On the growth of structural equation modeling in psychological journals

This study investigates the distribution of technical and substantive structural equation modeling articles (SEM) that were published in psychological journals from 1987 to 1994. An inspection of more than 1050 abstracts on PsycLit 1987–1995 (PsycINFO, 1973–1995) revealed a number of clear trends: (a) an increase by year of articles concerned with SEM, (b) an increase in the number of journals that publish structural equation modeling articles, (c) a relatively stable output of technical articles across years, and (d) an increase of substantive articles across years. Furthermore, when the substantive articles are classified as either causal models or confirmatory factor analyses, a similar “growth” trend across years occurs for both categories. We further inspected the growth trend by considering the ratio of SEM articles to the total number of psychology articles and by comparing these results to distributions of analysis of variance, multivariate analysis of variance, regression, and factor analyses articles for the period of 1973 to 1994.