When Richard Green, the Founding Editor of Archives, launched the journal in 1971, it consisted of 4 issues. The second volume (which spanned two years) also had 4 issues. The third volume, in 1974, had 6 issues. Six issues remained in play until 2013 (Vol. 42) when, due to the already notable increase in the number of papers accepted for publication, the number of issues per year was increased to 8. The increase in the number of papers accepted for publication is (indirectly) reflected by the number of pages published per year. In 1971, the Archives contained 370 pages. In 2022 (Vol. 51), we hit a peak, at 4202 pages. Figure 1 shows the rather dramatic rise in the number of pages per volume, with a clear linear increase between 2002 and 2023. The correlation between year of publication and number of pages per year was 0.625 (p = 0.003), with the number of submissions per year and number of issues per year partialled out. Although the number of individuals and libraries who actually receive a “hard copy” of the Journal has decreased dramatically (we are, after all, in the era of electronic access), the publisher of Archives has expressed concern that the physical issues are, well, too “thick.” Accordingly, effective in 2024 (Vol. 53), we will now publish 10 issues per year. Hence, the rather cryptic title of this Editorial.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Number of pages published per year between 2002 and 2023 (Vols. 31–52)

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Editorial Board

At the end of 2023, Archives had 20 Associate Editors. New Associate Editors in 2023 are Swagata Banik, Karen Blair, Bethany Everett, and Steven John. Effective January 2024, Rhonda Balzarini will be a new Associate Editor. The Editorial Board at large had 179 members. Countries represented on the Editorial Board are Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Israel, Nigeria, Portugal, Scotland, The Netherlands, the United States, and Wales (https://www.springer.com/journal/10508/editors). Since 2021, Editorial Board member Kelly Suschinsky has also taken on the formidable task of working with the Editor as the Managing Editor, which the Editor deems invaluable.

Aims and Scope

In 2022, an ad hoc group from the Editorial Board updated the aims and scope of the Journal. It now reads as follows: The official publication of the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR), Archives of Sexual Behavior publishes scientific research on sex, gender, and sexuality. We invite contributions from multiple disciplines including, but not limited to, anthropology, biology, history, law, medicine, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology. Contributions consist of both quantitative and qualitative empirical research, theoretical reviews and essays, clinical case reports, and letters to the editor. Topical areas include, but are not limited to: abuse, coercion, and consent; alternative sexualities; cross-cultural studies; lifespan development; endocrinology; evolution; family diversity; gender development; gender diversity; mating psychology; media and technology; neuroscience; non-human animal behavior; paraphilias; psychobiology; risk-taking; sex education and health; sex/gender differences and similarities; sex therapy; sexual and romantic relationships; sexual dysfunctions; sexual orientation; sexual psychophysiology; sexual/gender discrimination and stigma; sexually transmitted infections; and transactional and commercial sex (https://springer.longhoe.net/journal/10508/aims-and-scope).

Target Articles

Under the leadership of Associate Editor Paul Vasey, we continue to publish Target Articles (Vasey & Zucker, 2016). Target articles are solicited by Dr. Vasey or interested authors can contact Dr. Vasey with a proposal. The Target Articles are followed by solicited commentaries, with a response by the author/authors of the Target Article. Since the time of the last Editorial (Zucker, 2021), we have published 10 Target Articles.

  • Access to Sexual Rights for People Living with Disabilities: Assumptions, Evidence, and Policy Outcomes (Cecilia Benoit, Andrea Mellor, and Zahra Premji) (November 2023)

  • Carving the Biodevelopment of Same-Sex Sexual Orientation at Its Joints (Doug P. VanderLaan, Malvina N. Skorska, Diana E. Peragine, and Lindsay A. Coome) (October 2023)

  • A Developmental Model of the Sexual Minority Closet: Structural Sensitization, Psychological Adaptations, and Post-closet Growth (John E. Pachankis and Skyler D. Jackson) (July 2023)

