahl=publications

Sheffield, N. (2013). Duke Graduate School scientific writing resource. Retrieved from https://cgi.duke.edu/web/sciwriting/

Smedslund, J. (1988). Psycho-Logic. Berlin, Germany: Springer.

Van Rappard, J. F. H. (1993). History in psychology. Psychologie und Geschichte, 4(3-4), 187-196. Retrieved from http://journals.zpid.de/index.php/PuG/article/view/134

Webb, E. J., Campbell, D., T., Schwartz, R. D., & Sechrest, L. (1966). Unobtrusive measures: Nonreactive research in the social sciences. Chicago, IL: Rand McNally.


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

Print version: 1694-2620
Online version: 1694-2639