Moving forward.

Abstract

In 2018, the name of ABAI’s flagship journal changed from The Behavior Analyst to Perspectives on Behavior Science (PoBS). Its purpose, however, remained unchanged: to inform its readership of the best science behavior analysis has to offer. I am honored to serve this mission as the second editor-in-chief of PoBS. In this role, I will continue the successful trajectory that began with the founding of The Behavior Analyst in 1978 and expanded during its transition to PoBS under the visionary stewardship of Dr. Hantula, a team of outstanding associate editors, and an increasingly diverse editorial board. This new responsibility has caused me to reflect on where the journal has been and leads me to contemplate its future. Over the past several years, the journal has evolved—and continues to evolve—in many ways, of which I will mention two. The first is in quality and influence. PoBS articles are attracting attention both within and outside the discipline of behavior analysis. Some of this attention can be measured by the all-important, if flawed, citation impact factor. Between 2014 and 2018, PoBS’s impact factor increased from 0.4 to 2.46, an astonishing rise. Although impressive, we should recognize that the impact factor is an imperfect metric of influence. It counts citations only over a short, 2-year span, and emphasizes one question: “What have you done for me lately?”Nevertheless, the impact factor is a necessary consideration for authors, especially those in the early or middle stages of their career, as they decide where to place their best work. A hard reality of modern scholarly life is that institutions of influence, including university promotion and tenure committees and extramural funding agencies, use the impact factor to evaluate the importance of an author’s published work. The rise in PoBS’s impact factor will, and already has, served to attract a wider range of high-quality submissions. Other dimensions of quality are not so easily quantified. For example, perusal of PoBS reference sections reveals citations to, and influence by, work published 20, 30, or more years ago. This make sense because our science and the applications that flow from it are grounded in long-standing principles that yield an understanding of behavior as an interaction between the individual and the context in which behavior occurs, as well as a history that spans a lifetime and even generations. Such principles are difficult https://doi.org/10.1007/s40614-020-00251-1