The window on psychology's literature: a history of Psychological Abstracts

With the rapid expansion of scientific information at the end of the 19th century, disciplines sought ways to keep their members abreast of the relevant research. Those pressures were felt in the science of psychology in the United States, where psychologists developed a bibliographic aid, The Psychological Index, in 1895 only a little more than a decade after G. Stanley Hall opened America's first psychology laboratory. The Index was useful but was only a listing of titles. More information was needed, which led to the development of a journal of abstracts, first published in 1927. This article traces the history of Psychological Abstracts from its origins in the Index to the evolution of the American Psychological Association's electronic information system known as PsycINFO, of which Psychological Abstracts has become an outmoded part. Nevertheless, for most of its 80 years, Psychological Abstracts was psychology's window on the world of research.