Highly Cited Articles in Evolutionary Psychiatry: Assessment With a Quality and Error Rating Scale

Evolutionary psychiatry is a growing field that emphasizes the value of evolutionary explanations for traits that make individuals vulnerable to mental disorders. Some articles that apply evolutionary theory in psychiatry make errors, such as viewing a disease as an adaptation. We assessed article quality and error quantity in the most cited articles on evolutionary psychiatry and examined the relationship of these measures to citation number.

PubMed, Web of Science, and Google Scholar were searched in 2023 and again in 2025 using specific terms related to "evolution" and "psychiatry", to find the most highly cited articles in the field. Based on the work of Nesse, we developed a measure for assessing overall article quality and error quantity in evolutionary psychiatry articles. We applied the measure to the 20 most highly cited articles, and calculated the correlations of article quality and error quantity with number of citations.

Twenty highly cited articles, with a mean citation count of 413.30 and publication year from 1964 to 2011, were rated. While the most highly cited articles had good quality on average, they also made important errors. There was no significant correlation of article quality or error quantity with citation count.

Highly cited articles in evolutionary psychiatry demonstrated strengths but also weaknesses. The lack of a relationship of article quality and error quantity to citation rates suggests that other factors influence such citations. Future research should focus on achieving consensus on how best to assess the quality of evolutionary psychiatry articles and what errors should be avoided.