The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century on the internet – Do internet page counts provide latent indicators of scientific eminence?

摘要

Recently, Haggbloom et al. (2002) established a rank-ordered list of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century (though only the first 99 are actually reported by the authors) meticulously measured by several quantitative and qualitative indicators. We aimed at replicating this listing by simply using page counts obtained from three major internet search engines using different search queries with a five times repeatedmeasurement. The resulting highly reliable indicators of internet frequency were consistently positively associated with the existing ranking and this correlation reached significance when the field of research was included in the query as an operator. We conclude that frequency dataobtained by this method can be considered a simple and valid indicator of scientific impact and discuss additional applications of this method.