Reprints: The New Ethic.

Commentary regarding what should be done about reprints especially when costs are a factor. Suggestions are provided by the author, such as, (a) Give or send reprints to those persons who will almost certainly be interested in the paper because of their general expertness, or their special activity, or their being mentioned in the paper. (b) Give or send also to those professional friends who will be interested in the paper simply because of its author, not because of its content. The lists for a and b can be broad or narrowly limited according as the author does or does not get pleasure from this kind of giving. This is his pleasure; let him decide how much he wishes to spend on it. Then (c) let the author meet requests by letter and postcard as they come in as long as he feels he can afford to. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Manners, Money, and Reprints.

Comment on the economics, etiquette, and benefits of requesting reprints. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Retain the Original Data! Comment.

Comments on how few authors of APA journal articles retain their original data. Some authors have suggested that the APA journals take steps to insure that authors store their data for future reference. The commentator provides specific reasons for the retention of original data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On writing "little papers."

Journal policies have encouraged the writing of "little papers" and have discouraged longer papers and monographs. "Little paper" refers "to the four- or five-page article dealing with one or two aspects of a larger problem." "Many psychologists are troubled by the proliferation of articles and journals dealing with psychological topics." The "little papers" are likely to be of small consequence and it is unlikely that "a productive science will eventually emerge from the host of trivial and unrelated studies that fill the journals." "Little papers" should be discouraged; editors should induce some authors to forego "one-shot" papers in favor of a series of integrated and planned researches. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Subtitle Communication.

A notion has occurred to me relative to a potentially more efficient means of information dissemination and I would be interested in membership and journal editors' considerations. Most of us read journal articles selectively, probably predominantly on the basis of titles, and most likely the selection is in terms of the key concepts reflected in the title and our associations. However, I suspect all of us have come across articles relevant to a topic that we would never have perused on the basis of the title (or summary, author, journal, Abstracts search, word of mouth, or even idle curiosity). Some articles have subsidiary aspects relevant to a topic unreflected in the title and some articles can be fruitfully interpreted from a viewpoint other than that of the title, author, or journal. What I propose is that the author select salient related topics and note them parenthetically to the article's title, if the journal editor concurs with the author's chosen notation. Such a bit of information should probably be limited to something like three "telegraphic" conceptual terms which could not be justifiably elevated to the status of the title. Any added type-setting costs for this procedure would seem to be minimal and, perhaps, might even be offset by a corresponding shortening of the author's article. Maybe this telegraphic conceptual procedure is only carrying the "article summary" practice a step further, but I cannot help but feel that the communication value would be enhanced by this sub-sub-subtitle means. I must say that I harbor no hope that this century would ever see a catalog of standard nomenclature for article sub-sub-subtitles. However such a practice, it is hoped, would increase pertinent information dissemination and retrieval, as well as decreasing readers' overlooking something of potential value to them. Also such a practice might lower our limens for the sometimes stultifying journal stimuli! (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Making the connection between research and reality: Strategies teachers use to read and evaluate journal articles.

This investigation of domain-specific professional reading clarifies the way 12 teachers who are professionally active select and read the journals and research articles in their fields. Using verbal protocol analysis and interviews, the authors identified and classified reading think-aloud reports into 5 categories: using strategies, connecting to practice, monitoring, questioning, and evaluating. The teachers in this study created meaning in complex and personal ways as they read. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Soviet psychology in 1968.

Presents data based on a review of 59 articles published in Voprosy Psychologie (Problems of Psychology) between March and October 1968. Topics examined in the articles included physiological/neuropsychological problems, educational problems, problems of personality, speech problems and aphasias, politics, and animal psychology. (0 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonsexist language requirements for APA manuscripts.

The author mentions finding sexist language among recent journal articles and offers an address where one may obtain the APA guidelines for nonsexist language. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Courtesy in Requesting Reprints.

Boring asked for comment on his "new ethic," and Morgan's letter (American Psychologist, 1956, 11, 206-208) merits it. Morgan is objecting to a mannerly abuse of courtesy which becomes a lack of consideration. At the risk of being thought a stuffed shirt, shouldn't the "education of eager, aggressive graduate students" include a bit of graciousness? In this "tense, competitive America" a few moments of real courtesy and graciousness, not its empty, abused form, might help to make living a little more pleasant for all of us. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychology in action: Psychological classics: Older journal articles frequently cited today.

Presents a list of "psychological classics," journal articles published before 1933 which appear from 3-10 times in 18 general psychology textbooks currently in use. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychology and Aging: The first 20 years.

This article provides a review of the first 20 years of Psychology and Aging, the American Psychological Association's first and only scholarly journal devoted to the topic of aging. The authors briefly summarize its history, its contributions to the study of aging, and its broader status as a scholarly publication. One theme highlighted in our review is the diversity of content in the journal throughout its history. Another is the strong impact that articles published in the journal have had on both basic and applied topics in aging. Efforts to encompass the breadth of topics and methodologies in aging research while retaining excellent quality remain the exciting but essential challenge for Psychology and Aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Gregory Daniel Webster: Psi Chi/APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award.

Presents a citation for Gregory Daniel Webster, who received the Psi Chi/APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award "for an outstanding research paper whose findings report that APA journal articles became shorter in length after the year 2000." A brief profile and a selected bibliography accompany the citation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Androcentric reporting of gender differences in APA journals: 1965-2004.

