Publishing in JABA as a practitioner: what actually gets accepted

What actually gets accepted in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis is rarely a first try, and Dr. Stephanie Peterson is honest about her own "0 for 11" streak before one paper finally broke through. If you are a BCBA who wants to publish your applied work in JABA, that number matters more than any submission checklist. It tells you what the road looks like before it tells you how to walk it.

What JABA actually publishes (and what it doesn't)#

JABA is the flagship journal for applied behavior analysis. The word applied is doing a lot of work in that name. Reviewers want studies that show socially important behavior change in real settings, with data that another BCBA could reproduce. Think functional analyses, treatment comparisons, skill acquisition with kids who need the skills, and replications that move a clinical question forward.

What JABA tends not to publish is a one-off clinical story without controlled data, a study with only a single short baseline, or a project where the question is more about staff workflow than client behavior. Those projects are real and they matter. They just live better in other journals.

If you are a practitioner reading the table of contents and thinking "my caseload looks nothing like this," you are not wrong. Most JABA papers come from labs that have university support, graduate students, and a research line that runs for years. That does not mean a BCBA in a clinic cannot publish there. It means you need to be honest about whether your question, your design, and your data match what reviewers expect.

The acceptance math: how many rejections per accepted paper#

Here is the part nobody tells you in grad school. Peterson runs a lab, sits on the editorial side of journals, and still gets rejected. She put a real number on it:

I have a number of publications on my Vita. And I can tell you for every single one of those publications, there's probably at least three rejections that I've had, probably more.

Three rejections per accepted paper. From a tenured editor. If that is the baseline for someone with a full research program, a first-time practitioner author should plan for the same math, or worse. That is not pessimism. It is planning.

JABA itself is the harder target inside that math. Peterson is direct about her track record there:

I went for a streak of submitting things to the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis and I was 0 for 11, guys. Until Cody Morris and I and my other student published that paper on Ascent. That Ascent paper we recently published like broke my losing streak with Java.

Eleven straight rejections at JABA from a respected researcher. Before you read that as a reason to quit, read it as a reason to plan. If your first JABA submission gets rejected, you are not failing. You are joining a very normal pattern. The BCBAs who eventually publish in JABA are the ones who treat each rejection as a revision queue, not a verdict.

A simple rule of thumb for your own planning: assume a 70 to 90 percent rejection rate at JABA for new authors, and budget 9 to 18 months from first submission to a final decision across one or two journals.

When JABA is the right target vs. when BAP or ETC is smarter#

Picking the right journal is half the battle. Peterson is clear about this:

There are some journals that are going to be very, uh, open to and receptive of practitioner oriented work. In fact, there's some journals that are aimed at, uh, part to, um, sorry, practitioner oriented work. And so it's important for you to select the journal that you're going to submit your work to very carefully.

For a BCBA in clinical practice, the two most common practitioner-friendly targets in our field are Behavior Analysis in Practice (BAP) and Education and Treatment of Children (ETC). BAP was built for the practitioner audience. It welcomes case studies, tutorials, ethics discussions, and applied projects that do not need a full research lab to produce. ETC sits next to JABA in topic but tends to be more open to school-based and developmental work.

Aim at JABA when:

• Your study has a clean single-case design with at least three demonstrations of effect.
• Your question moves a published JABA line of work forward (a replication or a logical next step).
• You have clean interobserver agreement and treatment integrity data.
• The behavior you changed is socially meaningful and the change held over time.

Aim at BAP first when:

• Your project is a case study, a clinical tutorial, or a quality improvement story.
• You have a smaller dataset but a strong conceptual or ethics angle.
• This is your first publication and you want the win on your CV.

Aim at ETC, Behavioral Interventions, or Journal of Behavioral Education when your work sits in schools or with developmental populations and the design is solid but the topic feels off-center for JABA.

Picking the right home journal up front is the single biggest lever a practitioner has on the rejection math. It is also the easiest one to ignore when you are emotionally invested in JABA as the goal.

Reading a rejection letter without losing the weekend#

The rejection email is going to land in your inbox on a Friday at 4:50pm. That is a law of physics. What you do with the next 48 hours decides whether the paper ever sees a revision.

