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In an earlier article, we used digital historical methods to examine the first 14 volumes (1887-1903) of The American Journal of Psychology (AJP) by creating networks of the vocabularies used in every substantive article the journal published in those years. These networks showed us the major research groups that had been gathered together by the journal's founder-editor, G. Stanley Hall, and how the intellectual composition of the journal (and the discipline) changed over that 17-year period. In the present article we extended that study forward, creating networks for the next 15 volumes (1904-1918), broken into time blocks of 5 years each. Our findings, in brief, were that vision research (especially color) continued to play as consistent and prominent role in the journal as it had since the start; that memory, association, and some higher mental processes were active areas of research throughout; that Hall continued to have an on-again, off-again relationship with theoretical and philosophical psychology; that intelligence-measuring methods, psychoanalysis, and psychophysics were periodically popular enough that they each generated a cluster in 1 of the 3 time blocks; and that Titchener's participation in the editing of AJP led to its becoming the major outlet for his Structuralist research program (an absence that we noted in our earlier studies of the journal Psychological Review)., The American Journal of Psychology (AJP), first launched in 1887 by Granville Stanley Hall, was the first scholarly periodical dedicated specifically to the 'new' scientific psychology in North America. (1) [...]

The American Journal of Psychology (AJP) was the first academic journal in the United States dedicated to the 'new' scientific form of the discipline. But where did the journal's founding owner/editor, G. Stanley Hall, find the 'psychologists' he needed to fill the pages of such a venture 1887, when he was still virtually the only professor of psychology in the country? To investigate this question we used the substantive vocabularies of every full article published in AJPs first 14 volumes to generate networks of verbally similar articles. These networks reveal the variety of research communities that Hall drew on to launch and support the journal. Three separate networks, corresponding to 3 successive time blocks, show how Hall's constellation of participating research communities changed over AJPs first 17 years. Many of these communities started with rather nebulous boundaries but soon began to differentiate into groups of more distinct specialties. Some topics declined over time, but new ones regularly appeared to replace them. We sketch a quasievolutionary model to describe the intellectual ecology of AJPs early years., The American Journal of Psychology, first launched in 1887 by Granville Stanley Hall, was the first scholarly periodical dedicated specifically to the 'new' scientific psychology in North America. (1) The [...]