How the launch of a new journal in 1904 may have changed the relationship between psychology and philosophy.

Recent research has used networks of scholarly journal articles to investigate the intellectual structure of the discipline of psychology from the later 1880s to the early 1920s. Here, instead, we examined the networks of philosophical journals that were closely aligned with psychology-The Monist, Philosophical Review, and The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods-between 1890 and 1913. We discovered that, although the first 2 of these journals published a great deal of psychologically relevant material up to 1903, material of that sort seemed to evaporate after the launch of the third journal in 1904. It was not so much that material migrated from the old journals to the new one. It was rather that the new journal was able to attract new trends in American philosophical psychology, while interest in traditional approaches seemed to dry up. The result was that psychology moved into a new and expansive era, while America philosophy was left somewhat destabilized as it attempted to reconfigure its disciplinary identity. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Evolution of the American Journal of Psychology, 1904-1918: A Network Investigation.

In an earlier article, we used digital historical methods to examine the first 14 volumes (1887-1903) of The American Journal of Psychology (AJP) by creating networks of the vocabularies used in every substantive article the journal published in those years. These networks showed us the major research groups that had been gathered together by the journal's founder-editor, G. Stanley Hall, and how the intellectual composition of the journal (and the discipline) changed over that 17-year period. In the present article we extended that study forward, creating networks for the next 15 volumes (1904-1918), broken into time blocks of 5 years each. Our findings, in brief, were that vision research (especially color) continued to play as consistent and prominent role in the journal as it had since the start; that memory, association, and some higher mental processes were active areas of research throughout; that Hall continued to have an on-again, off-again relationship with theoretical and philosophical psychology; that intelligence-measuring methods, psychoanalysis, and psychophysics were periodically popular enough that they each generated a cluster in 1 of the 3 time blocks; and that Titchener's participation in the editing of AJP led to its becoming the major outlet for his Structuralist research program (an absence that we noted in our earlier studies of the journal Psychological Review).

The Evolution of The American Journal of Psychology 1, 1887-1903: A Network Investigation.

The American Journal of Psychology (AJP) was the first academic journal in the United States dedicated to the "new" scientific form of the discipline. But where did the journal's founding owner/editor, G. Stanley Hall, find the "psychologists" he needed to fill the pages of such a venture 1887, when he was still virtually the only professor of psychology in the country? To investigate this question we used the substantive vocabularies of every full article published in AJP's first 14 volumes to generate networks of verbally similar articles. These networks reveal the variety of research communities that Hall drew on to launch and support the journal. Three separate networks, corresponding to 3 successive time blocks, show how Hall's constellation of participating research communities changed over AJP's first 17 years. Many of these communities started with rather nebulous boundaries but soon began to differentiate into groups of more distinct specialties. Some topics declined over time, but new ones regularly appeared to replace them. We sketch a quasievolutionary model to describe the intellectual ecology of AJP's early years.

Searching for the structure of early American psychology: Networking Psychological Review, 1909-1923.

This study continues a previous investigation of the intellectual structure of early American psychology by presenting and analyzing 3 networks that collectively include every substantive article published in Psychological Review during the 15-year period from 1909 to 1923. The networks were laid out such that articles (represented by the network's nodes) that possessed strongly correlated vocabularies were positioned closer to each other spatially than articles with weakly correlated vocabularies. We identified distinct research communities within the networks by locating and interpreting the clusters of lexically similar articles. We found that the Psychological Review was in some turmoil during this period compared with its first 15 years attributable, first, to Baldwin's unexpected departure in 1910; second, to the pressures placed on the discipline by United States entry into World War I; and, third, to the emergence of specialty psychology journals catering to research communities that had once published in the Review. The journal emerged from these challenges, however, with a better-defined mission: to serve as the chief repository of theoretical psychology in the United States.

Searching for the structure of early American psychology: Networking Psychological Review, 1894-1908.

This study investigated the intellectual structure of early American psychology by generating 3 networks that collectively included every substantive article published in Psychological Review during the 15-year period from the journal's start in 1894 until 1908. The networks were laid out so that articles with strongly correlated vocabularies were positioned close to each other spatially. Then, we identified distinct research communities by locating and interpreting article clusters within the networks. We found that, from the first 5-year time block to the second, psychological specialties rapidly differentiated themselves from each other. Between the second and third 5-year time blocks, however, the number of specialties shrunk. We discuss the degree to which this shift may have been attributable either to a change in the journal's editorship in 1904, or to a broader crisis of confidence, beginning that same year, in the use of "consciousness" as the discipline's defining concept.

Beyond the schools of psychology 2: a digital analysis of psychological review, 1904-1923.

In order to better understand the broader trends and points of contention in early American psychology, it is conventional to organize the relevant material in terms of "schools" of psychology-structuralism, functionalism, etc. Although not without value, this scheme marginalizes many otherwise significant figures, and tends to exclude a large number of secondary, but interesting, individuals. In an effort to address these problems, we grouped all the articles that appeared in the second and third decades of Psychological Review into five-year blocks, and then cluster analyzed each block by the articles' verbal similarity to each other. This resulted in a number of significant intellectual "genres" of psychology that are ignored by the usual "schools" taxonomy. It also made "visible" a number of figures who are typically downplayed or ignored in conventional histories of the discipline, and it provide us with an intellectual context in which to understand their contributions.

Beyond the schools of psychology 1: a digital analysis of Psychological Review, 1894-1903.

Traditionally, American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century has been framed as a competition among a number of "schools": structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc. But this is only one way in which the "structure" of the discipline can be conceived. Most psychologists did not belong to a particular school, but they still worked within loose intellectual communities, and so their work was part of an implicit psychological "genre," if not a formalized "school." In this study, we began the process of discovering the underlying genres of American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century by taking the complete corpus of articles from the journal Psychological Review during the first decade of its publication and conducting a statistical analysis of the vocabularies they employed to see what clusters of articles naturally emerged. Although the traditional functionalist school was among the clusters we found, we also found distinct research traditions around the topics of color vision, spatial vision, philosophy/metatheory, and emotion. In addition, momentary clusters corresponding to important debates (e.g., the variability hypothesis) appeared during certain years, but not others.