Over 500 separate journal articles were reviewed to identify the 25 most frequently cited articles between 1972, the year the Marland Report was published, and 1988. To qualify for the data base the article must have used the term "gifted" or some related term (e.g., "giftedness," "genius," "precocious") in the title or have been indexed by ERIC or Psychological Abstracts with that term as a descriptor. The 25 most frequently cited articles were compared to a random sample of 25 articles from the same data set on a number of characteristics (e.g., purpose, theoretical basis, topical area, research design, and statistical methods). In general, comparisons on these and other variables showed few differences between frequently cited and randomly chosen articles. In comparison to other psychological/ educational disciplines gifted articles were cited much less frequently and used less sophisticated research designs and statistical analyses. Furthermore, articles tended to lack either a theoretical or research basis. Implications of these findings for the discipline are discussed.
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