Editorial: Journals, Journals, JournalsAuthor(s): W. K. EstesSource: Psychological Science, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1990), pp. 1-3Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of the Association for Psychological ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40062384 .

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Editorial

Journals, Journals, Journals

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

There are seemingly countless journals in print. Why so many? and why another? On the occasion of inaugu- rating a new journal, we may well be expected to address these questions. For answers, let us take a look at the

journal publication game in which our Society has just drawn a hand.

Ever since the appearance of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in 1665, the journal has been the primary vehicle for communicating among scholars. Yet the very strengths and popularity of this format have created an untenable situation for academic libraries and the people who rely on them for information. (Astle, 1989)

The problem for the libraries is that the number of

journals has been steadily increasing while journal prices are rising even faster, so that, in the face of ever-higher demand to make journals available to scholars, the num- ber being purchased by libraries is actually decreasing.

The problem for users is that limited time and limited

reading rates make it impossible to keep up with the lit- erature. We constantly hear from our colleagues remarks like:

We've known for some time that, roughly speaking, nobody reads anything but preprints, the archival journal of choice . . . and secondary references cited in these two primary sources. (David Merman in Physics Today, cited in Astle, 1989)

Why doesn't the market keep the supply of journals tuned to the level that libraries can acquire and scholars can read? The answer seems to be that the publication of

scholarly journals, unlike magazines, is not reader- driven.

The enterprise is fueled mainly by the joint needs of

publishing companies to profit and scholars to publish. The result is the proliferation of journals, even though many have only a few hundred subscribers, and the es- calation of prices- these trends obviously holding as

strongly for psychology as for other fields. Thus, there is reason to raise the question:

What does the future hold for journals in psychology?

For clues to an answer, we might first look to the past. Doing so, we note first how inextricably the growth of

psychology and the growth of its journal enterprise have been intertwined throughout the first century of their

joint existence. As psychology began to split off from

philosophy and physiology toward the end of the nine- teenth century, the move toward autonomy was marked

by the founding of Mind (1876) in England, Zeitschrift fur

Psychologie (1890) in Germany, and the American Jour- nal of Psychology (1887), soon followed by the Psycho- logical Review (1894) in the United States. Though I don't have a statistical summary, I think the expansion of psychological journals must have tracked quite closely the growth in numbers and activities of psychologists since that period - in each case a shallow growth curve for five or six decades, then an explosive increase fol- lowing World War II. My impression of the most recent decade is that the parallelism is finally weakening in that the increase in number of psychologists (judging from statistics on PhDs in psychology) is tapering off somewhat while the proliferation of journals continues unabated.

How, specifically, have psychology and psychologists been served by journals in this apparent symbiosis?

In summarizing the answers that occur to me, I shall distinguish service to psychologists as producers of infor- mation, to psychologists as users, and to psychology as a science.

Information storage and communication. Most con- spicuous, of course, is the role of journals in the commu- nication and preservation of the products of the work of psychologists. Journals are more durable than meeting talks and more timely than books - reasons enough to make them appear indispensable. These attributes clearly are evident to psychologists. In a study of information exchange activities of psychologists, ratings of impor- tance of various sources of information by samples of American and foreign psychologists showed much higher reliance on journals than on books or communications at meetings in both samples (American Psychological Asso- ciation, 1964).

The social and symbolic roles. The founding of jour- nals often provides a signal of recognition of groups and movements. The emergence of psychology as an identi- fiable discipline in this country was marked by the found- ing of journals like the Psychological Review and

Psychological Bulletin, whose contents have virtually de- fined the scope of scientific psychology. Somewhat later, major specializations began to take form, and with them

major specialty journals for experimental, social, and abnormal psychology. Then, as disaggregation of psy- chology continued, each new subdivision has had to be le-

gitimized by its own journal - the branching process con-

tinuing down to the current generation, which includes journals of mental imagery, nonverbal behavior, music

VOL. 1, NO. 1, JANUARY 1990 Copyright © 1990 American Psychological Society 1

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PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Editorial

Frequent questions about PS

Q- How will PS differ from the American Psychologist?

