Do researchers claim their findings are applicable to the real world? An empirical study of social and personality psychology articles

Abstract The extent to which application claims are common in published articles can help provide insights into the norms and culture of a field. Estimating the prevalence of application claims, particularly in a literature that is not specifically an applied field, can help to shed light on the extent to which researchers consider their findings applicable to the real world, and/or are incentivized to connect their findings to real-world applications. To investigate how often social and personality psychologists make application claims in their published (mostly basic research) articles, we extracted and categorized application claims from 669 original empirical social and personality psychology articles published from 2010 to 2020 across seven journals. Just over one quarter of articles contained at least one application claim, and one in 20 articles contained an application claim in the Abstract. We did not find a significant association between having an application claim, and articles' (i) citation count or (ii) Altmetric score; however, we did not have sufficient evidence to conclude that there is no association. It is difficult to say whether one in four articles with application claims is too many or too few without diving deeper into the evidence behind the application claims in those articles. Nevertheless, these descriptive results can help inform future scholarship on how incentives and norms in the field shape researchers' practices.