Content and context: The impact of Campbell and Stanley.

Abstract

The year was 1957. The United States, a world power arising out of the ashes of World War II, was entering an age of economic prosperity. Especially in the United States, the many successes of science had created optimism about a new age of technological and social well-being. But at the same time, Sputnik had just been launched by the Soviet Union. The Cold War was in its second decade and still growing. The civil rights era was just beginning in the United States, where social and economic disparities were about to generate a war on poverty.Amidst this social context, Donald T. Campbell, having recently been told he was unlikely to be tenured at the University of Chicago because of his sparse publication record (Campbell, 1981), was in his third academic position, an associate professorship in psychology at Northwestern University. At Northwestern, Campbell continued to pursue several related programs of research that he hoped would eventually garner him both academic tenure and the respect of his colleagues. 1

Why the resistance to statistical innovations? Bridging the communication gap.

“…Aspiring authors of quantitative articles could also learn from Mavens by modeling their highly cited articles. For example, Shadish, Phillips, and Clark (2003) conducted a case study of Campbell and Stanley’s (1963) influential article on quasi-experimental designs. Another function Mavens could serve would be to monitor a website maintained by one of the psychological associations listing accessible quantitative articles by topic, something akin to socialpsychology.org.…”

Campbell and Rubin: A primer and comparison of their approaches to causal inference in field settings.

“…Second, in gathering references, I was struck by the continued widespread work on generalized causal inference that traces its inspiration at least partly to CCM (e.g., Boruch & Mosteller, 2002; Cook, 2007; McKnight, McKnight, Sidani, & Figueredo, 2007; Reichardt, 2006; Shadish & Rindskopf, 2007) and the continued high number of citations to the key works in CCM. Much of this work was and still is carried out by members of the core theory group that Campbell attracted to Northwestern University (Shadish, Phillips, & Clark, 2003). However, CCM achieved paradigmatic status in part because it attracted so many researchers who were not themselves part of the Northwestern theory group (e.g., Bickman, 2000; Braver & Braver, 1988; Henry & Mark, 2003; Lipsey, 1990; Maxwell, 2003; McKillip, 1992; McKnight et al, 2007; Reynolds & West, 1987).…”

Sleeping Beauties in Psychology: Comparisons of "Hits" and "Missed Signals" in Psychological Journals.

“…It is not entirely clear whether group support within a scientific school or the theoretical framework were responsible for articles being recognized more swiftly. Contributors to Sternberg’s (2003) volume emphasized group support, referring to “tribal leadership” (Shadish et al, 2003) and the necessity of finding “champions and converts” (Sternberg & Jarvin, 2003) or “disciples” (Berscheid, 2003).…”

“…As in these examples, investigations of the process of scientific recognition in psychology have tended to focus on the scientists themselves (Over, 1982; Simonton, 1976, 2002). There have been few investigations of what makes scientific articles influential (see Shadish, 1989; Shadish, Phillips, & Clark, 2003; Sternberg & Gordeeva, 1996, on this topic in psychology). In the present article the focus of attention is on scientific publications rather than on scientists.…”