50th Anniversary

Best of Human Factors

In celebration of its 50th anniversary, HFES ranked all of the papers ever published in the Human Factors journal (Cooke and Salas, 2008). Three criteria were used. The first criterion was scientific impact (i.e., citation rate). The second criterion was expert opinion (i.e., rankings by presidents of HFES, HFJ editors / editorial board members, and current HFES technical group chairs). The final criterion was whether or not a paper had won the HFES Jerome H. Ely Award.

The overall results indicate that Bennett & Flach (1992) [click here to download] was ranked as the 7th most influential article in the history of the journal.

Cooke and Salas (2008) describe the results in the following manner:

The 30 exemplary papers in this volume (selected from nearly 2,800) ... are the most highly cited and valued by a representative sample of readers. Six of the papers in this collection won the prestigious HFES Jerome H. Ely Award for best paper in a volume year. They are truly the best of the best.

Bennett & Flach (1992) was originally chosen as the lead article in a Special Issue of the Human Factors journal devoted to visual displays (Venturino & Post, 1992):

The first paper deals with configural displays, which are a potential solution to the problem of displaying the numerous values that are an inherent property of complex systems .... Bennett and Flach provide a much-needed critical review of the recent literature on configural displays ... This paper provides a valuable organization for the diverse results from configural display experiments.

Lee, Cassano-Pinche, & Vicente (2005) measured citation history alone, and found that Bennett & Flach (1992) had the third-highest scientific impact of articles published in the years 1990 to 1995.

Lee, J. D., Cassano-Pinche, A., & Vicente, K. J. (2005). Bibliometric analysis of Human Factors (1970-2000): A quantitative description of scientific impact. Human Factors, 47(4), 753-766.

Cooke, N. J., & Salas, E. (2008). Best of human factors: Thirty classic contributions to human factors/ergonomics science and engineering. Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.

Venturino, M., and D. L. Post. 1992. Special Issue Preface. Human Factors 34 (5):509-511.

© Kevin B. Bennett, all rights reserved

phone: 937-775-2444
fax: 937-775-3347
e-mail: [email protected]

Commemorative plaque