A: They will serve some of the same functions, but PS will concentrate on presenting and representing scientific psychology and will generally not be concerned with professional affairs.

Q: How will theoretical, review, and research articles differ between PS and the other broad gauge journals, Psychological Review, Psychological Bulletin, and Journal of Experimental Psychology .General?

A: Some overlap is to be expected in each case, the differences being matters of emphasis (except for length of articles, where PS will not contest with the others at the upper part of the range).

Selection criteria for theoretical articles in PS will be similar to those of Psychological Review but with special concern for breadth of appeal and readability.

Literature reviews for PS should aim for selectivity, interpretive value, and theoretical content at the expense of the comprehensive coverage and extensive reference lists characteristic of the Psychological Bulletin.

Research articles will be of the kind found in JEP.General, but selected not only for theoretical or practical significance but also with a view to representing the full range of research in scientific psychology.

The shorter Research Reports in PS, typically presentations of single studies or brief theoretical communications, are intended to meet a need not currently being well served by psychological journals. They will be refereed with a high standard of quality, but with turnaround of manuscripts fast enough to enable timely publication.

Q: Is PS to be essentially a clone of Science?

A: In many respects, yes. It is designed to serve much the same functions for psychology that Science does well for the physical and biological sciences. Two differences are that general articles and news in PS will be contributed by psychologists or other scientists rather than by professional writers, and that, with respect to research publication, every effort will be made to keep PS from becoming a house organ for a few specialties.

Q: When should I begin sending my best work to PS?

A: Now.

perception, spatial vision, discourse processes, among seemingly innumerable recent entries, many of them as- sociated with new societies.

Standard setting. Long before the appearance of re- search grants and their review panels, journals began to provide organized peer review of research outputs. The first fruits were improved standards for the report of re- search. The easy informality of earlier decades gave way gradually to increasingly uniform rules, tacitly assumed by investigators or set out in fine print by editors, for kinds and depth of information to be supplied about methods and results, and for the organization of research reports until today writing Method and Results sections of a research article is much like filling in a tax form. But the growing influence of journal reviewers and editors has gone much beyond the standardization of reporting, extending to ever stricter standards for experimental con- trol and, most notably, statistical analysis. The almost obligatory analysis of variance is to an important degree the creature of the journal establishment.

Certification of merit. A perhaps unforeseen conse- quence of journal reviewing mechanisms and standard

setting is that meeting the standards has become a prin- cipal way of certifying merit for purposes of qualifying investigators for academic promotion and scientific awards. One of the most nearly ubiquitous criteria set by promotion and award committees for giving weight to research contributions is that the work be reported in "major, refereed journals." It is hard to overestimate the power over the lives of scientists exerted by the editors and referees of journals.

Contributions to intellectual life. The appearance of Volume 1 , Number 1 of the Psychological Review must have been an occasion of some excitement for psychol- ogists of the mid- 1890s. The diverse but quantitatively somewhat meager contents included George Trumbull Ladd's APA address, brief accounts of current studies in the Harvard and Yale laboratories, a curious article by Sir Francis Galton on arithmetic by smell, a more staid contribution on infant language by John Dewey, and dis- cussions of 'The case of John Bunyan" by the philoso- pher Josiah Royce and of a disagreement with Wundt by William James. A book review section, remarkably ex- tensive by present standards (making up a full 25% of the issue), presented a review of thirteen books on the ner-

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PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

Editorial

vous system by Henry Donaldson and of three on aphasia by M. Allen Starr. "Notes" remarked on appointments to instructorships, James Rowland Angell to Minnesota in philosophy (he would, however, offer courses in ex- perimental psychology), and Howard Crosby Warren to Princeton, actually in psychology, and the "calling" of "Professor Stumpf

' to Berlin. The first issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychol-

ogy, appearing some three decades later, was marked by similar diversity and not much more formal organization. The modest offering of articles ranged from new methods of heterochromatic photometry to test results on 1000 juvenile delinquents. Some were laid out in almost the modern style with Method, Results, and Conclusions, others presented simple, narrative accounts of research with no headings.

