Trends in Reporting Procedural Integrity: A Comparison

Han et al. (2023) counted how often behavior-analytic papers say they checked if the treatment was done correctly.

They looked at every article in four main journals for several years.

The team simply asked: did the authors record procedural integrity and tell us the numbers?

Most studies still leave out procedural-integrity data.

Only two journals—JABA and Behavior Analysis in Practice—show a small upward trend.

The silence is loudest in older and smaller journals.

Frank-Crawford et al. (2024) saw the same climb in a different area. Their scoping review found that 70 % of recent self-injury studies now report safety steps, up from almost none.

Kranak et al. (2020) used the same count-and-chart method on JABA authorship. Together these papers show that behavior analysts can move the needle when they pick a reporting standard and push it.

Feldman et al. (1999) sounded a matching alarm 24 years earlier about vague autism diagnoses. The message is steady: we spot the gap, we talk about the gap, yet the gap lingers.

If you run or supervise sessions, start treating procedural integrity like the dependent variable. Record one integrity measure every session, paste the summary into every report, and require the same from trainees. The field already knows what to do; Han et al. just proved we are not doing it. Your next paper, poster, or parent update can be part of the fix.