Behavior analysis is a particular approach to accounting for what humans and other organisms do. Its discernable antecedents go back a long way, but it emerged as a coherent set of concepts and methods through the seminal research of B. F. Skinner, and it has continued to develop through the present day. A widely dispersed community of experimenters and practitioners has extended the interpretive reach of behavior analysis by building upon and sometimes renovating the foundations provided by Skinner's six decades of contributions. Their innovations and elaborations are linked by common threads of prose, technique, interpretive assumptions and subject matter.

Nearly all of the essays collected here appeared first as book reviews in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB). Their coverage has sometimes focused on behavior analysis itself. More often, they have considered developments in diverse areas such as biology, philosophy, psychophysics, cognitive psychology, anthropology and linguistics and the mutual implications for behavior analysis and those other disciplines. The reviews appeared in journal issues that span more than a quarter of a century, mostly under our separate individual terms as Review Editors. Reprinting some of them in a single volume seems appropriate not only for the convenience of the long-term reader who could now have many of them together in one place rather than dispersed over six feet or more of journal shelves, but also for ease of access by newer participants in the discipline, by those without access to a complete set of volumes, and especially by those outside behavior analysis who may find these essays relevant to their particular interests.

When we first broached this project at a meeting of the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, it was clear that any reprinting of JEAB reviews in a single volume would entail difficult decisions about which to include and which not. Our choices were based upon such factors as length, contemporary relevance, and overlaps of coverage, and not upon mechanical or arbitrary criteria such as year of publication, the Review Editor who had invited or accepted a review, or even whether the review target was a book or a subject area. In the end, inclusion was dictated primarily by the relevance of content.

We have provided some organization to the collection by grouping thematically related reviews, and introduce each section by sketching ways in which the articles are interrelated. Still, each review can stand alone as an independent essay. The articles have been reproduced from the original journal pages, including running headers and pagination; we have retained the original pagination for the convenience of those who wish to cite or quote from these reviews. At the bottom of the reprinted pages, we have added topical running footers and continuous pagination for the book as a whole, to make it easier for the reader to browse through the volume, and for teachers to identify selections as assignments for students. We have also provided an index to citations within the reprinted articles; for practical reasons, the index has been compiled to refer the reader to the article within which the citation occurs rather than to the exact page on which it occurs. Citations within our section introductions are included in the index, but the references themselves are listed in a single reference section that precedes the index.

We tried to make this volume represent the range, quality and implications of contemporary work in the experimental analysis of behavior and related disciplines in their many empirical and conceptual dimensions. We also tried to create a volume that would be useful for teaching as well as for scholarship. The categories that emerged in this project were instructive to us. We hope they will prove useful both to seasoned JEAB readers and to those readers just becoming acquainted with behavior analysis.