The reinstrumentalization of theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM) in psychological publications: A citation context analysis

Abstract

Research instruments play significant roles in the construction of scientific knowledge, even though we have only acquired very limited knowledge about their lifecycles from quantitative studies. This paper aims to address this gap by quantitatively examining the citation contexts of an exemplary research instrument, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM), in full-text psychological publications. We investigated the relationship between the citation contexts of the DSM and its status as a valid instrument being used and described by psychological researchers. We specifically focused on how this relationship has changed over the DSM’s citation histories, especially through the temporal framework of its versions. We found that a new version of the DSM is increasingly regarded as a valid instrument after its publication; this is reflected in various key citation contexts, such as the use of hedges, attention markers, and the verb profile in sentences where the DSM is cited. We call this process the re-instrumentalization of the DSM in the space of scientific publications. Our findings bridge an important gap between quantitative and qualitative science studies and shed light on an aspect of the social process of scientific instrument development that is not addressed by the current qualitative literature.

Relationships between method-section citation rates and citation contexts: evidence from highly cited references in psychology

“…This research is based on a similar paper sample to that used in our previous study (Li, 2021), where all full-text English-language psychology research articles were acquired from the Elsevier Text and Data Mining service. A total of 104,094 articles were included in our final sample.…”

“…All these articles (1) are from psychological journals being classified by the Elsevier database and (2) have structured full texts in the XML format, so that we can separate Method and non-Method sections automatically. More details concerning this paper sample were offered in our previous work (Li, 2021).…”

“…Following our previous study (Li, 2021), the following measurements were used in this research to evaluate the instrumentality of references and their citation contexts in full-text research articles.…”

“…However, quantitative researchers are gradually shifting their attention to material research objects in recent years under the influences of open science, which puts stronger emphasis on science as processes instead of just outputs (Fecher and Friesike, 2014). Especially under the concept of entitymetrics (Ding et al , 2013), an increasing number of quantitative studies have been published to examine how major material research objects, especially data and software, are distributed in scientific publications (Howison and Bullard, 2015; Li, 2021; Li et al , 2017, 2018; Pan et al , 2015; Zhao et al , 2018) and the development of algorithms to extract such entities from full-text scientific publications (Yan and Pan, 2015; Li and Yan, 2018; Wang and Zhang, 2020).…”

“…However, the focus of this research is on the relationship between the instrumentality (the extent to which a reference is cited as a research instrument) and the citation contexts in citation sentences ( citances ). In other words, we do not regard any reference as the unambiguous representation of any instrument; instead, the connection between reference and instrument is reflected in various citation contexts and may vary over time (Li, 2021).…”