Miki TAKASUNA
Tokyo International University, Waseda Satellite, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan
takasuna AT tiu.ac.jp

To evaluate the historical importance of neuroscience knowledge for the students in my psychology course, I collected data from references found in physiological psychology textbooks (1942-1990) and those of biological psychology (1984-2002). Since I was interested in literature selected by the author(s) who described the broad spectrum of the physiological or biological psychology, I chose only general and introductory books written by a single author or limited number of authors, and thus, excluded more specialized books written by multiple authors and those compiled by editors. From 25 textbooks (22 in English, 2 in Japanese, 1 in German) there were over 23,000 references. Since most of the literature (ca. 46%) was cited within a decade after a study’s original publication, I used a weighted scoring method with a logarithm-based categorization, which included the span between the years of publication and citation. For example, if an article was cited within a decade after the original publication, it was counted as 1.0 point; if an article was cited 35 years after publication, it was counted as 1.6 points. The total score of each reference and the number of citation were analyzed. The detailed results will be shown in tables.

Pavia, Italy, 2006