Surveys of the literature may facilitate future scholarship by identif
ying important conceptual developments or recent advances in empirical
research. However, we suggest that Shortz, Worthington, McCollough, D
eVries, and Morrow's (1994) conclusions regarding prominent trends in
marital therapy and research suffer serious limitations based on the a
uthors' failure to consider objective indices of either journals' infl
uence or authors' actual impact, in addition to their exclusion of non
journal sources and use of an arbitrary method of weighting authorship
. We identify alternative approaches to evaluating published scholarsh
ip for use in future surveys.