The Evolution of the American Journal of Psychology, 1904-1918: A Network Investigation

In an earlier article, we used digital historical methods to examine the first 14 volumes (1887-1903) of The American Journal of Psychology (AJP) by creating networks of the vocabularies used in every substantive article the journal published in those years. These networks showed us the major research groups that had been gathered together by the journal's founder-editor, G. Stanley Hall, and how the intellectual composition of the journal (and the discipline) changed over that 17-year period. In the present article we extended that study forward, creating networks for the next 15 volumes (1904-1918), broken into time blocks of 5 years each. Our findings, in brief, were that vision research (especially color) continued to play as consistent and prominent role in the journal as it had since the start; that memory, association, and some higher mental processes were active areas of research throughout; that Hall continued to have an on-again, off-again relationship with theoretical and philosophical psychology; that intelligence-measuring methods, psychoanalysis, and psychophysics were periodically popular enough that they each generated a cluster in 1 of the 3 time blocks; and that Titchener's participation in the editing of AJP led to its becoming the major outlet for his Structuralist research program (an absence that we noted in our earlier studies of the journal Psychological Review).