How Can We Incorporate Relevant Findings from Psychology into Systems Methods?

Introduction

Martin (2010) used SCOPUS to analyse the citation patterns of Systems journal articles. He used a number of techniques to identify the core group of journals that appeared to be those most widely used by Systems authors, and then identified a group of 21 authors using those journals who were either widely recognised Systems authors and/or amongst the authors who published most frequently in those journals (two strongly over-lapping criteria). These formed his ‘Systems panel’.

In addition, he selected a set of ‘benchmark domains’ from a number of other academic fields that are also concerned with tackling complex real-world issues (the creative problem solving literature, the naturalistic decision making literature, the action learning literature, the group decision and negotiation literature, and the operations research literature). While some of these were represented by particular key academics, others were represented by particular journals, or particular ‘special issues’ of journals that were devoted to the relevant field.

Martin’s main results are summarised in Table 1. ‘Systems-1’ to ‘Systems-21’ are the 21 Systems authors. The benchmark domains are individually labelled. In the case of Creative Problem Solving, there were three separate authors, all of whom are very well known in that field.