Androcentric thinking assumes maleness to be normative and attributes gender differences to females. A content analysis of articles reporting gender differences published between 1965 and 2004 in four American Psychological Association journals examined androcentric pronouns, explanations, and tables and graphs. Few articles used generic masculine pronouns to refer to both women and men. However, explanations of gender differences within articles that mentioned such differences in their abstracts and titles referenced attributes of women significantly more often than attributes of men. Most tables and graphs depicting gender differences positioned males' data before females' data, except when gender differences among parents were concerned. Psychologists have ceased to use male-centered pronouns, but female and male psychologists continue to report, explain, and depict gender differences in androcentric ways. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reliability and Sample Size.

Asserts theat a recent comment by Wallin (Amer. Psychologist, 1954, 9, 203) suggests that editors might relieve the overload of publication material by refusing experimental articles in which conclusions are based upon a small number of cases. While it is true, as in the three cases cited by Wallin, that some experimental articles either state or imply generalizations far beyond the limits of their sampling techniques, it appears to the writer that sample size, per se, is not the critical factor. To make sample size a criterion for rejection would be, in effect, to force a return to older, large sample techniques which rnethodologists and statisticians have done so much to streamline in recent years. Such methods, while they offer the comfort of security in numbers, are remarkably inefficient and, in most cases, the additional labor adds no information which could not have been gained through the proper handling of observations of a smaller sample. It should be made clear that a difference, statistically reliable at the .01 level of confidence and based upon a sample of ten observations, is just as stable as a difference at the same level of confidence based upon a sample of 1,000 observations, provided that conditions of randomization obtain. It seems to the writer that the sampling technique employed is more important than the sample size. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On (Not) Trimming One's Toenails With a Bazooka.

Comments on the study by J. G. Adair and N. Vohra (see record 2003-02034-001), which showed that the number of references used in psychological articles has increased over the past few decades. This increase constituted such a crisis in their view that they advised psychologists to cut back on the number of references they use as a way of responding to the information explosion. C. D. Green contends that there is no crisis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Journal Impact Factors and Self-Citations: Implications for Psychology Journals.

Comments on the study by J. G. Adair and N. Vohra (see record 2003-02034-002) of changes in the number of references and citations in psychology journals as a consequence of the current knowledge explosion. They made a striking observation of the sometimes excessive number of self-citations in psychology journals. However, after this illustration, no further attention was paid to the issue of self-citation. Therefore, an important underexplored question is to what extent impact factors of psychology journals are artificially inflated or deflated by self-citations. For the present article, the authors used the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) databases Web of Science (WoS) and Journal Citation Reports (JCR) as the basis of our analyses. From each article (including empirical articles and literature reviews) in five high-, five middle-, and five low-ranked journals in psychology published in 1998 and 1999, they collected the number of self-citations and other-citations in 2000 from the WoS. Data analyses show that, compared with low- and middle-impact psychology journals, the true citation counts of high-impact psychology journals are actually underestimated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The explosion of knowledge, references, and citations: Psychology's unique response to a crisis.

The knowledge explosion has created enormous difficulties for researchers to be aware of, access, and process the volume of new literature. Electronic literature retrieval systems and specialization on narrow topics have been strategies used to cope with these problems. In this study, the authors examined the additional effects of the knowledge explosion on researchers' writing, referencing, and citing. Counts of references within sampled empirical journal articles in sociology, physics, biology, and experimental and social psychology revealed impacts of the knowledge explosion in all disciplines but the greatest effects within psychology. Detailed analyses indicated that substantial changes in the numbers of references and citations and in their format and use within the research article are psychology's unique response to the knowledge explosion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reprints and translations in the history of psychology.

Reviews the book, Origins of Psychometry: Johan Jacob de Jaager, student of F. C. Donders on Reaction Time and Mental Processes, translated and edited by Josef Brozek and Maarten S. Sibinga (1895). The main body of this book is a facsimile and a translation of an 1865 doctoral thesis by Johan Jacob de Jaager on reaction time. The thesis, supervised by F. C. Donders, is described by the editors as marking "the birth of experimental psychology in the framework of experimental physiology." Biographical and bibliographical notes are included, as is a three page list of references. In the thesis itself, de Jaager began with the presentation of original data on the velocity of nerve conduction. He then moved to a comparison of simple reaction times when the locus of the stimulus on the body is, and is not, known to the subject beforehand. Then simple reaction times to different colored lights were reported, followed by a "complication" experiment involving the discrimination of colors. Finally, studies involving verbal reactions to auditory stimuli were reported. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

SPQ editorial June 2008.

This issue features the first research article (Bradshaw, Buckley & Ialongo, 2008) accepted by our new editorial team; a group of individuals with unusual methodological talent. Also in this issue you will find a special section on neurodevelopmental disorders of childhood, the adaptation of children with such problems to schooling, and implications for the practice of psychology with these children in schools. Our fall issue will premier our first contribution to the Evidence for Practice section, which represents an attempt to directly link accumulated scientific knowledge to the everyday work of psychological practitioners. I am happy to receive any inquiries from prospective contributors to SPQ. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)