Speaker
Jeremy Trevelyan Burman
Title
What is the History of Psychology?
Abstract
Following the distinction between little-p psychology and big-P Psychology, this paper approaches the History of Psychology as a “doing” separate from its “subject” (the history of psychology, or of psychological thought). It traces connections using data from Thompson Reuters’ Journal Citation Reports, which is better known as the source of the Journal Impact Factors. And it uses network analyses to treat the data. Interesting insights emerge as a result. For example: although the History of Psychology’s influence extends to many hundreds of journals, only a relatively small number among them can be counted as “good friends. ”Internal boundaries are then defined in order to show distance from the core out to the periphery, with exemplary hard-to-find readings extracted in a supplemental bibliography. A second data layer is then added to map the extant ecology of interests. This shows that specialist historians engage in a great diversity of topics, but that the underlying interests reduce to a small number of broad categories: Psychology, Social Control & Intervention, Money & Power, People & Places, Health, and Historical Studies. And each of the primary journals reflects these interests in a different way. But the analyses also identify some concerns that extend well beyond the limits of the case of the History of Psychology. Namely,it seems the inclusion criteria used by the automated systems governing the data behind the Impact Factors may be overly restrictive; substantive articles are being excluded when they shouldn’t be, with important consequences for the discipline as a whole.
Location
York University, Behavioural Science Building, Room 163 (Endler Conference Room)