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Abstract
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I am well-known for claiming that we have reached the end of suicidology (Lester, 2000, 2019). By this, I mean that I do not think that researchers and theoreticians will advance our understanding of why people die by suicide. There are several aspects to this.
Suicide is Statistically Rare
First, suicide is statistically rare (Lester, 1994). Rare events are very difficult to predict. However, there are rare events in the physical world (such as hurricanes and lightning strikes) that are rare, but their mechanisms of development are understood.
Too Many Articles Published
Second, the literature of suicide is becoming so large that a comprehensive view of it is not possible. In my four books entitled Why People Kill Themselves, I reviewed every work on suicide that I could find from 1897 to 1997. I used abstracts from every discipline. I don't think any one person could do this anymore. I just now downloaded the articles on suicide and self-harm from SafetyLit1 for May 2, 2021, and there were 106 articles listed. In 52 weeks, that would extrapolate to 5,512 articles in 2021.
Obscure and Low Prestige Journals
I am not sure that SafetyLit searches all the possible journal domains: anthropology, gender studies, media studies, criminal justice studies, etc. Furthermore, many academic institutions and researchers frown on predatory journals (that is, those that charge a fee), and most of those articles are not included in abstracting services. However, this does not mean that none of them are making a useful contribution to the field.
For example, my cohort theory of suicide (Lester, 1984) proposed that each cohort of the population born may have only a limited number of potential suicides. If this cohort has a high suicide rate early in life, then it will have a low suicide rate later in life, and vice versa. I found this theory in an article by Uematsue (1961) published in Acta Medica et Biologica which is not a commonly perused journal. (An article by M. Uematsue in 1961 is listed in PubMed, but it is not his article on suicide.)
If we are seriously interested in studying suicide, then some person or team might profitably search predatory journals for articles on suicide. The most prestigious journals often refuse to publish innovative and short articles on topics. In the good old days, the two journals Psychological Reports and Perceptual & Motor Skills, published by Robert and Carol Ammons, would often publish an article on a new idea, and this idea would appear in the prestigious journal many years later with more substantial research supporting it. The original idea, however, would be in the Ammons's journals...
Language: en |