JOSEF BROZEK, Bethlehem / USA
The study is based on the analysis of
citations of WUNDT's works in the volumes of the American Journal of Psychology
(AJP) published in the 90 years from 1877 to 1887.
1) Our first question concerned the changes
over the years in the citation rates. Our sample of the AJP articles, used in
this part of the study, was limited to experimental papers. There were a total
of 130 citations. Of these 72 % occurred in the first 30 volumes, 20 % in the
middle 30 volumes, and 8 % in the last 30 volumes. The decrease in the citation
rate is dramatic and clear-cut. For subsequent analyses both experimental and
non-experimental communications were used.
2) Let us begin with a consideration of the
citations of the book-length publications. Combining the citations of the
German editions and the translations we obtain a total citation count of 211 (=
100 %). Using relative citation frequencies as a criterion, what is the
"rank of fame" of the 12 works that were cited in the first 90
volumes of the American Journal of Psychology? The "best sellers" by
far, are Grundzüge - The
Principles of Physiological Psychology, accounting for 62 % of all the book
citations. The Vorlesungen - Lectures
on Human and Animal Psychology amount to 11 % and are followed by the Grundriss
- The Outlines of Psychology
accounting for 8 % of the book citations. The citation percentages for the
remaining 9 works are below 4 %. Importantly, WUNDT's 10 volume Völkerpsychologie
accounts for only 3,8 %, even when we count the citation of each volume as a
separate "event". In comparison with the 62 % for the Grundzüge,
the Völkerpsychologie fared very poorly in America, indeed.
3) Citation counts for the original German
editions and for English translations are 179 and 32 or, in percentages, 85 %
and 15 %, respectively. This attests to the easy familiarity of the early
American representatives of the "new psychology" with the German
language - a skill that in recent decades has dropped among American research
psychologists down to nearly zero and that barely survives among the
historians.
It is not clear why the Grundriss - The Outlines of Psychology is cited
primarily in English translations (with frequencies of 3 vs. 13) while for the Vorlesungen
- The Lectures on Human and Animal
Psychology, available in the 1890's, the citation count for German and the
English editions is about equal (13 vs. 11). The greatest contrast is observed
in the citation of the Grundzüge - The
Principles of Physiological Psychology with 130 citations of the German
editions versus a simple citation of E. B. TITCHENER's 1904 translation of the
Introduction and part I of the 5th German edition of 1902-1903.
4) But how about the citation of the
individual editions of the works for which more than one edition is available?
Strangely enough, while the Beiträge - The Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception appeared
between 1862 and 1897 in 3 editions, only the first edition (1862) has been
cited. By contrast, the Vorlesungen - The Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, published between 1863
and 1922 in 8 editions, are cited in the overwhelming majority of cases in
their second (1892) edition. The Grundzüge - The Principles of Physiological Psychology appeared between 1873
and 1911 in 6 editions. The citation frequencies show a distinct trend toward
higher values for successive editions, with an average frequency of 8 for the
first two editions, 23 for the 3rd and 4th editions, and 39 for the 5th and 6th
editions.
5) In contrast to the 221 citations of
books, WUNDT's articles in journals were cited with a much lower frequency,
yielding a total of 18 citations. In most cases a given article was cited only
once, and only one article was cited by three different authors. It is the
large paper "On the experiments involving questions addressed to the
subject and on the methods of the psychology of thought" (Psychologische
Studien 3: 301-360, 1907), forming an important link in the debate between
Leipzig and the "Würzburg School" of OSWALD KÜLPE. As is true of all
the historiographic methods, citation analysis has its advantages and its
limitations. As the present study indicates, this approach is particularly
valuable when we are concerned with an objective assessment of trends,
including the rates of decay of a man's fame and impact. We may look at such
curves as curves of "collective forgetting".