The Scholarly Impact of Industrial-Organizational Psychologists in Academia: Normative Data and Construct Validity

In academia, scholarly impact is a prototypical performance criterion used for a variety of purposes, most noticeably, but not exclusively, promotion and tenure decisions. In making these decisions, one may ask, “What constitutes ‘good’ scholarly impact for an industrial-organizational psychologist?” Acknowledging some critiques raised against them, bibliometric indicators of scholarly impact have nevertheless become widely accepted. However, the availability of normative data would potentially further enhance their utility. So, using data based on all 2021 paid-up members of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology who listed academia as their primary work sector, restricted to only those in research-focused academic positions (N = 1075), the study’s objectives were to (1) present normative scholarly impact data for industrial-organizational psychologists in academia, (2) examine the relationships between various scholarly impact metrics in a test of their construct validity, (3) investigate how normative impact varies as a function of various factors, and (4) as a further test of their construct validity, explore the convergence between individual-level rankings based on textbook citations and impact metrics. In doing so, this study contributes to the broader discussion of “how we might define, generate, make sense of, measure, reward, and shape” (Haley et al., 2022, p. 347) scholarly impact. Finally, we provide an interactive dashboard < https://hindex.shinyapps.io/shinyweb/> that presents normative data which can be searched and sorted based on a variety of user-specified variables. The approach outlined and data presented here serve as a template for researchers seeking to generate similar normative data for other fields.