Behavior and Social Issues Across Four Decades: Citation Patterns and Interdisciplinary Exchange

Behavior-analytic journals have historically exhibited high levels of self-citation and relatively limited exchange with other scientific disciplines. Although bibliometric studies have examined citation patterns in journals such as the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior , no large-scale investigation has analyzed the references cited in Behavior and Social Issues ( BSI ). This study addresses this gap through a bibliometric analysis of all references cited in BSI between 1978 and 2022. A total of 562 publications and 14,765 references were classified according to research type, disciplinary alignment, authorship, and publication outlet. The results revealed the predominance of theoretical and interpretative publications throughout the journal’s history, as well as strong concentration around a relatively small group of behavior-analytic authors and journals, particularly B. F. Skinner and S. S. Glenn. At the same time, BSI consistently incorporated references from disciplines such as anthropology, economics, evolutionary biology, political theory, and environmental science. Direct journal self-citation represented 7.91% of all references cited in BSI , substantially lower than rates previously reported for several other behavior-analytic journals. Taken together, the findings suggest that BSI developed through the combination of a stable behavior-analytic intellectual core and broad interdisciplinary engagement with socially relevant problems, functioning as a comparatively permeable and interdisciplinary outlet within behavior analysis.