Updated Strategies for Making Regular Contact With the Scholarly Literature
Set up one RSS feed and a shared cloud folder to auto-deliver new studies each week.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Briggs et al. (2022) wrote a how-to paper for busy BCBAs.
They list free tech tools that pull new articles to your phone.
They also give step-by-step folders and tags so teams can share one cloud library.
What they found
The paper does not test people. It shows a system.
RSS feeds, journal apps, and shared drives can scan the literature for you each week.
The setup takes under an hour and meets the Ethics Code to stay current.
How this fits with other research
Bank et al. (2023) asked 180 BCBAs how they really search. Most still hunt by hand once a month. Briggs gives the same group an easier way.
Whitehouse et al. (2014) mailed out a printed list of key articles. Briggs swaps the paper list for auto-feeds, updating the same job with new tools.
MSáez-Suanes et al. (2023) found most supervision papers are opinion, not data. Briggs answers by turning the act of reading into a simple, trackable routine.
Why it matters
You promise clients you will use the best evidence. These tools make that promise easy. Pick one RSS app, add top journals, and set alerts for your client’s target behaviors. Share the feed link with your team. In five minutes a week you stay ethical and sharp.
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Open Feedly, add the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis feed, and tag the first five articles that match your caseload.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
The Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts (Behavior Analyst Certification Board, 2020a) states that behavior analysts must provide services based on the published scientific evidence (Code 2.01, “Providing Effective Treatment”) and maintain competence by reading relevant scholarly literature (Code 1.06, “Maintaining Competence”). Carr and Briggs (2010) acknowledged several potential barriers that might prevent behavior analysts from pursuing this obligation and offered helpful recommendations for circumventing these barriers. Although the nature of these barriers has primarily stayed the same since the publication of Carr and Briggs, the profession and field have grown more complex over the past decade, and several additional barriers have emerged. Luckily, technological advances and resources recently made available offer additional solutions for behavior analysts to consider adopting. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to provide an update to the strategies described by Carr and Briggs for overcoming barriers related to searching the literature, accessing journal content, and contacting the contemporary literature. In addition, we conclude with how leaders might incorporate the proposed strategies into their organization at a systems-wide level.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2022 · doi:10.1007/s40617-021-00590-8