The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior at fifty.
JEAB grew from a tiny U.S. club into a global, open journal while keeping its experimental soul.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Laties (2008) traced the first fifty years of the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior.
The author counted who edited, who published, and who could read the journal after the web arrived.
What they found
The editorial chair shifted from a small U.S. men's club to a broader, more international group.
Free online archives opened, letting any reader anywhere download every back issue.
How this fits with other research
Horton (1987) tells how the 1957 meeting created JEAB; Laties (2008) shows where that choice led.
Saville et al. (2002) tracked authorship only to 1999; Laties (2008) extends the same metrics through 2008, confirming the slow rise in non-U.S. authors.
Johnstone et al. (1996) cheered the first web site; Laties (2008) celebrates the same move as a turning point toward open access.
Why it matters
If you train RBTs or supervise master's students, use the free JEAB archive as a textbook. Assign a classic rat study or a recent choice experiment and discuss how the data still speak to today's token economies.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Pick one open-access JEAB article, email the PDF to your team, and ask how it could inform a client's reinforcement schedule.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior was founded in 1958 by a group of male psychologists, mainly from the northeastern USA and connected with either Harvard or Columbia. Fifty years later about 20% of both editors and authors reside outside this country and almost the same proportion is made up of women. Other changes in the journal include having its own website for more than a decade and now publishing online as well as on paper. A recent connection with PubMed Central of the National Library of Medicine has made possible the completely free electronic presentation of the entire archive of about 3,800 articles.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2008 · doi:10.1901/jeab.2008.89-95