National Information System for Psychology: A proposed solution for a pressing problem.

Cott, Harold P. Van

doi:10.1037/h0037751

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…These developments often give rise to increased research, which may be fruitful from a domain-specific point of view. In America, following the Sputnik crisis (in 1957) important innovations in discipline-oriented national information systems emerged, and increased the interest in domain-oriented information systems (cf., Van Cott, 1970 and the above-mentioned APA studies). In German, such specialized systems are named "Fachinformationssysteme," described in Bundesminister fur Forschung und Technologie (1990).…”

Section: Predecessors To Domain-analysis In Ismentioning

confidence: 86%

Toward a new horizon in information science: Domain-analysis

Hjørland

Albrechtsen

1995

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

482

266

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This article is a programmatic article, which formulates a new approach to information science (IS): domain‐analysis. This approach states that the most fruitful horizon for IS is to study the knowledge‐domains as thought or discourse communities, which are parts of society's division of labor. The article is also a review article, providing a multidisciplinary description of research, illuminating this theoretical view. The first section presents contemporary research in IS, sharing the fundamental viewpoint that IS should be seen as a social rather than as a purely mental discipline. In addition, important predecessors to this view are mentioned and the possibilities as well as the limitations of their approaches are discussed. The second section describes recent transdisciplinary tendencies in the understanding of knowledge. In bordering disciplines to IS, such as educational research, psychology, linguistics, and the philosophy of science, an important new view of knowledge is appearing in the 1990s. This new view of knowledge stresses the social, ecological, and content‐oriented nature of knowledge. This is opposed to the more formal, computer‐like approaches that dominated in the 1980s. The third section compares domain‐analysis to other major approaches in IS, such as the cognitive approach. The final section outlines important problems to be investigated, such as how different knowledge‐domains affect the informational value of different subject access points in data bases. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Section: Predecessors To Domain-analysis In Ismentioning

confidence: 86%

Toward a new horizon in information science: Domain-analysis

Hjørland

Albrechtsen

1995

J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci.

482

266

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…However, even in the absence of outside funding, the OCMD managed to press on with planned changes for the growth and expansion of PA . The successes and positive results of the Project on Scientific Information Exchange in Psychology and the NISP, although limited, were most notable in their effects on PA and in the impetus they provided for moving the APA more rapidly into the modern communications era (Van Cott, 1970).…”

Section: The New Pa Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

The window on psychology's literature: A history of psychological abstracts.

Benjamin¹,

VandenBos²

2006

American Psychologist

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With the rapid expansion of scientific information at the end of the 19th century, disciplines sought ways to keep their members abreast of the relevant research. Those pressures were felt in the science of psychology in the United States, where psychologists developed a bibliographic aid, The Psychological Index, in 1895 only a little more than a decade after G. Stanley Hall opened America's first psychology laboratory. The Index was useful but was only a listing of titles. More information was needed, which led to the development of a journal of abstracts, first published in 1927. This article traces the history of Psychological Abstracts from its origins in the Index to the evolution of the American Psychological Association's electronic information system known as PsycINFO, of which Psychological Abstracts has become an outmoded part. Nevertheless, for most of its 80 years, Psychological Abstracts was psychology's window on the world of research.

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“…We then also find him, and another later APA-affiliated author, in discussions of an NSF-funded information system for biology (Judd, Fromm, & Kinkade, 1967; Kinkade & Bedarf, 1967; Kinkade, Bedarf, & Van Cott, 1967; Van Cott & Kinkade, 1967). So there does indeed seem to be something larger going on that merits further investigation (see also Kinkade, 1972; Van Cott, 1970). The system that became PsycINFO seems to have been at the centre of a much larger project that has so far eluded proper historical investigation.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Through the looking-glass: PsycINFO as an historical archive of trends in psychology.

Burman¹

2018

History of Psychology

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Those interested in tracking trends in the history of psychology cannot simply trust the numbers produced by inputting terms into search engines like PsycINFO and then constraining by date. This essay is therefore a critical engagement with that longstanding interest to show what it is possible to do, over what period, and why. It concludes that certain projects simply cannot be undertaken without further investment by the American Psychological Association. This is because forgotten changes in the assumptions informing the database make its index terms untrustworthy for use in trend-tracking before 1967. But they can indeed be used, with care, to track more recent trends. The result is then a Distant Reading of psychology, with Digital History presented as enabling a kind of Science Studies that psychologists will find appealing. The present state of the discipline can thus be caricatured as the contemporary scientific study of depressed rats and the drugs used to treat them (as well as of human brains, mice, and myriad other topics). To extend the investigation back further in time, however, the 1967 boundary is also investigated. The author then delves more deeply into the prehistory of the database's creation, and shows in a précis of a further project that the origins of PsycINFO can be traced to interests related to American national security during the Cold War. In short: PsycINFO cannot be treated as a simple bibliographic description of the discipline. It is embedded in its history, and reflects it. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

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National Information System for Psychology: A proposed solution for a pressing problem.

Cited by 12 publications

References 19 publications

Toward a new horizon in information science: Domain-analysis

Toward a new horizon in information science: Domain-analysis

The window on psychology's literature: A history of psychological abstracts.

Through the looking-glass: PsycINFO as an historical archive of trends in psychology.

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