Superstars, Shadows, and Citations: The Unequal World of Psychology Research

Right now, I’m slowly (but steadily) reading Simonton’s 2002 book "Great Psychologists and Their Times: Scientific Insights into Psychology's History." Among other things, he explores the question of what makes someone a “great psychologist.” In doing so, he refers to Ortega y Gasset’s hypothesis that scientific progress isn’t driven by a few exceptional geniuses, but rather by a mass of competent but unknown scientists. These “shadow” researchers are products of structured education systems, institutions, and scientific culture, rather than unique natural talent. Progress, Ortega suggests, requires many people reproducing, refining, applying, and gradually advancing existing knowledge. In this view, the system matters more than the individual—the scientific enterprise can move forward even without "heroes."

Simonton, however, challenges this idea. Using publication and citation metrics, he argues that the empirical distribution of scientific productivity and influence contradicts Ortega’s hypothesis. In fact, a different idea may be closer to reality: “the appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities” (Cesare Lombroso, 1891).

He supports this claim with several studies:

• Among 299 Australian academic psychologists (1970–1975), the top 10% most productive authors accounted for 36% of all publications, but 60% of all citations (White & White, 1978).

• In a sample of 196 American academic psychologists, 11% received no citations over a three-year period, another 25% averaged no more than two citations per year, and only 10% averaged more than 50 citations per year (Helmreich et al., 1980).

• A large-scale study of 48,903 psychologists who published in top English-language journals (1962–1967) found that over half were cited only once, and only 6% received six or more citations. Just 18 authors received over 200 citations (Myers, 1970).

• Among faculty at the top 100 psychology departments in the US, UK, and Canada, 22% received no citations in a given year, and only 3% were cited more than 100 times over a five-year period (Endler, Rushton, & Roediger, 1978).

So, Simonton concludes that a small proportion of researchers account for the majority of published work and citations. The rest—while perhaps competent—remain largely invisible and, in his view, don’t contribute meaningfully to scientific progress.

I think this conclusion is open to debate. First, it’s not clear whether publication or even citation counts are a good proxy for the true value or impact of a scholar’s work. Second, it's possible that the work of more "visible" psychologists wouldn’t have been possible without the foundational efforts of these less-known researchers. Not all forms of influence are easily measured.

Still, the question intrigued me. Simonton’s book was published over 20 years ago, and the citation studies he references are mostly from the 1980s or earlier. I wondered—has anything changed?

It turns out, not much. The current landscape still shows a skewed pattern: a relatively small group of researchers gets the bulk of the citations, while most are cited modestly or rarely. Particularly, Radosic and Diener (2021), in their article "Citation Metrics in Psychological Science," analyzed 30 PhD psychology departments in the US. They found that citation distribution remains highly skewed—most researchers have low or average citation counts, while a few accumulate extraordinarily high numbers. For example, one professor had 101,852 citations! (Which, honestly, I find staggering 😊).

The article contains some interesting data. For instance, they show that citation counts have increased over time for early-career researchers. They compared average citations numebr of those who earned PhDs from 1981–2000 to those from 2001–2015. I create the graph using their data.

It appears that publishing activity has intensified in recent years.

Speaking of citations, another article—"On the validity of citation counting in science evaluation: Content analyses of references and citations in psychological publications" (Krampen, Becker, Wahner, & Montada, 2007) —analyzed what gets cited, how often, and what types of citations are used. The authors found that 25% of citations are merely perfunctory and carry little informational value. That certainly complicates the idea of using citation counts as a measure of scientific worth.

Looking at the most highly cited works in psychology can also be illuminating. In "Classic articles in Psychology in the Science Citation Index Expanded: A bibliometric analysis" (Ho & Hartley, 2015), the authors identified 111 papers with over 1,000 citations (from among 280,350 articles indexed in the Web of Science in psychology as of 2013). Here's the top 10:

1. Cohen (1992), A power primer (6,839 citations)

2. Bandura (1977), Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change (9,977)

3. Shrout & Fleiss (1979), Intraclass correlations: Uses in assessing rater reliability (7,514)

4. Bentler (1990), Comparative fit indexes in structural models (6,408)

5. Brainard (1997), The psychophysics toolbox (3,554)

6. Pelli (1997), The VideoToolbox software for visual psychophysics (2,810)

7. Stroop (1935), Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions (6,451)

8. Miyake et al. (2000), The unity and diversity of executive functions (2,020)

9. Miller (1956), The magical number 7, plus or minus 2 (6,739)

10. Bentler & Bonett (1980), Significance tests and goodness of fit (5,549)

To my relief, I realized that I’ve actually read most of the articles from this top 10 list — though I must admit I don’t know anything about the Psychophysics Toolbox.

Notably, six of these top ten are methodological papers. Only one introduces a novel theoretical concept. So, does this mean that methodological articles make the greatest contribution to psychology’s progress? It’s open questions.

But think about it — if, for example, you wanted to show someone what psychology is about and give them a few studies to read as an example, which works would you choose? From this list, I definitely wouldn’t pick the methodological papers; I’d go with the studies by Bandura and Miller.