Publication Trends in Behavioral Gerontology in the Past 25 Years: Are the Elderly Still an Understudied Population in Behavioral Research?

The case is made that issues facing the elderly are problems of social importance that should be of interest to applied behavior analysts. An electronic review of eight prominent behaviorally-oriented journals was conducted in order to examine the frequency of publications over the past 25 years that were concerned with issues related to aging. A total of 109 articles were devoted to aging across the eight journals, with about 30% of these involving participants with cognitive impairments. Results also indicate that each of these journals has published less than one article per year related to aging. The role behavior analysts can play in serving both the elderly and their caregivers is discussed