On Sun, 16 Nov 2014 06:37:58 -0800, Gerald Peterson wrote:
Perhaps, another Psychologist I must use to illustrate the violation of
scientific and ethical principles?
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/eminent-harvard-psychologist-mother-of-positive-psychology-new-age-quack/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=eminent-harvard-psychologist-mother-of-positive-psychology-new-age-quack
Of course, one would have to cautious about making such a statement
because no "official" or "legal" organization has reached such a
conclusion. However, there may be other points that can be identified
that are more factual. Consider the following:
If one does a citation analysis of Langer's work through the World of
Science (WoS) Plus database (the database formerly known as World of
Knowledge) one will obtain the following facts:
(1) Langer has a total of 4,603 citations for 55 publications, as based
on the journals used by WoS (Google scholar and other databases will
give different numbers but WoS are seen by many as being more "gold
standard-ish" even if it does exclude some sources). This is a large
number of citations indicating that the cited publications have had some
influence.
(2) Langer has a h-index number of 26 which is an admirable number
but not particularly outstanding (for comparison's sake, Daniel
Kahneman has 177 publications in the WoS database, and a total
sum of 57,558 citations and an h-index of 75 -- not bad for a Nobel
Prize winner).
(3) WoS provides a variety of numbers for citations, both raw and
summary, so one can do additional analysis if one is so inclined.
With respect to Langer, examination of her citation number by
year reveals some interesting results. Her most cited paper is
the 1975 "illusion of control" article with 1,270 citations. If one
looks just at the early years of her research career, say 1972
(year of first publication) to 1980, one would obtain a sum of
3,586 citations. In other words, About 78% of her total citations
are based on the 20 papers (of which 2 are corrections) published
during this time. In the subsequent 34 years with 35 publications,
there are only 1,017 citations (or about 29 citations per paper,
in contrast to about 199 citations per paper for the first 18 papers --
NOTE: the corrections have never been cited which is why is 18
and not 20 is used).
(4) Is it possible that most people will be familiar with Langer's
earlier work and continue to associate that research with her
rather than her recent work? She has 19 publication for the
year range 2000-2014 with 300 citations or about 16 citations
per article though one article has 107 citations and 4 have zero
citations). This recent work may soon have larger citation numbers
and may reflect a late career resurgence of influence. But more
careful analyses (e.g., examinations of the journals in which
research was published, whether citation article are supportive
of the original research or contrary to it, and so on) are needed
to make more valid evaluations.
So, there is much more to examine and think about. And it is
likely that a variety of rival hypotheses may suggest themselves
to explain, say, recent research as presented by Coyne.
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
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