Moving the Pendulum Back to the Middle: Reflections on and Introduction to the Inductive Research Special Issue of Journal of Business and Psychology

This special issue of the Journal of Business and Psychology contains a diverse set of 13 papers that adopted an inductive approach. In addition to setting the stage for the special feature, the case for inductive research is broached. The papers in the special feature used a variety of approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, that shared the characteristic that they did not report tests of deductive theory-driven hypotheses. Rather these papers presented exploratory findings that were not limited by an explicit a priori theoretical framework. The special issue heeds calls that the field needs more inductive research to serve as the basis for theory. It is hoped that it will inspire editors of other journals to be more accepting of good inductive papers that report novel findings.     

A Study on Journal Self-Citations and Intra-Citing within the Subject Category of Multidisciplinary Sciences

For academic research outcomes, there is an increasing emphasis on the bibliometric scorings like the journal impact factor and citations when the assessment of the scientific merits of research or researchers is required. Currently, no known study has been conducted to explore the bibliographical trends of the subject category of multidisciplinary sciences as indexed by the annual Journal Citation Reports of the Thomson Scientific. The effect of journal self-citations and intra-citing within a discipline to the bibliometric data computation can be confounding. In this study, six journals were selected from the multidisciplinary sciences subject category where the trend of self-citations and intra-citing were analysed. These journals were chosen as they published more than 450 citable articles in the year 2007 and had available bibliometric data for a 10-year period. The results showed that self-citations rose as much as +23.98% while intra-citing declined up to ?5.80% over the observed period. The retrospective impacts and influences of these observations were also discussed in this study.     

Comparing Journal of Consumer Psychology and Journal of Consumer Research

The Journal of Consumer Psychology (JCP) was created in 1992 partly in response to what was interpreted by some as a shift in the methodological focus of the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR). JCR began to increase its accommodation of postmodern approaches, compared to more positivistic approaches. JCP's mission was thus perceived by some to be more methodologically homogeneous, with a greater focus on traditional experimental psychology in the domain of consumer behavior. Is JCR really more methodologically diverse than JCP? In what other ways are the two journals similar or different? This article attempts to answer these questions with an in‐depth analysis of the articles published in both journals from 1992 to 1998. The articles are reviewed in terms of overall output, authorship, content, research design, and data analysis. Conclusions and implications are included.     

The use of ethnic minority populations in published psychological research, 1990-1999

For this study, the authors analyzed the contents of 16 psychology journals for the presence of empirical articles on African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans during the period ranging from 1990 to 1999. In 6 APA journals, there was a low percentage (4.7%) of such articles. African Americans were the most studied ethnic group. Data collected for this study also indicated that minority research has been increasing more in non-APA journals than in APA journals. In both APA and non-APA journals, counseling-oriented journals had higher percentages of minority articles than did journals of other subdisciplines. Possible explanations, consequences, and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Approaches to the study of media and religion: Notes from the Editors of the Journal of Media and Religion with recommendations for future research

As the Journal of Media and Religion (JMR) begins its seventh year, the editors pause to reflect on research directions and make recommendations for future research. Based on studies in JMR and other sources, three research approaches are identified: (1) The Proliferation of Mediated Religion, or the idea that media are creating multiple places of worship beyond the physical walls of traditional congregations, (2) Religious Audiences as Interpretive Communities, where shared interpretations of popular media content are increasingly important in understanding religious groups, and (3) Media Criticism drawing on the cultural aspects of religion in critiquing media genres and texts.

A dominant theme across the three approaches is that individuals are increasingly willing to have religious experiences through media of popular culture. The numinous is recommended as an integrative concept to facilitate research of new forms of mediated religion.     