It seems likely that these and the other journals of the period were read as they came off the press and provided prime material for discussions and arguments over lunch or tea. In fact, the same was still true to a considerable degree when I was a graduate student around 1940. But no longer today. Current issues of the same journals present a much more formidable appearance, packed with articles that are typically long, similarly structured, and dense with information. One who scans a new issue is put off simply by the mass of material, suitable to be studied and referred to later, not to be read and discussed as it comes off line. The psychological journal has ma- tured to be an impressive device for information storage, but at the cost of its function as a catalyst for the intel- lectual life of the academic community.

The future for journals. What next? The predicament we face is clear enough. Journals have become com- pletely indispensable to researchers and teachers in psy- chology, but the number of journals needed to serve the needs for archival storage of knowledge, symbolic func- tions, standard setting, and certification of merit has

grown so large, with no end in sight, that neither individ- uals nor libraries can meet the costs or provide the stor-

age space to keep the enterprise afloat much longer. I have no doubt that some of the schemes that have been

proposed for using technological advances will soon come into common use (Carabillo, 1966; Council on Bi-

ological Sciences Information, 1970). Perhaps the solu- tion will be some combination of mailings of contents

listings of journals to subscribers with the journals them- selves existing only on disks, where articles can be se-

lectively retrieved and transmitted electronically to us- ers. Most of the functions of journals will still be served, but the picture is one of a cold and unexciting future. How will the science of psychology fare if the intellectual life of psychologists degenerates for lack of one of its main stimulants?

A way of mitigating the cold electronic future has been envisaged by those who conceived Psychological Sci- ence and nurtured its gestation - namely, producing a journal specifically to serve the missing functions. The journal should be designed

• to be read as well as referred to, • to provide psychologists with a convenient means to

view the range of work in their science, • to publish articles meriting archival storage but more

readable and less dense in information than is typical of the more specialized journals.

As the vast array of specialized serials crowding li- brary shelves is eaten away by the inexorable advance of information processing technology, a journal so designed may be the last to go. A holdout against the merciless demand for increasing efficiency, it may preserve some of the flavor, and, in current jargon, "user friendly" style of the early journals.

Helping psychologists keep up with their field would be a sufficient purpose for the new journal, but we mean to set our sights still higher and try to serve some func- tions that have been largely missed by the present journal armamentarium - promoting interdisciplinary knowledge- ability on the part of psychologists and presenting scien- tific psychology to people outside our field. With this thought in mind, Psychological Science will welcome ar- ticles written for psychologists by investigators in related areas of neural, cognitive, linguistic, and social science and will encourage psychologists to try, on occasion, the truly formidable task of presenting psychological re- search and applications in a form comprehensible, per- haps even interesting, to educated nonpsychologists in government, industry, and academia.

It will not be easy for psychologists, shaped up by editors for a good many years to produce lengthy and detailed expositions of multiple studies, to come around to the style intended for Psychological Science. Experi- ence during the months preceding this first issue confirms this supposition, but also has found encouragingly wide- spread interest in making the needed effort.

W.K. Estes

REFERENCES

American Psychological Association. (1964). A preliminary study of information exchange activities of foreign psychologists and a comparison of such ac- tivities with those occurring in the United States. (Project on Scientific Information Exchange in Psychology, Rep. No. 10). Washington, DC: Au- thor.

Astle, D.L. (1989). Suicide squeeze: The escalating cost of scholarly journals. Academe, 75, 13-17.

Carabillo, V. (Ed.). (1966). The national information problem. S.D.C. Magazine, 9, 1-15.

Council on Biological Sciences Information. (1970). Information handling in the life sciences. Washington, DC: National Research Council.

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