Sosine Jacob, Cox David J
Department of Data & Analytics; Behavioral Health Center of Excellence, Beverly, MA USA.
Behavioral Data Science Research Lab; Endicott College, Beverly, MA USA.
Anal Verbal Behav. 2023 Jan 30;39(1):146-167. doi: 10.1007/s40616-022-00179-4. eCollection 2023 Jun.
Published research in scientific journals are critical resources for researchers as primary sources about: what is important in the field, the direction the field is headed, how the field relates to other sciences, and as a historical record for each of these. In this exploratory study, we analyzed the articles of five behavior analytic journals to identify trends in these areas. To do this, we downloaded all available articles ( = 10,405) since the inception of five behavior analytic journals and one control journal. We then used computational techniques to turn the collection of raw text into a structured dataset for descriptive, exploratory analyses. We found consistent differences in the length and variability of published research across behavior analytic journals compared to a control journal. We also found increasing article lengths over time which, combined with the previous finding, may highlight changing editorial contingencies that influence the writing behavior of researchers. Further, we found evidence suggesting distinct (though still connected) verbal communities between the experimental analysis of behavior and applied behavior analysis. Lastly, keyword trends suggest that increased focus on "functional analyses," "problem behavior," and "autism spectrum disorder" currently dominates the research being published in these journals similar to the practitioner arm of behavior analysis. Researchers interested in studying published behavior analytic textual stimuli will find the corresponding open dataset useful. And, for those interested in computational analyses of these data, this first pass at simple descriptions provides a launching point for much fruitful future research.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40616-022-00179-4.
科学期刊上发表的研究对于研究人员来说是至关重要的资源，作为主要来源，涉及：该领域中什么是重要的、该领域的发展方向、该领域与其他科学的关系，以及作为这些方面的历史记录。在这项探索性研究中，我们分析了五本行为分析期刊的文章，以确定这些领域的趋势。为此，我们下载了自五本行为分析期刊和一本对照期刊创刊以来的所有可用文章（=10405篇）。然后，我们使用计算技术将原始文本集合转化为结构化数据集，用于描述性、探索性分析。我们发现，与对照期刊相比，行为分析期刊上发表的研究在长度和变异性方面存在一致差异。我们还发现文章长度随时间增加，结合之前的发现，这可能突出了影响研究人员写作行为的不断变化的编辑条件。此外，我们发现有证据表明行为实验分析和应用行为分析之间存在不同（尽管仍有联系）的语言群落。最后，关键词趋势表明，目前对“功能分析”“问题行为”和“自闭症谱系障碍”的更多关注主导了这些期刊上发表的研究，类似于行为分析的从业者分支。对研究已发表的行为分析文本刺激感兴趣的研究人员会发现相应的开放数据集很有用。而且，对于那些对这些数据进行计算分析感兴趣的人来说，这次简单描述的首次尝试为未来许多富有成果的研究提供了一个起点。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s40616-022-00179-4获取的补充材料。
