Research Rankings of Behavior Analytic Graduate Training Programs and Their Faculty.

The authors sent a survey to every BACB-approved graduate program. They counted how many faculty had ten or more publications in the field’s top journals.

They also made a top-10 list of the most productive programs and faculty.

Only about half of the programs had even one faculty member with ten or more top-tier papers.

Many programs had faculty with zero publications in those journals.

Curiel et al. (2023) adds a world lens. They show that 79–96 % of articles in our flagship journals still come from North America. Together the two studies say: our programs and our journals are both home-grown.

Logan et al. (2000) did a similar head-count two decades earlier. They found the same “few stars” pattern in developmental-disabilities research. The new data say the concentration problem has not gone away; it just moved to the BACB training world.

Palya (1993) and Bennett et al. (1998) looked at gender instead of raw output. They found women under-represented in editorial boards and authorship. Cox et al. (2015) did not track gender, so we still do not know if the low-output programs are also low-diversity programs.

If you sit on a hiring committee, check the paper count before you invite someone to train the next wave. If you mentor students, steer them to programs on the top-10 list or push their current faculty to publish. More faculty pubs now equals better-trained BCBAs later.