Scholarly Merit in a Global Context: The Nation Gap in Psychological Science

Abstract

Psychologists from the United States are extremely prominent in psychological science, publishing more articles and receiving more citations than researchers from other nations. In this brief article, I review some previous research on this "nation gap" in psychology and highlight relevant data from journals published by the Association for Psychological Science. I then discuss some possible explanations for the nation gap and touch on some of its implications for thinking about scholarly merit and scientific eminence. I hope that the research and data discussed here will stimulate further consideration of the role of author nationality for both judgments of scholarly merit and psychological science more generally.

Toward a psychology of Homo sapiens : Making psychological science more representative of the human population

“…In particular, as psychological science has begun to pay more attention to issues that might influence replicability, we were interested in whether scholars have begun to pay more attention to the role of cultural context in influencing generalizability of findings. Discussion of how we choose our samples and how we should report them is likely to produce more generalizable research (9), facilitate integrated data analysis (10), and enhance reproducibility of our findings (11), as well as to possibly diversify our researchers (8).…”

How USA-Centric Is Psychology? An Archival Study of Implicit Assumptions of Generalizability of Findings to Human Nature Based on Origins of Study Samples

“…Simons and colleagues (2017) also cautioned about the widespread lack of published papers in psychology clearly identifying their target populations or constraints on the generality of their findings. A complementary concern is a sampling bias in psychology involving restricted levels of diversity among samples recruited for study, who are predominantly recruited from the United States (Arnett, 2008; Cheek, 2017; Nielsen et al, 2017). Along with the recognition that most psychology researchers are based in western institutions, this persistent sampling bias has contributed to recent calls for greater inclusiveness and internationalization of psychology as a discipline (Christopher et al, 2014; Hruschka et al, 2018; Van de Vijver, 2013).…”

Personality Science: United in Diversity

“…Second, diversity in those conducting research is important. To date, US-American researchers still dominate psychological science (Cheek, 2017). In personality psychology, especially North America and Central Europe are dominant forces, while the salience and impact of researchers from other countries (e.g., from South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania) still seem to lag behind.…”