  • Neuroelectric Correlates of Human Sexuality: A Review and Meta-Analysis (Anastasios Ziogas, Elmar Habermeyer, Pekka Santtila, Timm Poeppl, and Andreas Mokros) (February 2023)

  • Our Grandmothers’ Legacy: Challenges Faced by Female Ancestors Leave Traces in Modern Women’s Same-Sex Relationships (Tania A. Reynolds) (October 2022)

  • The Empirical Status of the Preparation Hypothesis: Explicating Women’s Genital Responses to Sexual Stimuli in the Laboratory (Martin L. Lalumière, Megan L. Sawatsky, Samantha J. Dawson, and Kelly D. Suschinsky) (February 2022)

  • An Evolutionary Perspective on Appearance Enhancement Behavior (Adam C. Davis and Steven Arnocky) (January 2022)

  • The De-Scent of Sexuality: Did Loss of a Pheromone Signaling Protein Permit the Evolution of Same-Sex Sexual Behavior in Primates? (Daniel Pfau, Cynthia L. Jordan, and S. Marc Breedlove) (August 2021)

  • Understanding Women’s Responses to Sexual Pain After Female Genital Cutting: An Integrative Psychological Pain Response Model (Jennifer J. Connor, Sonya S. Brady, Nicole Chaisson, Fatima Sharif Mohamed, and Beatrice “Bean” E. Robinson) (July 2021)

  • Female Genital Cutting and Deinfibulation: Applying the Theory of Planned Behavior to Research and Practice (Sonya S. Brady, Jennifer Jo Connor, Nicole Chaisson, Fatima Sharif Mohamed, and Beatrice “Bean” E. Robinson) (July 2021)

Special Sections

The Archives also publishes Special Sections (e.g., proposed by the Editor or an Associate Editor or upon inquiry), which focus on a particular topic. Since 2021, we have published four Special Sections.

  • The Impact of Youth Violence on Sexual Health of Adolescents from National and International Perspectives (Guest Editors: Jun Sung Hong and Dorothy L. Espelage) (October 2023)

  • “Cancel Culture”: Its Impact on Sex/Gender Teaching, Clinical Practice, and Research (Guest Editor: Heino F. L. Meyer-Bahlburg) (January 2023)

  • Impact of COVID-19 on Sexual Health and Behavior (Guest Editors: Lori Scott-Sheldon, Kristen Mark, Rhonda Balzarini, and Lisa Welling) (January 2022)

  • Consensual Non-Monogamy (Guest Editors: Lisa Dawn Hamilton, Carm De Santis, and Ashley E. Thompson) (May 2021)

The Journal welcomes new suggestions.

Brief Reports

In 2022, we added an option to submit articles as a Brief Report. As noted on the Journal’s platform, Brief Reports are original research and/or preliminary findings presented in a more succinct way and with fewer details than regular articles. Brief Reports should be empirical in nature and follow the structure of a typical manuscript (Abstract, Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion). Brief Reports can describe new findings that have an immediate impact on the field of sex/gender research, present new data on controversial issues, or point to conceptual, cutting-edge implications. If methodologically sound, Brief Reports may present null findings or the non-reproducibility of prior research. Brief Reports should be no longer than 3500–4000 words: the abstract, references, and figure and table captions are excluded from the word count. There is no limit to the number of figures, tables, or references included. Supplementary material (i.e., information tangential to the main paper) is allowed. Narrative literature reviews or meta-analyses will not be considered for Brief Reports. Qualitative reports may not be appropriate for Brief Reports. Brief Reports will be subject to standard masked peer review (2–3 reviewers). In your cover letter, please provide the rationale for submission as a Brief Report rather than submission as a regular Article ((https://www.springer.com/journal/10508/submission-guidelines).

