Research Productivity and Performance of Journals in the Creativity Sciences: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

A bibliometric approach was employed to analyze the research productivity and performance of creativity studies between 1965 and 2012. A dataset was constructed using all publications and citations retrieved from four key journals that publish creativity research: Journal of Creative Behavior (JCB), Gifted Child Quarterly (GCQ), Creativity Research Journal (CRJ), and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (PACA). Major findings in this study include: (a) During the study period, the four journals have published 1,891 articles on creativity and they have been cited 11,709 times; (b) the impact factors of the four journals increased from lower than .50 in 2002 to over 1.0 in 2012; in 2012 PACA had the highest impact factor, followed by CRJ; (c) JCB published the most creativity papers and CRJ had the most citations; (d) about a third of the articles published in the four journals have never been cited. Implications for the field of creativity are discussed.