First citation speed for articles in Psychology of Music

Abstract

This study examined the speed of initial research impact and dissemination for 619 articles published in Psychology of Music ( POM) from 1973 to 2012. A computer script calculated the time elapsed from publication to receiving a first-citation from a referencing journal and discipline. Journal references ( n = 7,969) to POM were extracted from Google Scholar and divided into business, education, medical, music, music education, natural science, psychology, social science, and technology collections. Stratified plots revealed that journals in the disciplines of music education and psychology cited POM articles more quickly than other fields; music psychology journals cited POM more quickly than music education journals from US and worldwide sources, and POM articles published from 1973–1992 were more quickly cited by journals in music education, while articles from 1993–2012 by those in music psychology. Cox regression indicated research-uptake accelerated with later decades, publishers, editor eras, and increased article impact. Results confirm the importance of recent POM articles to journals in the discipline of music psychology and earlier articles to journals in the field of music education. POM was cited broadly, though adoption speeds were slower for journals in fields beyond music education and psychology.

Sources Cited in the Journal of Research in Music Education: 1953 to 2015

“…There probably are a number of reasons for this increase in materials cited over time. Generally, these trends seem to reflect the referencing behaviors in several scientific fields, where reference lists continue to expand (Milojević, 2012), and may suggest music education researchers are exploring newer topics than those established in prior eras and therefore require more explanation and justification, which could be evidenced by paradigm shifts occurring sometime in the 1976–1985 era, as was argued by Jorgensen and Ward-Steinman (2015), as well as in the 1986–1995 and 2006–2015 time spans, when new research journals and topics were emerging (Hancock & Price, 2016; Price & Chang, 2000). At the same time, the number of references per article eclipses those in other fields.…”

“…During the eras examined, there has also been an expansion in relevant journals publishing music education research (cf. Hancock & Price, 2016; Price, 1997), which were increasingly cited over journals in other disciplines (see Tables 3 and S2). It appears that citation norms consolidated around a set of discipline-specific journals in the 1986–1995 and 1996–2005 eras.…”

“…Many aspects were discussed from this work, but the initial outreach of articles in the JRME is strong, with 50% of these articles cited in their first year and 75% by the eighth. A year later, Hancock and Price (2016) examined the speed of initial impact of 619 articles published in POM from its 1973 inception to 2012. More recent publications of POM tended to cite its own studies faster than other serials, but it was not that way before 1993.…”

“…In contrast, studies comparing citation practices between disciplines have shown that researchers in the humanities and arts tend to cite artistic works, monographs, and performances more so than journal articles (Garfield, 1982; Huang & Chang, 2008; Moed, 2006), which complicates comparisons of citation practices and research impact. Other unique attributes of research in these disciplines include the production of many studies that remain uncited for years (Hancock, 2015; Hancock & Price, 2016), if ever (Hamilton, 1991), and a trend for scholarship to have lower rates of self-citation (3%) when compared with figures from the physical sciences (15%), social sciences (6%), and all other fields (9%; Snyder & Bonzi, 1998).…”

Visualizing Music Psychology: A Bibliometric Analysis of Psychology of Music, Music Perception, and Musicae Scientiae from 1973 to 2017

“…Hancock and Price (2016) provided some evidence of this gap by examining the first citation speed for articles in Psychology of Music from 1973 and 2012. The authors found that the probability of an article receiving a first citation was .25 after 2 years, .50 after 4 years, and .75 after 7 years (Hancock & Price, 2016).…”