Acceleration of citing behavior after the millennium? Exemplary bibliometric reference analyses for psychology journals

With reference to social constructivist approaches on citing behavior in the sciences, the hypothesis of acceleration of citing behavior after the millennium was empirically tested for a stratified random sample of exemplary psychology journal articles. The sample consists of 45 English and 45 German articles published in the years 1985 versus 1995 versus 2005 in high impact journals on developmental psychology, psychological diagnosis and assessment, and social psychology. Content analyses of the reference lists refer to the total number of references cited in the articles and the publication years of all references. In addition, the number of self-references, the number of pages, and the number of authors were determined for each article. Results show that there is no acceleration of citing behavior; rather, on the contrary, a significant trend is revealed for an increase in authors' citing somewhat older references in the newer journal articles. Significant main effects point a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: SCIENTOMETRICS
• Authors: Günter Krampen
• Keywords: Applied Computing, Behavior, Journal Articles, Psychology, SCIENTOMETRICS 2010