Archives at 50 Years

From Goldstein, Kant, Judd, Rice, and Green (1971) to Peled, Shilo, Marom, and Eick (2020), 2021 marks the “golden” year for the Journal. Sandwiched in-between these two articles, the Archives has more than 4100 entries in PubMed, including those that are still in advance online publication form. It is my deep regret that the Founding Editor of Archives, Richard Green, M.D., J.D. (1936–2019) could not be with us to celebrate this milestone (Herbert, 2019).

Quantitative growth has certainly been an element of the Journal’s evolution. In 1971, it published 374 pages. In 2020, it published 3088 pages (an 8.25-fold increase). When I became Editor in 2002, we had 80 new submissions. In 2020, we had 706 new submissions (an 8.82-fold increase). As noted in previous Editorials, this growth has necessitated a continued expansion of the Editorial Board. In 2021, the Journal has 19 Associate Editors: Cecilia Benoit, Sophie Bergeron, Lori Brotto, Brian Dodge, Shari Dworkin, Christina Dyar, Brian Feinstein, Joshua Grubbs, Lisa Dawn Hamilton, Roland Imhoff, Kathryn Macapagal, David Puts, Natalie Rosen, Alexander Schmidt, Lori Scott-Sheldon, Sky Stephens, Kyle Stephenson, Paul Vasey, and Jennifer Walsh. I am also pleased to note that, for 2021, we added 25 new members to the Editorial Board at large: Jasmine A. Abrams, Kristin M. Anders, Gurit E. Birnbaum, Beáta Bőthe, Sarah M. Burke, Griet De Cuypere, Nicola Doering, Luk Gijs, Jackie S. Huberman, Sara Jahnke, Francisco Gómez Jiménez, Sofia Jawed-Wessel, Steven A. John, Christian Joyal, David J. Ley, Lisa Littman, Michael C. Parent, Lanna Petterson, Stephanie Raposo, Uzma S. Rehman, Eric Y. Tenkorang, Liadh Timmins, Sara A. Vasilenko, Christopher D. Watkins, and Paul Yong.

Target Articles

Under Paul Vasey’s leadership, we inaugurated by invitation the Target Article series (Vasey & Zucker, 2016). In 2020, we published one Target Article (Feinstein, 2020), along with 7 Commentaries and a response by Feinstein. Seven other Target Articles are currently online first (Brady, Connor, Chaisson, Sharif Mohamed, & Robinson, 2019; Connor, Brady, Chaisson, Sharif Mohamed, & Robinson, 2019; Davis & Arnocky, 2020; Lalumière, Sawatsky, Dawson, & Suschinsky, 2019; Pfau, Jordan, & Breedlove, 2019; Reynolds, 2021; Ziogas, Habermeyer, Santtila, Poeppl, & Mokros, 2019). Researchers interested in proposing a Target Article should contact Dr. Vasey at paul.vasey@uleth.ca.

Special Sections

In 2020, we published two special sections: Social and Behavioral Science with Gay and Bisexual Men in the Era of Biomedical Prevention (Guest Edited by Michael Newcomb and H. Jonathon Rendina) and IASR 2018 Symposium on Consensual Non-Monogamy (Guest Edited by Lisa Dawn Hamilton). In the current issue, there is a special section entitled Innovative Knowledge Translation in Sex Research (Guest Edited by Natalie O. Rosen and Lori A. Brotto).

Two special sections are in the works: Consensual Non-Monogamy (Guest Edited by Lisa Dawn Hamilton, Carm de Santis, and Ashley E. Thompson) and Impact of COVID-19 on Sexual Health and Behavior (Guest Edited by Lori A. Scott-Sheldon, Kristen P. Mark, Rhonda Balzarini, and Lisa L. M. Welling).¹

Guest Editorials, Commentaries, and Letters to the Editor

The journal also publishes Guest Editorials, Commentaries, and Letters to the Editor, all of which, in my view, play a useful role in intellectual discourse. Guest Editorials typically address a topic of general interest and which has received media attention (e.g., Scott-Sheldon & Chan, 2020). Commentaries address both specific and general issues of relevance to the sexological community (e.g., Imhoff, 2020; Lorenz, 2020; McCarthy et al., in press; Sakaluk, 2020). Not all journals publish Letters to the Editor. Letters to the Editor in Archives fall into two general categories: a response to a published paper (and the authors of such are always given the opportunity to reply) or on a topic that might be of interest to some readers of the journal. Not all Letters to the Editor are accepted for publication. Letters are vetted by me and, in the case of those that might be deemed “controversial,” subject to peer review. In 2020, we published three Guest Editorials, 9 Commentaries, and 31 Letters to the Editor.²

Manuscript Disposition (2019)

In 2019, the percentage of “rejected” manuscripts was 53.3%, “major revision” was 38.7%, and “provisional accept” was 7.8%. These figures remain fairly consistent with prior years (e.g., Zucker, 2018, 2020). For contributing authors, it is important to note that when manuscripts are given the designation of a Major Revision, the vast majority (of those that are resubmitted) are accepted for publication. (It is uncommon for a Major Revision to be declined after resubmission: to quote a colleague, “It happens,” but not very often.) This means that the initial decision indicates that the author has a “foot in the door” and that if she, he, or they can successfully respond to the first round of reviews it means that the manuscript is very likely to be accepted for publication.

Impact Factor (2019)

Table 1 shows the Impact Factor (IF) data 2019 for 91 sex/gender journals in the annual Web of Science/Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics), ranked by the 2-year IF score.

Table 1 Impact Factor for the year 2019: Sex- and gender-related journals ranked by 2-year Impact Factor (N = 91)^a

For the uninitiated to this treasure trove of numbers, a journal’s IF for a given year is a measure of the frequency with which its recent articles are cited on average during that year. “Recent” refers to the two prior calendar years or the five prior calendar years. Thus, Archives’ 2019 2-year IF is the number of times that its 2017 and 2018 articles were cited in 2019, divided by the number of articles the Archives published in 2017 and 2018 and the 5-year IF is the number of times that its 2014–2018 articles were cited in 2019, divided by the number of articles the Archives published between 2014 and 2018. The 5-year IF was introduced several years ago and one can find data on it going back to 2007. Although the IF is the best known metric for citation analysis, there are other measures, including the Immediacy Index (II) and the Cited Half-Life (CHL). The II is a measure of how frequently the journal’s “average article” is cited the same year in which it is published. Thus, the II for a year is calculated as the number of times articles from that journal are cited during that year, divided by the number of articles that journal published that year. The CHL is a measure of the longevity of the frequency of citations to articles in the journal, that is, for how long the average article maintains its currency. The CHL for a year is determined by the time required to account for a cumulative total of 50% of that year’s citations to the journal.

In 2019, 3483 journals in the Social Sciences received IF ratings. The median 2-year IF was 1.48. From Table 1, it can be seen that two journals, Gender and Education and Sex Education, were at the median for the 2-year IF. For 2019, Archives was ranked at the 86.4th percentile for the 2-year IF.

It can also be seen in Table 1 that the Archives is publishing a lot of articles/year: 161 in 2019. These numbers are notably higher than many of the other sex/gender social science periodicals (e.g., Journal of Sex Research: 74, Evolution and Human Behavior: 54; Psychology of Women Quarterly, 53; Sexual Abuse: 45). We even published more articles than Journal of Sexual Medicine (150). Of course, quantity does not equal quality. Moreover, one should recognize that to “maintain” an IF the numerator must keep pace with the denominator. On this point, we seem to be doing just fine and our initial disposition decisions have remained fairly constant in recent years. For those readers who enjoy numbers, Table 1 gives you a lot to chew on.