Deborah Kelemen

6.0k total citations
62 papers, 3.4k citations indexed

About

Deborah Kelemen is a scholar working on Social Psychology, Developmental and Educational Psychology and Sociology and Political Science. According to data from OpenAlex, Deborah Kelemen has authored 62 papers receiving a total of 3.4k indexed citations (citations by other indexed papers that have themselves been cited), including 39 papers in Social Psychology, 35 papers in Developmental and Educational Psychology and 19 papers in Sociology and Political Science. Recurrent topics in Deborah Kelemen's work include Child and Animal Learning Development (34 papers), Animal and Plant Science Education (18 papers) and Evolution and Science Education (16 papers). Deborah Kelemen is often cited by papers focused on Child and Animal Learning Development (34 papers), Animal and Plant Science Education (18 papers) and Evolution and Science Education (16 papers). Deborah Kelemen collaborates with scholars based in United States, Canada and China. Deborah Kelemen's co-authors include Joshua Rottman, Evelyn Rosset, Krista Casler, Cara DiYanni, Natalie Emmons, Liane Young, Paul Bloom, Samuel Ronfard, Tania Lombrozo and Deborah Zaitchik and has published in prestigious journals such as PLoS ONE, Child Development and Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

In The Last Decade

Deborah Kelemen

57 papers receiving 3.1k citations

Peers — A (Enhanced Table)

Peers by citation overlap · career bar shows stage (early→late) cites · hero ref

Name h Career Trend Papers Cites
Deborah Kelemen United States 29 1.5k 1.4k 956 800 749 62 3.4k
E. Margaret Evans United States 27 731 0.5× 1.1k 0.8× 548 0.6× 234 0.3× 579 0.8× 42 2.2k
Andrew Shtulman United States 21 849 0.6× 613 0.4× 503 0.5× 397 0.5× 595 0.8× 63 1.8k
Lawrence A. Hirschfeld United States 20 1.4k 0.9× 1.3k 0.9× 1.3k 1.4× 680 0.8× 528 0.7× 44 3.8k
Charles W. Kalish United States 32 1.7k 1.1× 919 0.6× 518 0.5× 563 0.7× 496 0.7× 79 2.7k
Kathleen H. Corriveau United States 31 2.9k 1.9× 1.1k 0.8× 1.1k 1.1× 979 1.2× 1.0k 1.3× 95 4.3k
Melissa A. Koenig United States 23 2.7k 1.8× 887 0.6× 890 0.9× 885 1.1× 793 1.1× 60 3.6k
Deena Skolnick Weisberg United States 25 927 0.6× 482 0.3× 495 0.5× 794 1.0× 1.1k 1.4× 58 2.7k
Jacqueline D. Woolley United States 26 2.6k 1.7× 905 0.6× 416 0.4× 1.6k 2.0× 820 1.1× 73 3.9k
Susan Carey United States 10 1.9k 1.3× 713 0.5× 209 0.2× 742 0.9× 1.1k 1.5× 17 3.3k
Jesse M. Bering United States 26 526 0.3× 1.1k 0.8× 1.2k 1.2× 686 0.9× 98 0.1× 65 2.4k

Countries citing papers authored by Deborah Kelemen

Since Specialization
Citations

This map shows the geographic impact of Deborah Kelemen's research. It shows the number of citations coming from papers published by authors working in each country. You can also color the map by specialization and compare the number of citations received by Deborah Kelemen with the expected number of citations based on a country's size and research output (numbers larger than one mean the country cites Deborah Kelemen more than expected).

Fields of papers citing papers by Deborah Kelemen

Since Specialization
Physical SciencesHealth SciencesLife SciencesSocial Sciences

This network shows the impact of papers produced by Deborah Kelemen. Nodes represent research fields, and links connect fields that are likely to share authors. Colored nodes show fields that tend to cite the papers produced by Deborah Kelemen. The network helps show where Deborah Kelemen may publish in the future.

Co-authorship network of co-authors of Deborah Kelemen

This figure shows the co-authorship network connecting the top 25 collaborators of Deborah Kelemen. A scholar is included among the top collaborators of Deborah Kelemen based on the total number of citations received by their joint publications. Widths of edges represent the number of papers authors have co-authored together. Node borders signify the number of papers an author published with Deborah Kelemen. Deborah Kelemen is excluded from the visualization to improve readability, since they are connected to all nodes in the network.

