Reference citations in B. F. Skinner's verbal behavior.

In writing Verbal Behavior, B. F. Skinner (1957) made clear his intention not to review the extant literature on the subject matter (Skinner, 1979, p. 282). Nonetheless, he did formally and informally cite many scientific, philosophical, and literary books and articles throughout his text. The formal citations appear as references in footnotes at the bottoms of pages, but are not found in any reference section of the book-there is none. The purpose of this paper is to provide that reference section. As mentioned, Skinner included both formal and informal citations in his book. The informal citations appear in the body of the text and, along with the formal citations, are indexed at the end of the book. This index contains 188 proper names of real people, who are listed on 336 separate pages in the 470 page text; over half of these individuals are authors of the formally referenced citations. Overall, the authors with five or more citations in the index are Freud (18), Shakespeare (16), B. Russell (9), Dickens (8), T. S. Eliot (7), Trollope (7), Stendhal (6), Tolstoy (6), Coleridge (5), Conrad (5), Dodgson/Carroll (5), Fowler (5), Joyce (5), Stein (5), and Tooke (5); Skinner's name does not appear. Given the higher number of literary figures compared to scientists and philosophers in this list, and a corresponding two-to-one split in the index, Skinner seems clearly to have emphasized literary material in developing and illustrating his analysis. The formal references to literary, scientific, and philosophical material in Verbal Behavior are made to 116 separate citations in 162 different footnotes. These references would have comprised the text's reference section had there been one. Both the 116 citations