Editorial QJEP Classics Revisited

In 2016 the Experimental Psychological Society (EPS) celebrates its 70th anniversary. Indeed in June 1946, shortly after World War II, Oliver Zangwill invited a few colleagues to an informal meeting in Cambridge to establish “a new body which would cater for those actually engaged in psychological research” (Mollon, 1996). The Experimental Psychology Group (as it was called then) had its first official meeting in October 1946. Two years later, the Group started its journal, called The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (QJEP), after receiving an anonymous gift of £1000 from one of its founding members (who later turned out to be G. C. Grindley). The object of the journal was “to foster an experimental approach to psychological problems”, as written in the first editorial of the journal.

Since its start, QJEP has thrived and is currently on the verge of its 70th volume (which will start in 2017). We thought this was a good time to take stock and look back at some of the papers with the highest scientific impact. Nowadays impact assessment is made easy (some would say “too easy”) by counting the citations to the publications. We made use of the Web of Science. According to this source, the following are the 11 most cited papers in QJEP (Table 1; also see below).

Table 1. The most cited articles in QJEP, with the number of citations in the last years and the total number of citations since publication.

Rank	Article	2012	2013	2014	2015	Total
1	Posner (1980), Orienting of Attention	262	256	280	292	4340
2	Tanaka and Farah (1993), Parts and Wholes in Face Recognition	92	76	84	76	1143
3	Tipper (1985), The Negative Priming Effect	43	41	36	27	1061
4	Treisman (1988), Features and Objects	23	39	29	24	1055
5	Coltheart (1981), The MRC Psycholinguistic Database	65	82	94	86	1030
6	Warrington (1975), The Selective Impairment of Semantic Memory	32	29	31	41	877
7	Brown (1958), Some Tests of the Decay Theory of Immediate Memory	24	21	25	23	778
8	Valentine (1991), A Unified Account of the Effects of Distinctiveness, Inversion, and Race in Face Recognition	58	65	45	36	689
9	Sternberg (1975), Memory Scanning	4	7	9	8	655
10	Baddeley (1996), Exploring the Central Executive	2	9	28	69	613
11	Wason (1960), On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task	31	36	31	22	611

Note: Source: Web of Science (https://webofknowledge.com, retrieved on 19 May 2016), with permission from Thomson Reuters.

The list in Table 1 gives a nice summary of the variety of topics in experimental psychology and the progress made in the last 70 years. It includes articles on attention, face perception, priming, visual perception, word recognition, memory, and reasoning. For each article, we contacted the original authors (or a suitable alternative, if the original authors were not available) and asked them whether they were willing to write an update. We asked the authors

to give a short account of the origins of the paper, a summary of the main messages (and their newness), an assessment of the fate of the findings since (which ones turned out to be correct; which had to be adapted or qualified), and the remaining implications for current research.

To our delight, in nearly all cases the authors were enthusiastic about the request. The only author who felt an update was not indicated for his article was Max Coltheart, whose 1981 paper presented a collection of word norms made available to the research community. Max Coltheart felt that the Wason paper was “far more deserving of commentary” than his (hence the inclusion of the 11th-most-cited paper). To some extent this view is understandable, as the popularity of the norms speaks for itself more than a commentary would do. On the other hand, the high impact of the norms is a good reminder for journal editors that articles describing research methods and stimulus materials are highly needed, as they are the bricks with which theories are built, and therefore that researchers should be encouraged/rewarded for making such materials available by publishing them in journals such as QJEP.

One of the authors of the special issue is Glyn Humphreys, who kindly agreed to write the review article for the Treisman (1988) paper and who sadly passed away earlier this year before the article was published. The fact that Glyn took on the assignment without hesitation (he only asked for an extension until his work as chair of the REF2014 committee was over) is further testimony of his endless generosity towards scientific psychology and towards the EPS.

When preparing the editorial, we were unfortunately confronted with the scare every historian dreads: namely, that at the end of the enterprise it turns out that an important element has been overlooked. One prominent article is not included in the review table provided by the Web of Science (probably because it is too old). It is Hick’s (1952) celebrated article “On the Rate of Gain of Information”, which has been cited 1119 times if the same criteria as for Table 1 are used. This would place Hick’s paper third on the list. Clearly this is unfinished business, which will have to be addressed in a future issue of the journal.

In the meantime, we hope you will enjoy the 10 review papers we currently have on some of the most influential papers ever published in QJEP. They are a nice testament to the history of psychology and fulfil the hopes the members of the Experimental Psychology Group expressed at the end of their first editorial—namely, that the newly established journal “may come to occupy a not unworthy place beside those of longer standing in this, and other, countries”. We are also convinced that the present updates, together with the original papers, will be great teaching materials for students who want to become better versed in experimental psychology.