I hesitate to share this post (which expands on a theme first explored back in a 2024 post), because it addresses an issue that I doubt has burned its way to the top of your ruminatory priority list. To examine this issue, I’m going to show you a whole bunch of data, but they do not describe some new behavior principle or an astonishing application of principle. Nope, this particular datafest is a nerdy deep dive into the “behavior” of behavior analysis journals — the kind of thing that excites maybe just enough people to fill a corner booth at your favorite bar [That’s an empirical fact: In a delicious irony, the typical article in a behavior analysis journal employing citation analysis attracts almost no citations. You can look it up.].
In short, this post probably won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, though it probably should be. No matter what your role in behavior analysis, journals are the lifeblood of our discipline. They chart the progress of our movement and spread its gospel. As our journals go, therefore, so goes the science and everything that flows from it. If you care about our science you should care about the health and vigor of our journals, even if publishing and editing aren’t part of your professional identity.
The Form and Function of Behavior Science
I’ll start by posing a very basic question: What are our journals for?
Journals themselves are happy to provide an answer of sorts via their mission statements. All journals have one, but to illustrate here’s a pretty typical example, chosen at random:
Journal of Behavioral Education (JOBE) is an international forum for original research on the application of behavioral principles and technology to education. It presents empirical research investigating best-practices and innovative methods addressing the needs of diverse learners and implementation; publishes rigorous experimental designs, discussion articles, and critical reviews; and focuses on a core audiences of educational researchers, practitioners, and school personnel.
— Based on journal web page
Mission statements like this do help us tell one journal from another — I mean, with the information above, you definitely don’t want to send JOBE your study on how methylmercury poisoning affects rat concurrent schedule performance, right? But here’s the thing: Mission statements tell you what topic area a journal has carved out, but they say nothing about how good a journal is at whatever it was created to do.
Examples of questions that usually are not clearly answered:
- How much of a difference does the journal make in the science world?
- If the journal ceased publishing, in what measurable ways would anyone be worse off? At the least, we might expect a journal to publish research that positively influences the evolution of its research area (to get at this, some people consult metrics like citation impact; more on that later in this post).
- Does the journal lead in other ways, say, by pushing science to better align with social justice values, or by increasing the influence of science in society and everyday life (the latter is sometimes called dissemination impact).
Here we’re starting to distinguish between topography (what a mission statement describes) and function (what the journal accomplishes with its chosen topic). To accentuate that theme, I’ll now highlight some possible functions of behavior analysis journals using data from the SCImago Journal & Country Rank data base, which is one of several services that rank journals along various dimensions. At bottom, you’ll find links to data describing our journals in three broad dimensions:
- Scholarly Influence: Focusing on citations attracted by a journal’s articles, considered in three different ways.
- Inclusiveness: Focusing on the extent to which the journal represents authors of multiple types.
- Societal Relevance: Focusing on how reliably the journal’s articles address matters that suggest they’re making a difference in the world.
The purpose is to compare behavior analysis journals so that you can see which are doing better and worse in a given dimension.
Straw Men
He who strives to reach the stars oft stumbles at a straw. (Edmund Spenser)
To get a sense of why the data shown below matter, a feel for how journals can/should function, consider a couple of cynically-constructed straw men that can serve as quasi Null Hypotheses in this discussion.
Straw Man #1: Imagine that the sole raison d’être of any journal is simply to entertain people who like to casually read the kind of content it publishes. The journal is divertissement only, for people who already enjoy its topic, and in this way functions like a popular-press magazine.
Straw Man #2: Imagine that the sole raison d’être of any journal is simply to provide goodies for people whose jobs depend on scholarly publishing. People get promotions and raises from publishing articles and being part of the editorial process, and the journal serves only to make these opportunities possible.
The fact is that any journal that reliably accepts manuscripts and publishes issues can serve either of these functions, and it’ll probably stay in business if it does only this. In case you think I’m just being cynical, there’s some evidence that due to market forces — journal publishing is big business — some journals really do exist simply to fill pages and continue to exist.
