Citation rates for experimental psychology articles published between 1950 and 2004: top-cited articles in behavioral cognitive psychology.

From citation rates for over 85,000 articles published between 1950 and 2004 in 56 psychology journals, we identified a total of 500 behavioral cognitive psychology articles that ranked in the top 0.6% in each half-decade, in terms of their mean citations per year using the Web of Science. Thirty nine percent [corrected] of these articles were produced by 78 authors who authored three or more of them, and more than half were published by only five journals.The mean number of cites per year and the total number of citations necessary for an article to achieve various percentile rankings are reported for each journal. The mean number of citations necessary for an article published within each half-decade to rank at any given percentile has steadily increased from 1950 to 2004. Of the articles that we surveyed, 11% had zero total citations, and 35% received fewer than four total citations. Citations for post-1994 articles ranking in the 50th-75th and 90th-95th percentiles have generally continued to grow across each of their 3-year postpublication bins. For pre-1995 articles ranking in the 50th-75th and 90th-95th percentiles, citations peaked in the 4- to 6- or 7- to 9-year postpublication bins and decreased linearly thereafter, until asymptoting. In contrast, for the top-500 articles, (a) for pre-1980 articles, citations grew and peaked 10-18-year postpublication bins, and after a slight decrease began to linearly increase again; (b) for post-1979 articles, citations have continually increased across years in a nearly linear fashion. We also report changes in topics covered by the top-cited articles over the decades.