Stakes are higher, risk is lower: Citation distributions are more equal in high quality journals

Psychology is a discipline standing at the crossroads of hard and social sciences. Therefore it is especially interesting to study bibliometric characteristics of psychology journals. We also take two adjacent disciplines, neurosciences and sociology. One is closer to hard sciences, another is a social science. We study not the journal citedness itself (impact factor etc.) but the citation distribution across papers within journals. This is, so to say, ""indicators of the second order"" which measure the digression from the journal’s average of the citations received by individual papers. As is shown, such information about journals may also help authors to correct their publication strategies.