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

Abstract

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).

What Is History of Psychology? Network Analysis ofJournal Citation Reports, 2009-2015

“…Whereas the approach typically used by specialist historians to do their work is microlevel "close reading" (usually of primary sources and often in archives of unpublished documents and correspondence), the methodological inspiration here is the macro-level "distant reading" that characterizes contemporary work in the Digital Humanities (following Moretti, 1994Moretti, -2009Moretti, /2013). The results are then consistent with importations recently made into Psychology generally (by, for example, Borsboom & Cramer, 2013;Burman, Green, & Shanker, 2015;Greenfield, 2013; but see also Pettit, 2016) and, more specifically, into the History of Psychology (by, for example, Burman, 2018;Green, Feinerer, & Burman, 2015a, 2015bPettit, Serykh, & Green, 2015).…”

“…For this reason, the output from such analyses cannot simply be accepted as shown (cf. Burman, 2018). 6 The result that matters most for our purposes, however, is straightforward: These analyses suggest that this doing is influenced primarily by 12 key journals.…”

“…Thus, when something has been identified that would never have previously been considered, we can trust that we have learned something new. We just need to go looking for what was missed, from where, and why (see Burman, 2018;Green, 2016;Pettit, 2016). Onward!…”

“…Methods now exist to examine similarities in language-use in a corpus of text, and these have been used to examine the early history of psychological publishing (e.g., Green et al, 2015aGreen et al, , 2015b. But the present approach to the quantitative examination of possibilities in the use of language-of a discipline's discourses-arose within Psychology itself (Burman et al, 2015(Burman et al, , 2018.…”

Meaning-Change Through the Mistaken Mirror: On the Indeterminacy of “Wundt” and “Piaget” in Translation

“…Indeed, the numbers themselves are not what matters, for my purposes here, so long as they skew consistently (cf. Burman, 2018b, on the changing consistency of PsycINFO’s meta-data).…”