Is There an ‘Arts Bias’ in the Creativity Research Journal? Comment on Glāveanu (2014)

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Notes

¹There is, of course, a lively discussion of whether creativity is general or domain-specific. The division of articles into two categories, domain-specific versus general, is not a contribution to this literature, as it simply reflects the way authors of the articles reviewed focused (or did not focus) their investigations.

²There is no suggestion here that there is some scholarly, scientific, or moral superiority of the one kind of article over the other, nor that the two articles cited as examples are in some way remarkable. The distinction between general articles and domain-specific articles is necessary for the purposes of this report, and the titles of the two examples cited clearly demonstrate the distinction being referred to.

³There is no suggestion that Garaigordobil's article is fraudulent or of lesser value, but only that it is not a focused study of creativity in a specific domain of creative achievement in the sense understood here.

⁴Other volumes also contained special issues (e.g., Volume 18, Nos 1 and 3; Volume 19, No. 4; Volume 20, No. 2; Volume 24, No. 1). However, these issues were not dedicated to a single specific domain. Volume 18, No. 3, for instance, focused on the general topic of divergent thinking and contained two domain-specific articles, one on mathematics and one on “verbal and graphic-figural creativity” (p. 329). As a result it did not create a false impression of the prominence of a particular specific domain.