Scholarly Merit in a Global Context: The Nation Gap in Psychological Science

Abstract

Psychologists from the United States are extremely prominent in psychological science, publishing more articles and receiving more citations than researchers from other nations. In this brief article, I review some previous research on this “nation gap” in psychology and highlight relevant data from journals published by the Association for Psychological Science. I then discuss some possible explanations for the nation gap and touch on some of its implications for thinking about scholarly merit and scientific eminence. I hope that the research and data discussed here will stimulate further consideration of the role of author nationality for both judgments of scholarly merit and psychological science more generally.