Abstract
A bibliometric approach was employed to analyze the research productivity and performance of creativity studies between 1965 and 2012. A dataset was constructed using all publications and citations retrieved from four key journals that publish creativity research: Journal of Creative Behavior (JCB), Gifted Child Quarterly (GCQ), Creativity Research Journal (CRJ), and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (PACA). Major findings in this study include: (a) During the study period, the four journals have published 1,891 articles on creativity and they have been cited 11,709 times; (b) the impact factors of the four journals increased from lower than .50 in 2002 to over 1.0 in 2012; in 2012 PACA had the highest impact factor, followed by CRJ; (c) JCB published the most creativity papers and CRJ had the most citations; (d) about a third of the articles published in the four journals have never been cited. Implications for the field of creativity are discussed.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this article was presented at 2011 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Washington, DC.
We thank Bing He at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Laura Ridenour at Indiana University for their help with data analysis.
The work of the third author on this article was supported as part of the project “Cooperation Analysis of Technology Innovation Team Member Based on Knowledge Network—Empirical Evidence in the Biology and Biomedicine Field” (No. 71103114), supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China. And it is also done as part of the project “Scientific and Technological Collaboration in the Field of Biomedicine-Using Co-authorship and Co-inventorship Analysis” (No. 71240006), supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Notes
Note. Number of articles published in each issue is a rough estimate because there are some variations of the number in different issues even for the same journal.