Self- and cross-citations in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior: 1993-2003.
JABA mostly cites itself and rarely pulls from JEAB, so the field still keeps basic and applied work in separate silos.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team counted who cited whom in every article published in JABA and JEAB from 1993 through 2003. They asked: how often do these two big behavior-analysis journals talk to each other?
They sorted each reference as a self-citation (same journal) or a cross-citation (other journal). Simple tallies showed the talking pattern.
What they found
About one in three JABA references pointed back to older JABA papers. Only about one in twelve JABA references pointed to JEAB work. JEAB almost never cited JABA.
In plain words, applied researchers mostly quoted themselves and rarely looked at the basic lab next door.
How this fits with other research
Davis et al. (1994) ran the same count for 1983-1992 and saw the same cold shoulder. The gap is not new; Symons et al. (2005) simply show it held steady for another decade.
Mahoney et al. (2019) extended the count to 2004-2018 and found a slight thaw: cross-citations inched up, but still sat below five percent. The wall is cracking, yet remains high.
Virues-Ortega et al. (2014) add a friendly footnote. They tracked authors, not citations, and found three times more scientists publishing in both journals by 2010. People are crossing the bridge even if their papers are not yet.
Why it matters
If you write or teach, let these numbers nudge you. Open a JEAB article this week and drop one basic finding into your next JABA-style program. The citation gap is shrinking, but only when each of us chooses to bridge it.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Self- and cross-citations in JABA and JEAB from 1993 through 2003 were examined. Yearly mean levels of self-citation for JABA and JEAB were 34.9% and 33.2%, respectively. Overall, 7.8% of JABA citations were JEAB articles, and 0.6% of JEAB citations were JABA articles. The former value, but not the latter, is substantially higher than the cross-citation level reported for earlier years. The two JEAB articles most often cited in JABA were published over 20 years ago and are concerned with establishing operations and the matching law.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 2005 · doi:10.1901/jaba.2005.133-04