Peterson, who reads reviews from both sides of the desk, gives this advice:

Hopefully reviewers are being kind and constructive in their criticism as they should be. They aren't always, but mostly they are. And I have found that I have to like sometimes step away from those reviews for a day or two and then go back to them after my emotional responding is all out of my system

The 48-hour rule is the rule. Open the email, read it once, close it, and do not touch it for two days. When you come back, do three things in order.

1. Sort comments into three buckets. Bucket one is changes you agree with. Bucket two is changes you disagree with but can defend with evidence. Bucket three is changes that would require a new study. Most reviewer comments fall into bucket one. Almost none fall into bucket three.
2. Decide where the paper goes next. If the rejection was at JABA, the right move is often to revise based on the reviews and submit to BAP or ETC, not to fight for JABA. Reviewers tell you exactly what made the paper not-quite-JABA. That feedback is gold for the next journal.
3. Write a brief response letter even if you are not resubmitting to the same journal. Walking through each comment in writing helps you see which ones are real. It also makes the next submission stronger.

A rejection at JABA is not the end of a paper. It is a free peer review.

What 'extends the literature' looks like to a JABA reviewer#

If you read the cover letters of accepted JABA papers, you see one phrase over and over: this study extends the literature on X. That phrase has a specific meaning to reviewers. It means the authors found a published JABA study, identified one limitation or one open question, and ran a new study that addresses it.

For a BCBA, this is actually the easiest path in. You do not need a brand-new idea. You need to read 3 to 5 recent JABA papers in your clinical area and answer one of the questions the authors flagged in their discussion section. Common open questions include:

• Did this intervention work with a different age group or diagnosis?
• Did the effect hold up in a real clinical setting instead of a tightly controlled one?
• Could a less-intrusive version of the procedure produce the same results?
• What happens when a paraprofessional, not a BCBA, runs the procedure?

Each of those is a publishable JABA replication that a clinic-based BCBA can run on caseload with no grant funding. Reviewers reward this. They are tired of "look at this cool new thing." They want the field to confirm what works.

Your first submission: replication or new question?#

Choose replication. Every time. For your first JABA submission, you want the cleanest possible match to an existing published method. A direct or systematic replication does three things for you. It gives you a built-in method section you can mirror. It gives you a published comparison for your data. And it gives reviewers a short answer to the question "why does this matter," which is the question that sinks most first-author submissions.

A new question is the right play for paper number three or four, after you understand how the review process works and what JABA reviewers care about. For paper number one, replicate.

If you walk away from this page with one thing, walk away with this. The BCBAs who publish in JABA are the ones who picked the right journal, planned for the rejection math, and treated their first submission as a replication, not a thesis. Peterson's "0 for 11" is the proof that the streak is normal. The Ascent paper is the proof that it ends.

FAQ#

What is JABA's acceptance rate for first-time authors?

JABA does not publish a public acceptance rate by author type, but Peterson's own pattern (eleven rejections before one acceptance) suggests practitioner first-time authors should plan for a single-digit acceptance rate per submission. The good news is that revised work submitted to Behavior Analysis in Practice or Education and Treatment of Children often lands on the second try.

Should I submit to JABA or Behavior Analysis in Practice first?

For your first publication as a BCBA, BAP is usually the smarter target. It was built for practitioner work, the review timeline is faster, and a published BAP paper makes a future JABA submission stronger. Save JABA for the project where you have a clean single-case design, strong integrity data, and a clear replication of a published JABA study.

How long does JABA take to respond to a submission?

Plan on 3 to 6 months for a first decision and another 2 to 4 months per round of revision. A paper that ends up accepted at JABA often takes 12 to 18 months from first submission to final acceptance. If you only have one paper in the pipeline at a time, the long timeline is the hardest part to plan around. Most published authors keep two or three submissions moving in parallel for this reason.

Ready to plan your first submission?#

The next CEU in this series walks through how to design a single-case study you can actually run on caseload, including the IRB workarounds Peterson uses with her own BCBA students.