Anyway, that’s a very low bar, and I hope we expect our journals to accomplish more. Think of this post as suggesting some potential additional accomplishments, some additional merits we should expect from our journals and ways to objectively evaluate them. My list of hoped-for accomplishments is far from all encompassing, but I hope it’ll prompt you to pose hard questions about what your favorite behavior analysis journals are currently accomplishing beyond meeting the straw-man goals just identified.
Thinking Critically
For each of seven accomplishment metrics below, I present quantitative results for several behavior analysis journals, plus an assessment (based on the sophisticated process of me eyeballing the data) of which of those journals seem to be doing relatively better and worse. You don’t have to accept my evaluations. By clicking the links provided, you can eyeball the data for yourself and in some cases get a bit of additional context.
I believe that if you let the data be your guide you will arrive at the same conclusions as me: We have too many journals for a discipline of our size and have expected too little of the many of the journals we do have.
If you’re part of a journal’s leadership, I hope you’ll ask whether your journal is measuring up to your expectations for an impactful, important publication. If you should have any concerns, I hope you’ll plot strategy for doing better.
If you’re someone who values a given journal, I hope you’ll let the journal’s leadership know how you feel about that journal’s performance in terms of metrics shown here. If something looks great, speak up! If something needs improving, speak up! I guarantee that the journal’s leaders want the best for it and are interested in your feedback.
Oh — and for some thoughts on what we might do about our glut of journals, see Part 2 of this post.
Notes:
- I expect some readers will respond to this post by protesting that the straw-man goals mentioned above are all we really have control over. But that’s not entirely true. For example, a fair amount is known about factors influencing how much a journal is noticed (that is, cited; e.g., see here and here and here and here), and some goals can be addressed through editorial policy. Most generally I’m saying that we should start by defining what we want our journals to accomplish, and act on that, rather than passively accept whatever they have become. That doesn’t feel like a very controversial proposition (though see Postscript 1).
- I have done a fair amount of editorial work for underperforming journals, alongside many committed, talented colleagues, and I can tell you that journal underperformance is virtually never a function of poor mission implementation by an editorial team. Rather, it reflects a journal mission that is too narrow or too unambitious, unfolding in a context in which there are just too many behavior analysis journals. Much respect to the incredible people who sweat blood trying to keep our discipline’s journals going! What we owe these people is to create a publishing milieu in which their efforts can pay off.
- If you’re looking for ideas on how to improve the landscape of behavior analysis journals, that’s coming in a followup post.
Notes on the data
- The behavior analysis journals described here those tracked in the SCImago database, which are the same journals indexed in the Scopus® data base. Quite a few behavior analysis journals are omitted. Journal-ranking services do not attempt to track all of the scientific journals that exist. How many is that? One 2021 source estimated 30,000, with an annual increase around 6%, meaning we’re probably pushing 40,000 now. That’s a near-impossible monitoring task, so for economy of effort, judgments are made about which journals “really matter.” Click here for information on how decisions are made about which journals get indexed in Scopus/SCImago. If a journal that interests you has been omitted, make of that what you will (and see this post for some context).
- Different journal indexing services collect and tally data using different procedures. Their results thus differ in systematic ways, so comparisons are meaningful only using data from within a given service.
- This post presents within-discipline comparisons. You get a different perspective when comparing behavior analysis journals to those in other research areas. In fact, go for it: Here are some quick comparisons of behavior analysis journals with selected journals from outside the discipline. No evaluation of our journals is complete without getting a sense of norms for journals generally.
- For a key to journal title abbreviations, see Postscript 2.
Scholarly Influence
QUALITY OF CITATIONS
You’re probably familiar with the citation impact factor, which estimates the volume of citations for a given journal’s recent articles. Some take IF as a measure of a journal’s quality, defined as amount of scientific influence. Normal IF just tallies citations. The SJR Indicator that takes into account the kinds of papers that are doing the citing. It gives extra weight to “citing papers” that appear in impactful journals, and less weight to those in journals that aren’t cited much.
