The Evolution of The American Journal of Psychology 1, 1887-1903: A Network Investigation.

The American Journal of Psychology (AJP) was the first academic journal in the United States dedicated to the "new" scientific form of the discipline. But where did the journal's founding owner/editor, G. Stanley Hall, find the "psychologists" he needed to fill the pages of such a venture 1887, when he was still virtually the only professor of psychology in the country? To investigate this question we used the substantive vocabularies of every full article published in AJP's first 14 volumes to generate networks of verbally similar articles. These networks reveal the variety of research communities that Hall drew on to launch and support the journal. Three separate networks, corresponding to 3 successive time blocks, show how Hall's constellation of participating research communities changed over AJP's first 17 years. Many of these communities started with rather nebulous boundaries but soon began to differentiate into groups of more distinct specialties. Some topics declined over time, but new ones regularly appeared to replace them. We sketch a quasievolutionary model to describe the intellectual ecology of AJP's early years.