The literatures on scientific paradigms and
schools also describe the importance of theory testing and theory building to the scholarly impact of
journal articles. McKinley et al. (1999) drew on
human information processing arguments to describe
when information is more likely to be salient
and memorable to scholars. Specifically, they suggested
that novel information separates a given article
from the multitude of articles competing for a
scholar’s attention. That suggestion echoes Davis’s
(1971) emphasis on generating theories that are not
just “true” but “interesting.” McKinley et al. (1999)
further emphasized that an article must also include
a bridge to a scholar’s existing knowledge to
be included in the “to be read” pile (see also Davis,
1971). Creating that bridge supplies the communication
efficiency and decreased barriers to collaboration
that can make a given article impactful to a
stream of research (Pfeffer, 1993). We therefore expect
that the theory building and theory testing
associated with a given empirical article will be
positively associated with its scholarly impact, as
judged by citation rates.