Science and Nature are, for better or worse, often regarded as the pinnacle of scientific achievement. Unfortunately for I/O psychology, the topics we study typically don’t fall within the sorts of things that they publish. Despite that, a handful of psychologists have managed it!
You might wonder how we came across this information. The reason is that we have collected a complete list of every I-O researcher currently employed in an I-O psychology doctoral program in the SIOP directory of graduate programs as well as every publication they have ever published, sortable by a huge number of interesting features, created by scraping Elsevier’s Scopus. We’re using this database to create rankings of interdisciplinarity among I-O psychology programs and faculty for a special feature to be published in TIP around May 2018 alongside several other new ranking systems. Until then, we’ll be releasing interesting little snippets as we poke around. Thanks to Bo Armstrong for suggesting this particular search!
Importantly, I don’t have any publication information for people not employed in I-O psychology doctoral programs as either permanent or temporary faculty. So if you’re an I-O and have a Nature or Science publication I missed, let me know, and I’ll add it here. As we construct unique, interesting data slices, it will also help us understand where the problems in our dataset are so that we can fix them before you see the final version!
Without further ado, and in alpha order:
- Michele Gelfand at the University of Maryland’s Social-Decision-Organizational Sciences program, with an article in Science titled Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study
- Nathan Kuncel and Sarah Hezlett at the University of Minnesota’s I-O Psych program, with an article in Science titled Standardized Tests Predict Graduate Students’ Success
- Mark Roebke, an I/O PhD student at Wright State, was part of the Open Science Collaboration that published an article in Science titled Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science
We also have two honorable mentions for I-O adjacent faculty:
- John Antonakis at the University of Lausanne business school, with an article in Science titled Predicting Elections: Child’s Play!
- Michael Frese at the University of Lueneburg business school, with an article in Science titled Teaching Personal Initiative Beats Traditional Training in Boosting Small Business in West Africa
That’s it!! I-Os have never published in Nature and only a few times in Science! Better than nothing, I suppose…
If you haven’t checked out the July SIOP Newsbriefs, there’s some interesting details buried via the “SIOP Membership Trends” article about I-O psychology online degree holders. If you open that article (in PDF form, gag) and then delve deeper, you can find a series of visualizations put together by viz master and all-around great guy Evan Sinar. The first two of this visualizations show the distribution of SIOP members by both country and by local area within the United States, which is pretty interesting on its own.
For example, I can zoom into southeast Virginia and see there are 39 registered I/Os in my vicinity. Assuming this includes student members, that leaves about 15 SIOP members not affiliated with ODU living nearby. Who are you people and why don’t you offer my students more internships so they don’t have to move across the country and stop working on our research projects for a whole summer!!!
(ahem)
Even more interesting to me is the third visualization in that PDF, which I’ve copy/pasted here. (Hopefully Evan won’t mind!)
Current SIOP members by date of degree earned, taken from this PDF.
If you stare at this long enough, you’ll discover a few interesting but generally unsurprising tidbits: Akron dominated I/O graduations from 1980-2010, there are a bunch of Minnesotans from the 1960s hanging around, etc., etc.
But if you stare at it a little longer, you’ll notice something interesting on the right side: online institutions are generally replacing non-online as the most prolific institutions in terms of graduates. Capella and Walden not only appeared but immediately achieved high rankings in the 2010s, and among current students, Grand Canyon, Phoenix, and the online Chicago School all appear. Most of the “big name” schools that are generally synonymous with I/O psychology disappear entirely. These programs are also a mix of Master’s and Ph.D., so these schools aren’t necessarily just churning out 2-year degrees (although that certainly contributes).
Are we staring in the face of a massive cultural shift in I/O psychology given this influx? Or will differences in training mean that these students have a much harder time breaking into “real I/O jobs” and disappear from the SIOP membership ranks later? I’ve talked about online programs and their rankings in my I/O graduate school series before. I’ve also heard a few stories from people it has happened to that generally go like this: a student gets a degree from a online program without the training or culture of traditional programs, finds themselves locked out of most I/O consulting firms, and ends up taking a vanilla HR position somewhere for a much lower salary than an I/O degree is traditionally worth.
Online I/O degrees are not necessarily worse than in-person degrees, but the training does tend to be part-time, and as a result, it is on average much less intense preparation despite an equal number of years spent studying. I’ve also met a number of online students who only came to the SIOP conference for the first time after graduation when they discovered they couldn’t get a job. Many of these students would have excelled in a brick-and-mortar program if they’d had the opportunity/time, too.
So what do you think will happen, both to SIOP and to this influx of online students?
2016 impact factors for academic journals across all of science were released last week by Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters), as part of their Journal Citation Reports database. There are a couple of interesting tidbits, particularly in relation to Journal of Applied Psychology.
Here is the top 15 of the list for the “applied psychology” category of journal and their impact factors:
Artist’s rendering of the current struggle. And I really struggled with whether Ryu should be punching JAP or PP.
- 7.733: Journal of Management
- 6.959: Annual Review of OP and OB
- 4.783: Organizational Research Methods
- 4.362: Personnel Psychology
- 4.130: Journal of Applied Psychology
- 3.607: Journal of Organizational Behavior
- 3.400: Work and Stress
- 3.385: Journal of Consumer Psychology
- 3.139: Journal of Occupational and OP
- 3.125: Media Psychology
- 3.094: Leadership Quarterly
- 2.917: Intl Review of Sport and Exercise Psych
- 2.809: Psychology of Sport and Exercise
- 2.722: Applied Psych-Health and Well Being
- 2.694: Journal of Business and Psychology
Impact factors are a really coarse metric of success – the average number of citations to articles within a journal – so they only give a general sense of how “impactful” a journal really is. Remember, articles are also often cited because they’re both highly visible and highly flawed. You might also notice that JOM is not really “applied psychology”, and that other types of applied psychology, like media psych and consumer psych, are also in the list.
The list led me to two observations:
One, Personnel Psychology is now more highly cited than Journal of Applied Psychology. Considering JAP is I-O’s flagship APA-published journal (PP is published by Wiley), this is particularly interesting. What practices do you think have led JAP to lose ground to PP? My suspicion is that JAP slightly more frequently publishes theoretical advancements that no one except the people researching them care about. After all, the narrower your topic, the fewer people will find it relevant to their own work, and theory in both JAP and PP is pretty narrow these days. That doesn’t imply that the quality of the work is poorer, just that I-O theory is increasingly irrelevant to anyone except I-Os. Whether that’s a “problem” or not is a matter of perspective.
Two, Journal of Business and Psychology appears at 15th in this list, with an IF of 2.694. This is dramatically higher than it was last year and I think is a great reflection of the progressive editorial practices put in place by editor Steven Rogelberg. Among “core general audience I-O publications,” this means it’s in third place, behind PP and in front of Journal of Vocational Behavior. If I were to make a wager, I’d bet that it will be even higher next year. Is it on track to surpass both JAP and PP one day?