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Fifteen Years and Counting: The Dissemination Impact of Behavior Analysis in Practice

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Abstract

When Behavior Analysis in Practice (BAP) was founded 15 years ago, questions were raised about whether a practitioner-focused journal was really needed to complement our field's well-established applied research periodicals. Like research journals, BAP publishes primary research reports for which scholarly citations are one measure of impact. Unlike most research journals, it also was intended to achieve dissemination impact, which implies influence on people who may not conduct research or leave behind citations. Using altmetric data as an objective measure of dissemination impact, we present evidence that BAP is becoming a leader in this domain among applied behavior analysis journals, and thus appears to be accomplishing exactly what it was designed to. We recommend explicitly relying on dissemination impact data to help shape the journal's future development.

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Notes

  1. It's not clear exactly how this decision is made (Al-Salihi, 2012; Van Noorden, 2012), but with the proliferation of new journals (e.g., the number more than doubled between 2006 and 2011; Gu & Blackmore, 2016), it's clear that the number of unindexed journals must be increasing as well. Reliable numbers are impossible come by, but according to estimates offered in a variety of blogs and other sources it appears that only about one third of more than 30,000 scientific journals currently have an impact factor.

  2. Citation counts are always an estimate. Several different services track citations but do so using different digital heuristics and therefore often arrive at different totals for the same publication (e.g., Martín-Martín et al., 2021). The counts presented here will not be replicated exactly using a citation-tracking tool other than Dimensions, but relative totals should be.

  3. Reasonable, but not straightforward. For discussions of the complexities of equating citation counts with article or journal quality, see Catalini et al. (2015), Cozzens (1989), D'Ippoliti (2021), Hudson (2007), or Walter et al. (2003).

  4. For narrative convenience we have skimmed over that fascinating hybrid called the scientist-practitioner. We think it likely that such individuals will find special interest in the concept of dissemination impact as described here (e.g., Critchfield & Dixon, 2022).

  5. Is this the best possible measure of impact? From a behavioral perspective, of course not: the best evidence of ABA's end-user influence would be direct observations of everyday people engineering better outcomes for themselves and those around them. But as Wolf (1978) observed when establishing ABA's agenda for social validity assessment, sometimes it is better to know what people say than to know nothing at all. Although talk is not action (Baer et al., 1968), it can be a precursor to action (Lloyd, 2002), and we suspect that ABA will have little influence over people who are not first aware of and impressed by it. It is in this spirit that records mentioning ABA articles are proposed as a measure of dissemination impact.

  6. Proper usage: "Altmetric," capitalized and singular, refers to the company, whereas "altmetrics," lower case and plural, refers to the type of data the company collates.

  7. For details on how different types of mentions are weighted in calculating the Attention Score, see https://help.altmetric.com/support/solutions/articles/6000233311-how-is-the-altmetric-attention-score-calculated-

  8. This is one of a suite of tools available free of charge from Altmetric (http://www.altmetric.com). All data presented here were collected February 7–9, 2022.

  9. A quirk of the database makes zeroes a bit tricky to interpret. The database of nonscholarly mentions also includes measures of scholarly impact (citations number of Mendeley readers). An article with demonstrated scholarly impact but no nonscholarly mentions receives an Attention Score of zero. An article with no mentions and no scholarly impact is omitted from the database, but is functionally equivalent to an article with an Attention Score of zero.

  10. Different types of mentions are weighted differently in calculating the Attention Score. For details, see https://help.altmetric.com/support/solutions/articles/6000233311-how-is-the-altmetric-attention-score-calculated-

  11. That is, for all of a journal's articles in the database, regardless of year of publication.

  12. It describes an effort at gender-role reprogramming of a minor. For more on this problematic article, see Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior & LeBlanc (2020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA

    Thomas S. Critchfield

  2. The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    William L. Heward

  3. University of Houston, Clear Lake, Houston, TX, USA

    Dorothea C. Lerman

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  1. Thomas S. Critchfield
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  2. William L. Heward
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  3. Dorothea C. Lerman
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Correspondence to Thomas S. Critchfield.

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We used only data from publicly available archives that are not linked to individuals, so our analysis was not subject to ethics board review or oversight.

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Critchfield, T.S., Heward, W.L. & Lerman, D.C. Fifteen Years and Counting: The Dissemination Impact of Behavior Analysis in Practice. Behav Analysis Practice 16, 399–406 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-022-00744-2

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