When future behavior analysts look back on the present moment in our science, what developments will they recognize as influential?
That is to say, amongst all of the stuff being published today in our way-too-many journals, what will prove to be the cutting-edge raw material for future behavior analysis? The most straightforward way to answer this question, of course, is to wait until the future, and see what articles from the present day got cited a lot [see Postscript 2].
But that strategy requires lots of patience, because citations build up slowly. The citation half-life of a behavior analysis article — how long it takes for half of the article’s eventual citations to accumulate — can stretch to 15 years or more).
For those not adept at waiting for a second marshmallow, here’s a short-term hack: examining attention to contemporary articles in the Mendeley reference-management tool. Mendeley “readers” are people who access the reference information of a given article that, presumably, they are considering citing. Mendeley readership correlates positively (r = +.30 to +.50) with later citation counts so, since it accumulates faster than citations, it may be assumed to foreshadow eventual citation impact.
The table below lists articles published in the past year that, so far, have the highest Mendeley readership. These articles may not have been much cited yet, but they could have special potential for future citation impact [though see Postscript 1].
A few quick procedural notes:
- I collected data using the Altmetric Explorer app.
- My data collection window (11/11/23 to 11/10/24) doesn’t exactly map onto the 2024 calendar year. Reason: My license to use the Altmetric Explorer app was about to expire, so I had did what I could when I could.
- This approach gives an advantage to articles published earlier in the year and potentially underestimates the early impact of those published near year’s end. A better way to do the analysis is to determine each article’s Mendeley readership for one calendar year after its date of publication. But with my access to the Explorer app expiring, I did what I could when I could.
Without further ado, here are the past year’s Top 40 “future citation classics.” The key trends are readily apparent via the interocular percussion test, so I’ll leave you to glean those for yourself.
| MENDELEY READERS | JOURNAL | ARTICLE TITLE |
|---|---|---|
| 44 | JCBS | Supporting employers and their employees with Mental hEalth conditions to remain eNgaged and producTive at wORk (MENTOR): A feasibility randomised controlled trial |
| 36 | JCBS | Through the extended evolutionary meta-model, and what ACT found there: ACT as a process-based therapy |
| 36 | JCBS | Preliminary feasibility, acceptability, and effectiveness of a pilot telehealth-based intensive outpatient program incorporating acceptance and commitment therapy for adolescents with obsessive compulsive disorder |
| 33 | JCBS | Stress and mental health: The role of emotional schemas and psychological flexibility in the context of COVID-19 |
| 30 | BAP | Affirming Neurodiversity within Applied Behavior Analysis |
| 29 | JCBS | Group acceptance and commitment therapy for adolescent anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis |
| 28 | JCBS | The acceptability, feasibility and preliminary efficacy of acceptance and commitment therapy for adolescents in the management of overweight or obesity: A scoping review |
| 25 | JCBS | A randomized controlled trial comparing two guided self-help Acceptance and Commitment Therapy formats to education on pain |
| 24 | JCBS | Acceptance and commitment therapy: What the history of ACT and the first 1,000 randomized controlled trials reveal |
| 22 | JCBS | Effects of acceptance and commitment therapy-based intervention on fatigue interference and health-related quality of life in patients with advanced lung cancer: A randomised controlled trial |
| 21 | JCBS | Emotional labor and emotional exhaustion in psychologists: Preliminary evidence for the protective role of self-compassion and psychological flexibility |
| 20 | JCBS | Applying a process-based therapy approach to compassion focused therapy: A synergetic alliance |
| 19 | JCBS | Truce: Outcomes and mechanisms of change of a seven-week acceptance and commitment therapy program for young people whose parent has cancer |
| 19 | JEAB | Habit and persistence |
| 18 | BAP | Compassion: The Eighth Dimension of Applied Behavior Analysis |
| 18 | JCBS | A call for qualitative research in Contextual Behavioral Science |
| 16 | BAP | How Can Qualitative Methods Be Applied to Behavior Analytic Research: A Discussion and Suggestions for Implementation |
| 16 | JCBS | Oncovox: A randomised controlled trial of a web-based acceptance and commitment therapy for breast cancer patients |
| 16 | TPR | Assessing Psychological Flexibility in Chronic Illness |
| 15 | JCBS | Testing the applicability of idionomic statistics in longitudinal studies: The example of ‘doing what matters’ |
| 15 | JCBS | A map of living: Moving through the variations of life with the guidance of metaphors |