See SJR Indicator data on behavior analysis journals.
| FARING relatively BETTER | FARING relatively WORSE |
|---|---|
| JCBS, JABA, JPBI, POBS | ETC, JOBM, AC, EJOBA, B&P |
TRADITIONAL CITATION COUNTS
This is mathematically similar to impact factor, presenting an estimate of average citations per journal article. I include it as a familiar frame of reference.
See mean citations per article in behavior analysis journals.
| FARING relatively BETTER | FARING relatively WORSE |
|---|---|
| JCBS, JABA, JPBI, POBS | ETC, TPR, BI, AC, EJOBA, B&P |
PREVALENCE OF UNCITED ARTICLES
A journal is reliably impactful, in the scholarly sense, when most of its articles are cited; less so if a substantial proportion are never noticed.
See ratios of cited to uncited articles in behavior analysis journals.
| FARING relatively BETTER | FARING relatively WORSE |
|---|---|
| JCBS, JABA, JPBI, JEAB, BM | POBS, ETC, TPR, JOBM, AC, EJOBA, B&P |
Inclusiveness
FEMALE AUTHORS
Although behavior analysis overall has become a female-dominated discipline, concerns remain about the representation of women in its scientific core.
See the prevalence of female authorship in behavior analysis journals.
| FARING relatively BETTER | FARING relatively WORSE |
|---|---|
| (Most) | JEAB, TPR, AC, B&P |
Obviously it’s also important to have current data on authors representing every traditionally under-represented group. I’m not aware of any published analysis, though the BACB tells us that about 73% of certificants at the Masters and Doctoral level are white, which isn’t exactly the analysis we want but also isn’t terribly encouraging.
INTERNATIONAL AUTHORS
Behavior analysis has spread from the U.S., where it originated, around the world. Are our journals keeping pace?
See the prevalence of multinational author teams in behavior analysis journals.
| FARING relatively BETTER | FARING relatively WORSE |
|---|---|
| JCBS, TPR, POBS, JEAB, BM, EJOBA | ETC, JABA, AC, B&P |
Societal Relevance
SUSTAINABILITY FOCUS
| FARING relatively BETTER | FARING relatively WORSE |
|---|---|
| JCBS, JOBE | (Most) |
PUBLIC POLICY INFLUENCE
I can’t honestly call any of our journals a success story here. Every single behavior analysis journal could be doing better when it comes to influencing policy discussions. Click above for more on this.
Postscript 1: On Passively Accepting What Our Journals Have Become
You might think that it’s easy to persuade behavior analysts to pinpoint desired outcomes and change behavior toward those ends, but history shows that in the world of journals change does not come easily. During my time in the discipline, I’m aware of at least four instances where Editors who sought to update their journals (I won’t names names or journals) received considerable blowback from traditionalists who were comfortable with the status quo. In all four instances, the sin was seeking to improve a journal’s visibility and impact by expanding its tropical focus and adjusting editorial practices.
I’m also aware of a few tines when hard questions were raised about the wisdom of continuing the publication an underperforming journal, with the result that a few vocal and well-placed individuals who were fond of the journal stepped up to make life uncomfortable for decision makers.
No good deed goes unpunished, as they say, and what these instances have in common is that something other than objective standards drove journal decisions. Which illustrates why it’s important to make the performance of our journals public so that a crowdsourced conversation about their futures can be well-informed.
Postscript 2: Key to Journal Abbreviations
| ABBREVIATION | JOURNAL TITLE |
|---|---|
| POBS | Perspectives on Behavior Science |
| JABA | Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis |
| JEAB | Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior |
| JCBS | Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science |
| JPBI | Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions |
| BI | Behavioral Interventions |
| BM | Behavior Modification |
| JOBE | Journal of Behavioral Education |
| ETC | Education and Treatment of Children |
| TPR | The Psychological Record |
| JOBM | Journal of Organizational Behavior Management |
| EJOBA | European Journal of Behavior Analysis |
| AC | Acta Comportamentalia: Revista Latina de Análisis del Comportamiento |
| B&P | Behavior & Philosophy |