Benefits to the Spanish research community of regional content expansion in Web of Science

The regional content expansion of Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI) Web of Science added approximately 1,600 journals to the database with a regional as opposed to international focus. Web of Science coverage has grown to reflect the changing nature of global research publication trends and the additional regional journals provide greater visibility to high quality local studies beyond their traditional boundaries. The cited references indexed from the regional journals represent the influence of those journals on both the global and local research communities. This study analyses the impact of adding Spanish regional journals to Web of Science on the publication and citation patterns of Spanish research. The findings demonstrate a recent increase in research output from Spain and this is explained by more Spanish research being produced rather than due to the indexing of more Spanish journals; indeed it is shown that the majority of Spanish research is not published in Spanish journals. An analysis of Spanish journal citations uncovers a Spanish regional citation network previously undetected and serves as valuable information for evaluators of Spanish journals.     

Abstracting Psychological Literature,Especially Non-English,in the 1990s

The cessation of non-English materials in Psychological Abstracts in 1988 resulted in a crisis, yet to be resolved, in the international exchange of information. As a long-term solution we favour founding International Psychological Abstracts, with the responsibility for preparation of the abstracts to be shared by the international psychological community. It is hoped that the compact-disc versions of the databases will become affordable to institutions around the world. In this communication, in addition to the abstract system of the American Psychological Association, attention will be given to other abstract journals in English as well as in French, German, and Russian.     

Exploring Why and How Journal Editors Retract Articles: Findings From a Qualitative Study

Editors have a responsibility to retract seriously flawed articles from their journals. However, there appears to be little consistency in journals’ policies or procedures for this. In a qualitative study, we therefore interviewed editors of science journals using semi-structured interviews to investigate their experience of retracting articles. We identified potential barriers to retraction, difficulties in the process and also sources of support and encouragement. Our findings have been used as the basis for guidelines developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics.     

Lesbian,gay, bisexual,and transgender youth: Limited representation in school support personnel journals

Many lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth experience harassment and discrimination in schools and these experiences lead to increased negative social-emotional outcomes. Youth who can identify at least one supportive adult at school report better outcomes than youth who cannot identify a safe adult. Yet, many educators report feeling uncomfortable or unprepared to support LGBT youth. One reason for educators' discomfort may be that content related to issues unique to LGBT youth is sometimes missing or covered minimally in university training programs. We hypothesized that LGBT content may be covered minimally in school support personnel journals, as well. This study analyzed eight school support personnel journals across the disciplines of school counseling, school nursing, school psychology, and school social work for LGBT content published between 2000 and 2014 to gain a better understanding of the visibility of LGBT issues in the research. Results suggested that there has been a lack of presence of LGBT issues in journals across disciplines. These results also suggest a need for an intentional focus on issues relevant to LGBT youth in school support personnel journals. Thus, the article concludes with an introduction to two articles in this special topic section, including Russell, Day, Ioverno, and Toomey's (in this issue) study on teacher perceptions of bullying in the context of enumerated school policies and other supportive sexual orientation and gender identity related practices and Poteat and Vecho's (in this issue) study on characteristics of bystanders in homophobic bullying situations. The broad goal of these three studies is to increase visibility of critical LGBT issues in school support personnel journals.     

In search of cultural diversity: recent literature in cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology

The purpose of this study was to identify where the most work on cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology is being published and who the most productive authors are. The journals that published the most articles on cross-cultural and ethnic minority issues from 1993 to 1999 and the most prolific authors on these issues were identified by PsycINFO. Cross-cultural research is cross-national, whereas ethnic minority research involves groups of color within the United States. The citation impact of these journals and authors was determined from the 1997 Social Sciences Citation Index. The results suggest that there is very limited overlap between the literatures in cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology. Most of the research in these areas is published in specialty journals, and there is a paucity of this research in prestigious journals. Perceived or actual barriers to publication in prestigious journals may cause some to seek specialty journals as outlets for research on cultural diversity. The top scholars in cross-cultural psychology are primarily men of European ancestry, whereas most of the top scholars in ethnic minority psychology are ethnic minority men and women. Strategies to increase the prominence of cultural diversity in the psychology literature include combining cross-cultural and ethnic minority psychology, increasing the number of editorial board members of prestigious journals having expertise in cultural diversity, and increasing the quality of specialty journals. Psychology will remain ill-equipped to face the challenges of the new millennium without increased attention to cultural diversity.     

