he papers behind the signal detection pages, in date order, from a law about comparing weights to a guide for radiologists. Every DOI was checked against Crossref; the two books are standard editions. The notes are our summaries, not quotations.

1. Thurstone (1927). A law of comparative judgment. Psychological Review. doi:10.1037/h0070288
   Judgments as comparisons between noisy internal values. The proportion of "A is greater" answers measures the distance between A and B in units of that noise, which is the idea under d′, thirty years early. Used in: Thurstone
2. Peterson, Birdsall & Fox (1954). The theory of signal detectability. Transactions of the IRE Professional Group on Information Theory. doi:10.1109/TIT.1954.1057460
   The engineering origin: how an ideal receiver should decide whether a noisy radar trace holds a target, given costs and prior odds. Introduces the receiver operating characteristic. Used in: signal detection
3. Tanner & Swets (1954). A decision-making theory of visual detection. Psychological Review. doi:10.1037/h0058700
   Carries the radar mathematics to a person looking for a faint light, and shows that observers behave like a detector with a criterion they can move. Used in: signal detection
4. Swets (1961). Is There a Sensory Threshold?. Science. doi:10.1126/science.134.3473.168
   A short Science article asking whether a sensory threshold exists at all. The data then available looked like continuous evidence and a movable criterion. Used in: signal detection  where the line is
5. Cornsweet (1962). The Staircase-Method in Psychophysics. The American Journal of Psychology. doi:10.2307/1419876
   The up-down staircase as a practical method: step the stimulus down after a detection and up after a miss, and it hovers around threshold. Used in: the staircase
6. Green & Swets (1966). Signal Detection Theory and Psychophysics. New York: Wiley.
   The textbook that made the theory standard in psychology. Dense, complete, and still the reference for the original derivations. Used in: signal detection
7. Watson & Pelli (1983). Quest: A Bayesian adaptive psychometric method. Perception & Psychophysics. doi:10.3758/BF03202828
   QUEST: an adaptive method that places each trial where it is most informative, using Bayes' rule over possible thresholds. Used in: timeline: psychophysics
8. Stanislaw & Todorov (1999). Calculation of signal detection theory measures. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers. doi:10.3758/bf03207704
   A practical paper on computing d′, criterion and related measures, including what to do with hit rates of exactly zero or one. Used in: signal detection
9. Swets, Dawes & Monahan (2000). Psychological Science Can Improve Diagnostic Decisions. Psychological Science in the Public Interest. doi:10.1111/1529-1006.001
   The case, made to a general audience, that diagnostic decisions in medicine, aviation and elsewhere improve when sensitivity and the decision threshold are treated separately. Used in: complementarity
10. Macmillan & Creelman (2005). Detection Theory: A User's Guide (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
    The working guide: how to design a detection experiment and analyse it, with the many variants beyond yes/no. Used in: signal detection

see also

	signal detection — the area page
	timeline: psychophysics — the same story by date
	signal — noise, information and inference