The British Journal of (Social and) Clinical Psychology- a brief citation review

Abstract

Editorial The British Journal of (Social and) Clinical Psychology -a brief citation reviewThis editorial marks the 50th volume of the, now, British Journal of Clinical Psychology, whose first nineteen volumes formed part of a combined British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. A hallmark of the journal has always been its capture of the generic scope of academic clinical psychology nationally and internationally with a firm commitment to the use of robust scientific methodologies. For the purposes of this editorial, we sought to identify articles to-date that have had most impact for researchers and to consider these -briefly -as a developmental perspective on the discipline of clinical psychology as well as considering their current relevance. We used citation counts to identify a select number of high-impact articles. However, mindful that citation counts favour older articles, we used several approaches in order to capture a broader selection of articles than would be achieved by applying only a single method.We used Web of Science to identify all articles from the to ensure an even sampling of articles from 1962 to 2010, we constructed successive 5-year time bands with the exception of 1977-1980, which we adjusted to a 4-year span so as to coincide with the last issue of British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. We selected the top cited article from each 5-year time frame, thereby yielding 10 articles spanning 1962-2010 (see Table 1 denoted by * ). In order to compensate for the cumulative effect of citations of older articles with the passage of time, we also considered the five highest impact articles during the last 20 years separately in order to capture articles that might otherwise have been masked. This yielded an additional three articles (see Table 1 denoted by †), which were all drawn from the 1990s, thereby reflecting the natural skew within this sampling frame. However, recognizing that any single search method produces its own biases, our approach served to reduce the dominance of a single search method. Table 1 presents a list of the 13 articles together with various Web of Science citation indices. These include the total citation count and average yearly citation count in order to provide a degree of control for time elapsed since publication. It also presents the citation count for these articles during the most recent 5-year period (2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010) as an indicator of their current citation salience.

The pre-history of health psychology in the United Kingdom: From natural science and psychoanalysis to social science, social cognition and beyond

“…By 1980, social and clinical psychology in Britain had grown in strength and the original BJSCP separated into two journals ( BJCP and BJSP ) in 1981. A review of the first 50 volumes of the BJCP , including 13 volumes of BJSCP , by the former editors (Barkham et al, 2011) identified 13 highly cited articles; the most cited was authored by Wing (1962) on the impact of institutionalisation on the mental health of patients. This reflected the substantial debate about care and treatment of people with mental health problems which erupted in the 1960s.…”

“…The second theme they noted was the impact of cognitive psychology on research into mental illness. However, the editors noted that ‘a dominant feature of the listed articles relates to measures and measurement’ with Hamilton’s measure of depression being described as a ‘super citation’ (Barkham et al, 2011: 4) accounting for 8.8 per cent of Web of Science citation counts for the BJSCP between 2006 and 2010. They compared this high rate of citation of measurement articles with comparable American journals and found a similar high rate, thus confirming the importance of measurement within clinical psychology research.…”

Measuring engagement in deliberate self-harm behaviours: psychometric evaluation of six scales

“…An appropriate analytic tool is the Rasch measurement model [29]. This model provides strict post-hoc tests of unidimensionality [30] and it is widely used in the development of mental health scales [31]. Moreover, the Rasch model informs the applicability of scales across different populations (item bias) and provides a hierarchy of scale items [32].…”