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.