Evidence That Applied Researchers Need Methodologists

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate that applied researchers need methodologists, as evidenced by citation records. Results include (a) that methodologists are authors on more than one half of the top-cited recent empirical articles in selected journals, (b) that a bibliometric analysis of educational research articles recorded in the Social Science Citation Index displayed methodological work as the dominant area of scholarship, (c) that even a small fraction of PsycINFO American Psychological Association (APA) citation records of well-known methodological studies demonstrates that the work of methodologists is used by researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and (d) that books written by methodologists in education or a closely related discipline constitute a sizeable proportion of the top 100 cited books in Google Scholar.