TPC Journal-Vol 11-Issue-1

68 The Professional Counselor | Volume 11, Issue 1 At the same time the vast majority of lead authors (92.1%) listed primary affiliations in university work settings. Although a non–university-affiliated participation rate of only 7.9% seems low overall, compared to other counseling journals, it actually is comparable with counseling journal leaders in this category like the Journal of Mental Health Counseling (Menzies et al., 2020) and Counseling Outcome Research and Evaluation (Johnson et al., 2021), and higher than most other counseling journals (MacInerney et al., 2020; Milowsky et al., in press; Saks et al., 2020; Sylvester et al., in press). This low level of participation from non–university-affiliated authors across counseling journals is curious given the powerful and necessary voices practitioners can lend to real-world counseling issues and interventions. But there are certainly barriers and constraints on practitioner motivations to engage in scholarship. First, practitioners are rarely compensated for research, nor are employee evaluations substantively impacted by scholarly contributions. If more incentives like compensation and evaluation were tied to practitioner scholarship efforts, we could expect practitioners to have a larger presence in counseling scholarship and collaborations. Practitioners are also incredibly busy providing counseling services to clients and students, and research and program evaluation becomes a lower priority as time constraints tighten. In contrast, employee scholarship production often is rewarded by universities through salary increases, promotions, and tenure. Likewise, professors are expected to, and often rewarded for, scholarship, including collaboration with graduate students and colleagues in research projects. Graduate students often engage in research to enhance their levels of qualification for doctoral study and future opportunities to join the professoriate. It is also possible that authors who are practitioner- students or scholar-practitioners simply default to a university affiliation for some reason—perhaps believing that university affiliations are more prestigious or may be given greater consideration in a positive disposition. In any case, journal editorial boards should encourage authors to list multiple affiliations to better gauge the prevalence of practitioners among contributing authors. Counselor scholars should continue to search for opportunities to collaborate with practitioners, both to access rich sources of field-based data and to amplify the valuable voices of experienced clinicians. In just 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 , including AdultSpan (Rippeto et al., in press), the Journal of Employment Counseling (Siegler et al., in press), The Journal of Humanistic Counseling (Sylvester et al., in press), and others far higher, exceeding 3.10 authors per article, such as Measurement and Evaluation in Counseling and Development (Saks et al., 2020) and the Journal of College Counseling (Milowsky et al., in press). Collaboration is essential to the future of counseling research as the profession and our domain of knowledge become larger and at the same time more specialized. This trend toward increased collaboration is very positive, perhaps reflecting a greater focus on mentorship and partnership. It will not be a surprise to note that simultaneous with this rise in collaboration was a proportional rise in publishing research articles. Research ventures are great opportunities for collaboration and building research partnerships with colleagues, graduate students, and practitioners. In particular, partnering with practitioners promotes meaningful field-based studies that enrich practice and document promising evidence-based interventions. Finally, as counselor educator–scholars, we must recommit to training practitioners who can collect, conduct, and collaborate in the publication of field-based research. Field-based studies are critical in counseling research because that is where the overwhelming majority of clients and students are counseled and treated. Conducting studies in