REQUIEM FOR MY LOVELY

Thirty-five years ago, B.F. Skinner (1976) lamented a decreasing trend in the prevalence of cumulative records in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB). The editorial began with the two memorable lines, “Evidently we have not long to wait for an issue of JEAB without a single cumulative record! I shall not miss the records so much as the kinds of experiments that could scarcely be reported without them” (p. 218). The first issue without a record did indeed arrive a few years later, in March of 1979, and is now a common occurrence. So common, in fact, that although Skinner would not live to see it, 2002 marked the first (and only to date) entire year of JEAB without a single cumulative record. Figure 1 presents the cumulative number of articles appearing in JEAB containing at least one cumulative record from 1958–2010. As the figure shows, after almost two decades of a relatively high constant rate, a negative acceleration began around the time of Skinner's prescient eulogy. Several possible explanations of this decline have been offered in a recent historical account of the technology (Lattal, 2004); nevertheless, JEAB continues to thrive beyond one of its initial objectives as an outlet for behavior analysts having difficulty getting their records published elsewhere (see Herrnstein, 1987; Skinner, 1987). Fig 1 Cumulative number of articles appearing in JEAB containing at least one cumulative record from 1958–2010.