INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 7 - N.2 (87-92) - 1992 E. Marini S.M. Borgognini Tarli Dipartimento di Scienze del Comportamento Animale e dell'Uomo, Sezione di Antropologia Universit?z di Pisa Via S. Maria 55 56126 Pisa Italy A statistical analysis of the literature on sexual dimorphism in primates The annotated bibliography on sexual dimorphism in primates com- piled by the authors was analysed considering the distribution of entries by keytitles, keywords, kind of periodicals and years of publication. A growing interest in this field was observed especially since the 1970s, but a relative scarcity of basic methodological papers was found. Articles on extant human populations and on living nonhuman primates are much more frequent than works on fossil primates and ancient humans. Key words: sexual dimorphism, pri- mates, bibliostatistics Introduction Bibliostatistical studies in Anthropology are relatively more frequent than in other fields, partly because of the interdisciplinary nature of the matter, partly because of the lack of specific bibliographic surveys as abstract collections, and partly because anthropological journals are poorly represented in the Science Citation Index. They can be classified into two main kinds: - studies on specific subfields, such as prehistoric anthropology (Schwidetzky, 1976), growth (Schwidetzky, 1979), dermatoglyphics (Schwidetzky and Mavalwala, 1982), dental anthropology (Wahl and Schwidetzky, 1983), mainly aimed at evaluating the state of the m't of the research or focusing on its development from the perspective of the history of science; - citation statistics, aimed at establishing a rank order of anthropological journals in terms of "impact", "citing half-life", "cited half-life" and "immediacy index" (Garfield, 1984). This paper clearly belongs to the first group, dealing with the analysis of a subject bibliography on sexual dimorphism in primates (Borgognini Tarli and Marini, 1991). The compilation of the bibliography and its statistical analysis were stimulated by the growing interest on sexual dimorphism in anthropological studies. We were also motivated by the need to collect and organize data and hypotheses for further investigation on diachronic trends and microevolutionary changes of sexual dimorphism in past and extant human populations. Materials and methods The bibliography includes about 3,000 entries on sexual dimorphism and related topics, brought up to 1989. Perusal was focused on authropological and primatological journals and books. The rel- evant periodicals were scrutinized starting from 1970, the others from 1980. Abstracts were