psychTools (version 2.3.3)

eminence: Eminence of 69 American Psychologists

Description

Marco Del Giudice criticized an earlier study by Simonton for using partial regression weights to estimate the importance of various predictors of rated eminence. This is a nice example of the (mis)interpretation of beta weights of highly correlated predictors.

Usage

data("eminence")

Format

A data frame with 69 observations on the following 9 variables.

name

a character vector

reputation

Log of rated reputation

birth.year

Year of birth

first.year

Year of first cited publicatin

last.year

Year of last cited publication

works

Log of number of publications

citations

Log of number of citations

composite

A composite index of publications

h

The 'h' index of citations

Details

Simonton (1997, 2014) discusses various estimates of eminence among 69 psychologists born between 1842 and 1912 and reports that the regression weights are small and interprets this as meaning number of publications and citations are not very important. Del Giudice (2020) points out that citations and the number of publications are highly collinear and thus while their independent contributions are small, their joint effect is quite large (R= .69 ). These data are given here as an example of multiple correlation and partial correlation

References

Marco Del Giudice (2020). How Well Do Bibliometric Indicators Correlate With Scientific Eminence? A Comment on Simonton (2016). Perspective in Psychological Science, 15, 202-203.

Simonton, D. K. (1992). Leaders of American psychology, 1879-1967: Career development, creative output, and professional achievement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 5-17.

Simonton, D. K. (2016). Giving credit where credit is due: Why it's so hard to do in psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11, 888-892.

Examples

data(eminence)
psych::lowerCor(eminence)
cs <- psych::cs
psych::partial.r(eminence, x= cs(reputation, works, citations),y=cs(birth.year))
psych::setCor(reputation ~ works + h +  first.year,data=eminence)