Abstract

Abstract From citation rates for over 85,000 articles published between 1950 and 2004 in 56 psychology journals, we identified a total of 500 behavioral cognitive psychology articles that ranked in the top 0.6 % in each half-decade, in terms of their mean citations per year using the Web of Science. Thirty nine of these articles were produced by 78 authors who authored three or more of them, and more than half were published by only five journals. The mean number of cites per year and the total number of citations necessary for an article to achieve various percentile rankings are reported for each journal. The mean number of citations necessary for an article published within each half-decade to rank at any given percentile has steadily increased from 1950 to 2004. Of the articles that we surveyed, 11 % had zero total citations, and 35 % received fewer than four total citations. Citations for post-1994 articles ranking in the 50th-75th and 90th-95th percentiles have generally continued to grow across each of their 3-year postpublication bins. For pre-1995 articles ranking in the 50th-75th and 90th-95th percentiles, citations peaked in the 4-to 6-or 7-to 9-year postpublication bins and decreased linearly thereafter, until asymptoting. In contrast, for the top-500 articles, (a) for pre-1980 articles, citations grew and peaked 10-18-year postpublication bins, and after a slight decrease began to linearly increase again; (b) for post-1979 articles, citations have continually increased across years in a nearly linear fashion. We also report changes in topics covered by the top-cited articles over the decades. Keywords Citations . Cognitive psychology . Impact factor Introduction The number of citations that academic articles receive has become a well-accepted, objective measure for evaluating the impact (and likely the quality) of journals Another way that citations can be used is to determine which individual publications have had a major impact on guiding the research of others in that research area. For cognitive psychology, White (1983) identified 50 prominent publications (journal articles and books) indexed in the 1979-1982 volumes of the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) that (a) had averaged more than 20 citations per year in the 1971-1982 SSCI and had at least five citations per year in any one of the eight major journals he surveyed. Although White provided a reasonably good reference for prominent cognitive psychology publications at that time, it was necessarily quite limited in its scope, due to citation counts not yet being available in electronic databases. In a follow-up to White's study, Standing (2009) examined citation trends across the years for 26 of the 50 publications that White identified. Standing found that citations increased for the first 5 years after an article's publication, but then monotonically declined, a trend that he noted was also evident in the physical sciences Using an electronic database that allows for a much more thorough and comprehensive analysis of a much larger sample of articles and journals, the present study updates and extends the work of Our top-500 list is based on mean citations per year rather than on total citations, so as not to give an unfair advantage to older articles that would have had additional years to accumulate citations. However, ranking an article on the basis of mean citations per year without taking its year of publication into account has its limitations. Because the number of journals (and of articles published) increased rather dramatically in the late 1960s (see Method Procedure From the psychology and language categories of the 2008 volume of Journal Citation Reports, we selected as potential candidates for inclusion in our sample all journals that we 1 Although one might question whether the median is a more suitable measure than the mean, we used the mean because it is much more closely tied to the number of total citations, which is used to compute both a researcher'sh-index and a journal's impact factor. Nonetheless, for some of the analyses that we report, we consider both means and medians. 2 Total citations can be informative because an article that has had a moderate number of citations over a long period of time can also be considered to have had a significant impact. Mem Cogn (2012Cogn ( ) 40:1132Cogn ( -1161 1133 ) 1950-1955, 1957-1959, 1966-1968, 1974-2004 -1987, 1991-1994, 1996, 2000-2004 believed publish a substantial number of peer-reviewed "cognitive" articles. Because it would not be feasible to sort through thousands of articles to determine whether each article met our criteria for being included in our top-500 list, we excluded journals (e.g., International Journal of Psychology) for which fewer than 40 % (an arbitrary number selected by the present authors) of their total articles are "cognitive" articles. (For journals that we were uncertain met the 40 % criteria, we reviewed the content of all of the articles published in two or three randomly selected issues that were published at least 3 years apart.) We also excluded journals that primarily publish articles that (a) employ neuroimaging or electrophysiology techniques to obtain their data (e.g., Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience), (b) are not written in English (e.g., Psicologica), or (c) were not subject to even nominal peer review (e.g., Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society). Two journals, Journal of Research in Reading and Thinking & Reasoning, that met the above criteria were nonetheless excluded because the electronic version of the Web of Science (WoS) that we had available only included 2 years of data from each of these journals. Although fewer than 40 % of the articles published in some journals that publish review articles on psychological research (e.g., Psychological Bulletin and Annual Review of Psychology) are "cognitive" articles, these journals were included because many of the integrative reviews they publish have had a significant impact in the field of cognitive psychology. The 56 journals making our final list are provided in Res 1983 Results As is shown in