Charakteristika der meist zitierten englischsprachigen Zeitschriftnbeiträge der Publikationsjahre 1981 bis 2010 aus der Psychologie der deutschsprachigen Länder

Results of publication-based citation analyses for 28,383 English-language journal psychology publications from the German-speaking countries published between 1981 and 2010 are presented. Data for analyses stem from the Web of Science database with its coverage of nearly 90 % of these publications. The distribution of the frequency of citations by other authors is strongly skewed and shows that 20 % of the articles are never cited, 60 % are cited 1-22 times, and 20 % are cited more than 22 times. Age of publication and frequency of citations have significant, albeit numerically low, rank order correlations (Kendall’s tau = .23). Therefore, the criteria of the number of citations by others per year since publication of the article is used to identify the 107 most frequently cited papers (TOP-107). The characteristics of these papers are described with reference to authorships and their internationality, the disciplines of psychology to which they belong, and to the study type (e.g., empirical vs. nonempirical). Limitations and possibilities of citation analyses are discussed with a preference for a rational integration of citation analyses into empirically supported peer review procedures.