Older adult research in the Journal of Counseling Psychology,The Counseling Psychologist,and Counselling Psychology Quarterly: A 15-year review and implications for research

In preparing for an aging global population, older adults’ well-being has become an urgent priority across the world. Counseling psychologists have also called upon the field for more empirical attention on older adults. Yet, a review of the literature revealed that older adults were represented in less than 2% of all the articles in the Journal of Counseling Psychology (JCP) and The Counseling Psychologist (TCP) from 1991 to 2000. The current study presents a follow-up review of older adult research in counseling psychology literature between 2001 and 2015 in the following mainstream journals: Counselling Psychology Quarterly (CPQ), JCP, and TCQ. Results suggest a decline in the past 15 years, with less than 1% of the total articles in JCP, TCP, and CPQ devoted to older adults. Most of the studies employed cross-sectional survey research design to examine predictors of mental health. A number of studies focused on culture-specific experiences of diverse older adults. Implications and suggestions for future research on older adult issues are discussed in relation to the principles and interests rooted in the field of counseling psychology.     

Play,Precariousness, and the Negotiation of Shared Meaning: A Developmental Research Perspective on Child Psychotherapy

Recent work in developmental psychology and primatology indicates that human infants are distinguished from other primates by the end of the 1st year by their awareness that others have subjective states like their own. This early appearing awareness of the subjectivity of others forms the basis for the subsequent negotiation and elaboration of “we-ness,” that is, of shared orientations toward the world that allow the child to enter into collaborative relations with others. It is argued that this gradual working out of collaborative strategies for the elaboration of shared meanings is a principal function of joint pretend play in early childhood, and this is one of the critical developmental functions addressed in psychodynamic play therapy. Developmental theory and research contributing to this perspective is integrated with excerpts from children's joint pretend play and from play therapy case material to illustrate the precarious and improvisational nature of the negotiation of shared meaning.     

Citation Networks of Communication Journals, 1977–1985 Cliques and Positions,Citations Made and Citations Received

This article analyzes the pattern of citations among all communication journals covered by the first nine years of the Journal Citation Reports volume of the Social Sciences Citation Index (Garfield, 1977–1985). It approaches these analyses from two perspectives: (1) bibliometric analysis of citation flows, ratios, and impact factors, and (2) network analysis of both cohesion-based and position-based citation patterns. The field of communication exhibits clear clustering and inbreeding, consisting of cliques of interpersonal journals, mass media journals, and residual isolate journals. Citation patterns within and across these cliques have been very stable from 1977 through 1985. The cohesion analyses show that Human Communication Research and Communication Education provide weak ties from mass media journals to interpersonal communication journals. The Journal of Communication is cited the most strongly by the most journals, and provides, by means of citations, bidirectional channels for the flow of scientific information between mass media journals and interpersonal journals. The positional analyses show that the set of journals that has similar citing patterns is somewhat different from the set of journals that is cited similarly. In particular, the set of sources for the research reported in articles in these journals is not similar to the set of journals that refer to the articles in these journals.     

Task orientation, parental warmth and SES account for a significant proportion of the shared environmental variance in general cognitive ability in early childhood: evidence from a twin study

Prior research suggests shared environmental influences on cognitive performance are important in early childhood. However, few studies have attempted to identify the factors comprising this shared environmental variance. To address this issue, we examined the covariance between task orientation, parental warmth, socioeconomic status and general cognitive ability in a British twin study of 125 pairs of identical and same-sex fraternal twins. Task orientation correlated r =.41 with general cognitive ability Bivariate genetic analyses suggested that this correlation was mediated by shared environmental influences. Additional analyses suggested that SES and parental warmth mediated about two-thirds of the shared environmental covariance between task engagement and cognitive skills.     