| 15 | JCBS | A fresh lens on psychological flexibility: Using network analysis and the Unified Flexibility and Mindfulness Model to uncover paths to wellbeing and distress |
| 15 | JCBS | Pilot evaluation of a self-help ACT intervention for palliative care patients |
| 14 | BMOD | A Meta-Analysis of Treatment for Self-Injurious Behavior in Children and Adolescents With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities |
| 14 | JCBS | Practice matters: The role of mindfulness skills in emotion dysregulation in borderline personality disorder |
| 14 | JCBS | Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) among U.S. veterans: A systematic review |
| 14 | JCBS | Verbal relations in the context of university experience: An exploratory analysis using a relational density theoretical framework and case example |
| 14 | TPR | A Scoping Review of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in Higher Education |
| 13 | JCBS | Self-compassion, difficulties in emotion regulation and eating psychopathology: Findings from an eating disorders clinical sample and a college sample |
| 12 | BAP | Perceptions of Machine Learning among Therapists Practicing Applied Behavior Analysis: A National Survey |
| 12 | BAP | Neurodiversity-Affirming Applied Behavior Analysis |
| 12 | BAP | Science over Cynicism: The Race to Preserve Best-Practice Applied Behavior Analysis through Expanded Awareness, Advocacy, and Enforcement of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act |
| 12 | BI | The effect of phonics skills intervention on early reading comprehension in an adolescent with autism: A longitudinal study |
| 12 | BSI | The Behavioral Education in Social Media (BE-Social) Program for Postgraduate Academic Achievement: A Randomized Controlled Trial |
| 12 | JCBS | The compassion connection: Experience sampling insights into romantic attraction |
| 12 | JCBS | Suicidality, gender identity-related stressors, and psychological flexibility among transgender and non-binary adults |
| 12 | JCBS | Effectiveness of acceptance and commitment therapy for addictive behaviors: A systematic review and meta-analysis |
| 12 | JCBS | Telehealth acceptance and commitment therapy for adolescents with transdiagnostic health-related anxiety: A pilot randomized controlled trial |
| 12 | JCBS | A psychometric evaluation of the parental acceptance and action questionnaire (PAAQ) in parents of children with and without disabilities |
| 12 | JCBS | Building a digital tool to support focused acceptance and commitment therapy practitioners in New Zealand primary care: A qualitative exploration of user needs to guide software feature development |
| 12 | JEAB | A neural autopilot theory of habit: Evidence from consumer purchases and social media use |
Postscript 1
Correlation isn’t causation, and robust Mendeley readership doesn’t guarantee a lot of future citations. For instance, an article that attracts a lot of scholarly interest today could:
- represent a transitory fad that is soon forgotten
- prove not to fuel valuable discoveries in the way contemporary observers expect
- resolve a scientific problem, leaving nothing further of substance to be investigated
Also note that the positive correlation between Mendeley readership and later citations, on which this post is predicated, has been demonstrated for articles of other disciplines. There are no published studies documenting this effect for behavior analysis articles specifically.
All that being said, Mendeley readership is a type of scholarly attention, and therefore worthy of our attention as we gauge what, in the behavior analysis literature, is making a splash.
Postscript 2
If you want a rough idea of what (relatively) recent papers have been getting cited (rather than what recent citers have focused on), you have to embrace a longer time frame. Here’s some citation data for articles published in the past 10 years in several behavior analysis journals.
Notes:
- Data are from a Web of Science (WOS) search conducted 11/14/24. Like all citations databases, this one is imperfect: Not all years for all journals show up in it, and other databases count citations in slightly different ways.
- “Mean cites” = average citations per journal article during the 10-year window. This number doesn’t take into account different publication dates for different articles, and is not equivalent to a journal’s citation impact factor.
- The two rightmost columns shows the percentage number of articles from each journal that were cited at least 10 times, and at least 40 times. Because journals release articles at different rates, and because WOS doesn’t index every publication year for every journal, the results are expressed as a percentage of relevant articles in the WOS database.
- The following journals were excluded because WOS does not index them: Behavior & Philosophy, Behavior Analysis: Research and Practice, Mexican J. Behavior Analysis, Japanese J. Behavior Analysis, European J. Behavior Analysis, J. Behaviorology.