The enduring intellectual legacy of B. F. Skinner: A citation count from 1966-1989.

The author counted how often scholars cited B. F. Skinner from 1966 to 1989. The count covered all of Skinner’s books and journal articles, not just one title. The goal was to see if interest in Skinner’s work was fading.

Citations held steady across the 24-year span. There was no downward slide. The data say rumors that behaviorism was dying were simply wrong.

Baer et al. (1984) looked only at Skinner’s 1957 book Verbal Behavior. They found lots of citations, but fewer than 4% were real experiments testing his verbal operants. The new wider count shows people kept talking about Skinner even when they were not running new tests.

Jump ahead to Petursdottir et al. (2017) and Bao et al. (2017). Both show a sharp rise after 2005 in empirical studies that actually use Skinner’s verbal operants with children with autism. The steady baseline from 1966-1989 helps explain where later growth started.

Wang et al. (2021) did the same kind of count for Murray Sidman. Their method matches the target paper, giving us confidence that citation tallies can track long-term influence inside behavior analysis.

When you hear “Skinner is old news,” you now have hard numbers to push back. Steady citations mean the concepts are still alive. That should give you confidence to keep using Skinner’s verbal operants, reinforcement schedules, and other pillars in your day-to-day practice. The field did not abandon these ideas; it built on them.