DIGEST - Volume 11, Issue 1

8 TPC Digest T his meta-study evaluates publication patterns and trends occurring in the first 9 years of The Professional Counselor ( TPC ), an electronic journal published by the National Board for Certified Counselors (NBCC). TPC began publication in 2011, and this is the first multi-year review examining the journal’s characteristics, patterns, and trends. This study attempted to answer two basic questions: (a) What is published within The Professional Counselor (article characteristics), particularly with regard to research studies? and (b) Who publishes in The Professional Counselor (author characteristics)? These questions are also analyzed for trends to determine changes in journal characteristics. Both author (e.g., gender, domicile, employment setting, top individual and university contributors) and article characteristics (e.g., topic, research design, participant type, sample size, statistics) are identified, with a particular focus on research articles. From 2011–2019, 272 articles were published in TPC . Of these, 265 articles were accepted into this analysis, while seven articles were rejected because they were briefer submissions (e.g., editorials, introductions to special issues, biographies, profiles). Results were analyzed for trends over time using ANOVA with weighted proportions after being aggregated into two time windows (2011–2014 and 2015–2019). Almost 64% of lead authors and all authors were women, and 92.1% of lead authors were primarily affiliated with universities. In the first 9 years of publication, 3.4% of TPC lead authors were domiciled outside the United States. Since TPC ’s inception, the University of Central Florida has featured the greatest number of lead authors, and the top author overall was Dr. Kathleen Brown-Rice. In terms of article characteristics, the topics of counselor education and training, school counseling, and multicultural issues each occurred in more than 10% of TPC articles, and each of these topics served as foci in special issues or sections over the years. Intervention studies maintained a stable presence among TPC research articles at 12.3%. About 58% of published works were research articles, and of these, 69% used quantitative design methodology. Nearly all coded research variables were stable over time, except for participant types, as the proportion of adult participant samples increased while undergraduate participant samples decreased over time. In the first 9 years, TPC experienced increased author collaboration, from 2.43 authors per article in 2011–2014 up to 2.83 in 2015–2019. This trend toward more collaboration was seen in all other counseling journals, with many in the same vicinity of average author contributions as TPC . The research designs used in TPC research studies are heavily weighted toward non- experimental designs, including descriptive or survey (42.4%), qualitative (18.4%), and correlational (18.4%) designs. True- and quasi-experimental designs appeared in only 4.4% of all TPC research articles, which is a low rate among other counseling journals. At the same time, the 12.3% proportion of intervention-focused articles is quite good when compared to other counseling journals. During its first 4 years of publication, TPC produced one of the highest proportions of qualitative tradition articles seen in the family of counseling journals (53.1%), before declining significantly from 2015–2019 to a 30.7% rate. Dorrie Williams is a master’s candidate at Vanderbilt University. Marcella Melanson is a master’s candidate at Vanderbilt University. Bradley T. Erford, PhD, NCC, LPC, LCPC, is a professor in the Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. Correspondence may be addressed to Bradley T. Erford, PMB 90, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37202-5721, Bradley.t.erford@vanderbilt.edu. Dorrie Williams, Marcella Melanson, Bradley T. Erford | T i st Author and Article Characteristics From 2011 to 2019