Scholarly productivity and citation impact of academic psychologists in Group of Eight universities

Objective: This study sought to update norms for scholarly publication and citation impact for Australian Group of Eight (Go8) university psychology academics published by McNally (2010). Method: Publication and citation data for 279 Go8 psychology academics were extracted using the Scopus and Google Scholar databases. Norms for career-wise publications, citations, and the h-index were developed for each academic level (from Lecturer to Professor), and eight-year publication counts for 2009-2016 were compared with the 2001-2008 figures reported by McNally. Results: Evidence of a steep increase in scholarly productivity was found relative to McNally (2010), and new norms were generated. There was notable variation between psychology subdisciplines, with neuroscience and clinical science academics typically having higher publication and citation counts than their cognitive psychology peers. Conclusions: Norms for scholarly productivity and citation impact among Australian psychology academics have undergone substantial change in recent years. Caveats concerning the application of research metrics are discussed.