A citation analysis of the influence on research of Skinner's verbal behavior.

The authors counted every paper that cited Skinner’s 1957 book Verbal Behavior. They looked at 836 citations across psychology, education, and speech-language journals. Then they sorted each citation into two piles: papers that actually tested Skinner’s verbal operants and papers that only mentioned the book.

Only 32 of the 836 citations (3.8 %) were real experiments. The rest were reviews, opinion pieces, or passing mentions. In other words, scientists talked about Skinner’s ideas far more than they tested them.

Bao et al. (2017) later showed the picture has changed. Their systematic review found a surge of real verbal-operant studies with children with autism after 2001. The field moved from citing to testing.

Mason et al. (2019) took the next step. They built the SCoRE metric so you can now count mand, tact, intraverbal, and echoic responses in a child’s language sample and track change over time.

Wang et al. (2021) ran the same kind of citation audit on Murray Sidman’s work. Like Skinner, Sidman is cited heavily, but Li showed most of those citations are also conceptual, not experimental.

If you write a verbal-behavior program, check that your references are empirical studies, not just classic quotes. Use the 2017 review to find real mand and intraverbal interventions. Try the SCoRE metric to measure your client’s operant balance. You will turn citation lore into testable practice.