Calculating Impact Factor: How Bibliographical Classification of Journal Items Affects the Impact Factor of Large and Small Journals

As bibliographical classification of published journal items affects the denominator in this equation, we investigated how the numerator and denominator of the impact factor (IF) equation were generated for representative journals in two categories of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). We performed a full text search of the 1st-ranked journal in 2004 JCR category “Medicine, General and Internal” (New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM, IF = 38.570) and 61st-ranked journal (Croatian Medical Journal, CMJ, IF = 0.690), 1st-ranked journal in category “Multidisciplinary Sciences” (Nature, IF = 32.182) and journal with a relative rank of CMJ (Anais da Academia Brasileira de Ciencias, AABC, IF = 0.435). Large journals published more items categorized by Web of Science (WoS) as non-research items (editorial material, letters, news, book reviews, bibliographical items, or corrections): 63% out of total 5,193 items in Nature and 81% out of 3,540 items in NEJM, compared with 31% out of 283 items in CMJ and only 2 (2%) out of 126 items in AABC. Some items classified by WoS as non-original contained original research data (9.5% in Nature, 7.2% in NEJM, 13.7% in CMJ and none in AABC). These items received a significant number of citations: 6.9% of total citations in Nature, 14.7% in NEJM and 18.5% in CMJ. IF decreased for all journals when only items presenting original research and citations to them were used for IF calculation. Regardless of the journal’s size or discipline, publication of non-original research and its classification by the bibliographical database have an effect on both numerator and denominator of the IF equation. Preliminary results of the study were presented at the 2006 ORI Research Conference on Research Integrity, Tampa, FL, December 1–3, 2006.     

Integrating Cultural Community Psychology: Activity Settings and the Shared Meanings of Intersubjectivity

Cultural and community psychology share a common emphasis on context, yet their leading journals rarely cite each other’s articles. Greater integration of the concepts of culture and community within and across their disciplines would enrich and facilitate the viability of cultural community psychology. The contextual theory of activity settings is proposed as one means to integrate the concepts of culture and community in cultural community psychology. Through shared activities, participants develop common experiences that affect their psychological being, including their cognitions, emotions, and behavioral development. The psychological result of these experiences is intersubjectivity. Culture is defined as the shared meanings that people develop through their common historic, linguistic, social, economic, and political experiences. The shared meanings of culture arise through the intersubjectivity developed in activity settings. Cultural community psychology presents formidable epistemological challenges, but overcoming these challenges could contribute to the transformation and advancement of community psychology.     

Productivity of doctoral programs in Psychology with Quality Mention in journal articles included in Journal Citation Reports

The main objective of the present study was to classify doctoral programs with Quality Mention in Psychology based on their scientific productivity. For this purpose, articles in the Web of Science published by professors teaching in these doctoral programs were analyzed. In addition, we analyzed scientific journals in which these professors tend to publish more papers and the evolution in the number of papers published until 2009. Results showed that the most productive doctoral program was the Neurosciences program at the University of Oviedo. This program showed a ratio of 40 articles--published in journals included in Journal Citation Reports--by each professor. In contrast, other programs did not reach a ratio of 10 articles per professor. Regarding journals, results showed that 9 out of the 20 most popular journals are Hispanic and a gradual increase in the number of published papers was also observed. Lastly, results and implications for quality assessment are discussed.     

Folie à Famille: A Family Therapist's Perspective

Over the last century there have been reports in the psychiatric journals of an unusual disorder, folie ä famille, yet the syndrome has been neglected by family theorists. In this paper the literature on delusions shared by families is examined from the perspective of a family therapist. The role the disorder plays in defining the continuum of functional/dysfunctional shared familial beliefs is described, and a case example demonstrating that folie ä famille may be underreported is presented.     

Couples' narratives of shared‐self,possessions and consumption experiences

How consumers use possessions and consumption to enact their shared‐self has been underexplored in earlier consumer research. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the emergence of couple‐level (or partnered) shared‐self. A narrative research method was used in Hong Kong, which allowed for an inter‐temporal narrative about the informants' important possessions. Our findings revealed key characteristics regarding the way in which informants' interpretations of shared selves developed over time. This included sharing and negotiating resources (e.g., a house or money) with their partners, integrating similar perspectives (e.g., interests and lifestyle) to their partners', and including their partners as part of the self. This study provides the basis for future research to see how these findings hold up at other stages of partnered relationships. This research provides a conceptualization – a temporal model of couples' shared‐self – that could contribute to and enhance the existing literature on the interrelationship between possessions and the extended self. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.