Empirical Assessment of Methodology in the History-of-Psychology Literature, 1975-1986

Psychological Abstracts was used to identify 1,161 history-of-psychology publications that appeared between 1975 and 1986. Information was obtained from each publication on the type of history (biographical, institutional, etc.), its historiography, the historical period that had been studied, and the quantitativeness of results. We found that the literature was mostly presentist in style and that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries received the bulk of attention. Publications that adopted an internalist perspective greatly outnumbered those with an externalist perspective. Quantitative methods were infrequently used. Results are discussed in reference to historiographic recommendations that had accompanied the institutionalization of the history of psychology in the late 1960s