Increases in alcohol and other drug articles during 15 years

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  • W. Miles Cox
    Indiana University
  • A. E. Thornton
There has been a dramatic increase during the last 20 years in psychologists' interest and research productivity in the area of alcohol and other drugs that is usually traced to the establishment of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute on Drug Abuse during the early 1970s. In order to have an index of this increase, we undertook to determine how the frequency with which psychologists have published articles on the topics of alcohol and other drugs in the journals of the American Psychological Association (APA) has changed during a 15-year period. For each of the 17 APA journals that publishes authors' original research, we tabulated the number of alcohol and other drug articles that was published during the period 1970-1984. If an article was related to both alcohol and another psychoactive drug, that article was assigned a value of one-half for alcohol and one-half for other drugs. Finally, across all 17 journals and for each year in the period under question, we determined (a) the percentage of total articles published that were related to alcohol and (b) the percentage of total articles published that were related to other drugs. Results suggest a steady increase in the percentage of both alcohol and other drug articles. Pearson product-moment correlations computed between year of publication and percentage of alcohol and other drug articles published yielded significant coefficients for both alcohol articles and other drug articles: r = 78, p < .001, and r = .81, p < .001, respectively.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)132-133
JournalPsychology of Addictive Behaviors
Volume1
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1987
Externally publishedYes
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