Publication Trends Over 55 Years of Behavioral Genetic Research

Abstract

We document the growth in published papers on behavioral genetics for 5-year intervals from 1960 through 2014. We used 1861 papers published in Behavior Genetics to train our search strategy which, when applied to Ovid PsychINFO, selected more than 45,000 publications. Five trends stand out: (1) the number of behavioral genetic publications has grown enormously; nearly 20,000 papers were published in 2010–2014. (2) The number of human quantitative genetic (QG) publications (e.g., twin and adoption studies) has steadily increased with more than 3000 papers published in 2010–2014. (3) The number of human molecular genetic (MG) publications increased substantially from about 2000 in 2000–2004 to 5000 in 2005–2009 to 9000 in 2010–2014. (4) Nonhuman publications yielded similar trends. (5) Although there has been exponential growth in MG publications, both human and nonhuman QG publications continue to grow. A searchable resource of this corpus of behavioral genetic papers is freely available online at http://www.teds.ac.uk/public_datasets.html and will be updated annually.