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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 AJP's 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 AJP's 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 AJP's early years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the structure of early American Psychology from 1894 until 1908 based on various articles published in the journal "Psychological Review". Other topics mentioned in this article include the role of vocabulary, the role of editorship, and the role of the publishing industry.

Traditionally, American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century has been framed as a competition among a number of 'schools': structuralism, functionalism, behaviorism, etc. But this is only one way in which the 'structure' of the discipline can be conceived. Most psychologists did not belong to a particular school, but they still worked within loose intellectual communities, and so their work was part of an implicit psychological 'genre,' if not a formalized 'school.' In this study, we began the process of discovering the underlying genres of American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century by taking the complete corpus of articles from the journal Psychological Review during the first decade of its publication and conducting a statistical analysis of the vocabularies they employed to see what clusters of articles naturally emerged. Although the traditional functionalist school was among the clusters we found, we also found distinct research traditions around the topics of color vision, spatial vision, philosophy/metatheory, and emotion. In addition, momentary clusters corresponding to important debates (e.g., the variability hypothesis) appeared during certain years, but not others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses early American psychology. Topics discussed include article published in periodical "Psychological Review", psychology journals and history of psychology. Other topics such as psychological specialties, theoretical psychology and American Psychological Association are also discussed.