All Works

20 of 20 papers shown
1.
Kelemen, Deborah, et al.. (2025). “The Earth is Alive”: Attributing Agency to the Earth Causes Moral Concern for the Environment and Biocentric Attitudes. Cognitive Science. 49(3). e70052–e70052. 1 indexed citations
2.
Kelemen, Deborah, et al.. (2024). Is biology destiny? The coherence of children’s beliefs about physical and psychological traits. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 249. 106108–106108. 1 indexed citations
3.
Kelemen, Deborah, et al.. (2023). Don't bug me!: The role of names, functions, and feelings in shaping children's and adults' conservation attitudes about unappealing species. Journal of Environmental Psychology. 87. 101990–101990. 6 indexed citations
4.
Kelemen, Deborah, et al.. (2023). The moral consequences of teleological beliefs about the human species.. Journal of Experimental Psychology General. 152(12). 3359–3379.
5.
Ronfard, Samuel, et al.. (2023). Why we should care about moral foundations when preparing for the next pandemic: Insights from Canada, the UK and the US. PLoS ONE. 18(5). e0285549–e0285549. 1 indexed citations
6.
Kelemen, Deborah, et al.. (2021). Why belief in species purpose prompts moral condemnation of individuals who fail to fulfill that purpose. eScholarship (California Digital Library). 43(43). 1 indexed citations
7.
Kelemen, Deborah, et al.. (2020). Does viewing Earth as a person and nature as intentionally designed impact beliefs about the immorality of environmentally damaging acts. Cognitive Science. 1 indexed citations
8.
Rottman, Joshua, Liane Young, Peter Blake, & Deborah Kelemen. (2018). Changing Children's Minds about Distributive Justice.. Cognitive Science. 1 indexed citations
9.
Schachner, Adena, Liqi Zhu, Jing Li, & Deborah Kelemen. (2017). Is the bias for function-based explanations culturally universal? Children from China endorse teleological explanations of natural phenomena. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 157. 29–48. 24 indexed citations
10.
Rottman, Joshua, et al.. (2016). Cultural influences on the teleological stance: evidence from China. Religion Brain & Behavior. 7(1). 17–26. 36 indexed citations
11.
Emmons, Natalie & Deborah Kelemen. (2015). Young children’s acceptance of within-species variation: Implications for essentialism and teaching evolution. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 139. 148–160. 53 indexed citations
12.
Emmons, Natalie & Deborah Kelemen. (2015). I’ve got a feeling: Urban and rural indigenous children’s beliefs about early life mentality. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 138. 106–125. 8 indexed citations
13.
Rottman, Joshua, Deborah Kelemen, & Liane Young. (2013). Tainting the soul: Purity concerns predict moral judgments of suicide. Cognition. 130(2). 217–226. 78 indexed citations
14.
Kelemen, Deborah & Evelyn Rosset. (2009). The Human Function Compunction: Teleological explanation in adults. Cognition. 111(1). 138–143. 298 indexed citations
15.
DiYanni, Cara & Deborah Kelemen. (2005). Time to get a new mountain? The role of function in children's conceptions of natural kinds. Cognition. 97(3). 327–335. 33 indexed citations
16.
Kelemen, Deborah, Maureen A. Callanan, Krista Casler, & Deanne R. Pérez-Granados. (2005). Why Things Happen: Teleological Explanation in Parent-Child Conversations.. Developmental Psychology. 41(1). 251–264. 53 indexed citations
17.
Kelemen, Deborah. (2003). British and American children's preferences for teleo-functional explanations of the natural world. Cognition. 88(2). 201–221. 86 indexed citations
18.
Kelemen, Deborah. (1999). The scope of teleological thinking in preschool children. Cognition. 70(3). 241–272. 272 indexed citations
19.
Kelemen, Deborah. (1999). Why are rocks pointy? Children's preference for teleological explanations of th natural world.. Developmental Psychology. 35(6). 1440–1452. 22 indexed citations
20.
Bloom, Paul & Deborah Kelemen. (1995). Syntactic cues in the acquisition of collective nouns. Cognition. 56(1). 1–30. 62 indexed citations

Rankless uses publication and citation data sourced from OpenAlex, an open and comprehensive bibliographic database. While OpenAlex provides broad and valuable coverage of the global research landscape, it—like all bibliographic datasets—has inherent limitations. These include incomplete records, variations in author disambiguation, differences in journal indexing, and delays in data updates. As a result, some metrics and network relationships displayed in Rankless may not fully capture the entirety of a scholar's output or impact.

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