Authorship Trends in The Analysis of Verbal Behavior: 1982-2016.
TAVB has balanced gender but still needs global voices—add an international co-author to your next verbal-behavior paper.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Dal et al. (2017) read every article in The Analysis of Verbal Behavior from 1982 through 2016.
They counted who wrote the papers, where they worked, and how often each person published.
The goal was to see if the verbal-behavior journal reflects the wider world of ABA researchers.
What they found
Women and men now publish equally in TAVB.
Most authors, however, still come from U.S. universities.
International voices remain rare even after 35 years.
How this fits with other research
Szempruch et al. (1993) tracked the older Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and saw the opposite shift. Their 1993 review found JABA moving away from verbal-behavior topics toward developmental disabilities in everyday settings.
Tincani et al. (2019) later audited graph quality in autism journals. Together these papers form a timeline: JABA left verbal behavior, TAVB kept it, yet both journals still center on U.S. labs.
Leslie (2006) reminds us why the field persists: Chomsky’s old attack on Skinner misunderstood verbal behavior, so TAVB remains the main home for correcting that story.
Why it matters
If you publish verbal-behavior work, invite a colleague from another country as co-author. One international name on your paper helps the journal mirror the global ABA community. Check your own reference list too—citing overseas studies gives those authors visibility and may earn you a future collaborator.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The Analysis of Verbal Behavior (TAVB) is the only journal focused on theoretical and empirical research in verbal behavior. An assessment of authorship trends can provide a critical perspective on practices in verbal behavior analysis (e.g., participation by non-US institutions, contributions by female authors). The present study examines authorship trends in all articles published in TAVB since its inception (between 1982 and 2016). All authors and their affiliations were listed and the first authors denoted as such. Authors were characterized as follows: prolificacy, new vs. frequent contributor status, number of co-authors, editor status, fellow status in a professional organization, and gender. Institutional affiliations were characterized as follows: academic vs. nonacademic institutions, prolificacy, and location (country). The review included 383 articles by 487 authors from 200 institutions. Our findings revealed areas in which TAVB is reaching maturity (e.g., author gender) and areas in which further action by contributors and editors is needed (e.g., international participation).
The Analysis of verbal behavior, 2017 · doi:10.1126/science.1136099