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I have always been fond of numbers, statistics, and mathematics although I am not very good at the latter two. As a child, with my friends, we created a “a league of our own” baseball world, inventing what we called “dice baseball” and kept copious statistics of our competitions. Hence, it is no wonder that I very much liked the 2011 film Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball_(film)).
Near the end of my graduate school days, I dimly recall the emergence of meta-analysis as an alternative to narrative reviews (Glass, McGaw, & Smith, 1981). Indeed, meta-analysis has become exceedingly important in the world of quantitative science. As of January 21, 2020, a PubMed search of “meta-analysis” yields a mere 176,759 hits. After publishing a narrative review on a topic related to my doctoral dissertation (Zucker, 1985), I realized my inadequacies and that I needed to get with it.
But it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that I had the opportunity to collaborate with Michael Bailey on my first meta-analytic adventure (Bailey & Zucker, 1995). According to Google Scholar, it has been cited 836 times.Footnote 1 Not bad. Subsequently, I have had the privilege and good fortune to publish two other meta-analytic studies (Grimbos, Dawood, Burris, Zucker, & Puts, 2010; Lalumière, Blanchard, & Zucker, 2000) with colleagues and another one is in the works (Zucker & Aitken, 2018).Footnote 2
Given my fondness for meta-analysis, I am delighted that the first four articles in this issue are meta-analytic studies (Collaer & Hines, 2020; Davis & Hines, 2020; Sadr, Khorashad, Talaei, Fazeli, & Hönekopp, 2020; Xu, Norton, & Rahman, 2020). Since I became Editor of the Journal in 2002, we have published at least 19 other meta-analytic papers (Babchishin, Hanson, & VanZuylen, 2015; Babchishin, Nunes, & Hermann, 2013; Blanchard, 2018; Blanchard & VanderLaan, 2015; Chivers, Seto, Lalumière, Laan, & Grimbos, 2010; Ferguson & Malouff, 2016; Frühauf, Gerger, Munder, Schmidt, & Barth, 2013; Grubbs, Perry, Wilt, & Reid, 2019; Karamouzian, Nasirian, Hoseini, & Mirzazadeh, 2019; Kettrey & Marx, 2019; Newcomb & Mustanski, 2011; Polisois-Keating & Joyal, 2013; Przybyla, Krawiec, Godleski, & Crane, 2018; Puts, McDaniel, Jordan, & Breedlove, 2008; Rooney, Tulloch, & Blashill, 2018; Salway et al., 2019; Schmidt, Babchishin, & Lehmann, 2017; Van Dongen, 2012; Zou & Fan, 2017) and at least two more are in press (Körner, Schaper, Pause, & Heil, in press; Mori et al., in press).
It gives me great pleasure that the Journal has become a regular repository of meta-analytic work on topics pertaining to sex/gender. I look forward to publishing more of them. They are an essential aspect of advancing the field of sex/gender science.
Notes
At the time, I told Bailey that the relationship between sex-typed behavior in childhood and sexual orientation in adulthood needed to be documented systematically. Although the relationship was obvious to me based on the retrospective and prospective literature, back in the day, I knew it would annoy a lot of people to demonstrate it systematically via meta-analysis. That it did. Now, no one cares. As a graduate student, Grimbos came to me and said that she wanted to do some readings as part of an independent course. I said, more or less, “That’s boring. Let’s do a meta-analysis.” We learned that Puts and colleagues were doing a similar meta-analysis, so we joined forces (that’s called collaboration and collegiality). When Lalumière told me that he wanted to do a meta-analysis on sexual orientation and handedness, I told him I would provide him with all of the relevant studies, but that he would find nothing. I was wrong.
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Zucker, K.J. Sex/Gender Research and Meta-Analysis. Arch Sex Behav 49, 365–366 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01651-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-020-01651-9