Richard Green Founding Editor Essay Award

Since 2017, an ad hoc Committee selects, for each calendar year, an article that receives the Richard Green Founding Editor Essay Award, which comes with an honorarium of $1000. In two years, there was a “tie”: To date, the “winners” have been:

  • 2017: Chivers, M. L. The Specificity of Women’s Sexual Response and Its Relationship with Sexual Orientations: A Review and Ten Hypotheses

  • 2017: Seto, M. C. The Puzzle of Male Chronophilias.

  • 2018: Hammack, P. L., Frost, D. M., Meyer, I. H., & Pletta, D. R. Gay Men's Health and Identity: Social Change and the Life Course.

  • 2018: Blanchard, R. Fraternal Birth Order, Family Size, and Male Homosexuality: Meta-Analysis of Studies Spanning 25 Years.

  • 2019: Benoit, C., Smith, M., Jansson, M., Healey, P., & Magnuson, D. “The Prostitution Problem”: Claims, Evidence, and Policy Outcomes.

  • 2020: Feinstein, B. A. The Rejection Sensitivity Model as a Framework for Understanding Sexual Minority Mental Health.

  • 2021: Atkins, D. N., & Bradford, W. D. The Effect of State-Level Sex Education Policies on Youth Sexual Behaviors.

Social Media

Archives is on social media. @ArchSexBehav has been posting to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, since January 2023. Posts highlight new online first articles published in Archives and the contents of each issue. Join up.

Impact Factor

Table 1 shows the 2022 Impact Factor (IF) data for 119 sex/gender journals in the annual Web of Science/Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate Analytics), ranked by the 2-year IF score.Footnote 1 In 2022, Journal Citation Reports show the 2-year Impact Factor to 1 decimal place only, rather than 3, apparently to encourage users to attend to other metrics; however, it is possible to calculate the IF to 3 decimal places, which makes it a bit easier to rank order the sex/gender journals. In Table 1, however, we did not do the same for the 5-year IF.

Table 1 Impact Factor for 2022: Sex- and gender-related journals ranked by 2-year Impact Factor (N = 119)
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For the uninitiated, 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, the 2022 2-year IF for Archives is the number of times that its 2020 and 2021 articles were cited in 2022, divided by the number of articles the Archives published in 2020 and 2021 and the 5-year IF is the number of times that its 2017–2021 articles were cited in 2022, divided by the number of articles the Archives published between 2017 and 2021.

Although the IF is the best-known metric for citation analysis, there are other measures. Journal Citation Indicator (JCI) is a new metric introduced by Clarivate Analytics. The JCI is based on the mean category normalized citation impact (CNCI) for the journal. CNCIs are calculated at the document level and are based on citations from all documents in the three previous years and the Journal Citation Report Year to articles and reviews published in the previous three years. The JCI is normalized for document type, publication year, and category. The average JCI for any category is 1. A JCI of 2 indicates that a journal is receiving twice the expected number of citations for the average journal in the category. A JCI of 0.5 indicates a journal is receiving half the expected number of citations for the average journal in the category. As citations distributions are skewed toward larger numbers of papers with fewer citations, the majority of journals in a category may have a JCI < 1.

Other metrics include 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.

Apart from the rank Archives would have across the several thousand Social Science journals that receive IF ratings, it is also classified under Psychology, Clinical and Social Sciences Interdisciplinary. For the former, the 2-year IF was ranked at the 71st percentile (38/131 journals) and for the JCI it was ranked at the 90th percentile (18/178 journals). For the latter, the 2-year IF was ranked at the 86th percentile (15/110 journals) and for the JCI it was ranked at the 88th percentile (31/265 journals). Of the 119 sex/gender journals shown in Table 1, the median 2-year IF was around 2.10 (Women and Therapy at 2.12 and Journal of Language and Sexuality at 2.09).

It is shown in Table 1 that the Archives is publishing a lot of articles per year: 285 Citable Items in 2022. These numbers are notably higher than many of the other sex/gender social science periodicals (e.g., Body Image: 157; Journal of Sex Research: 124; LGBT Health: 84; Sex Roles: 83; Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity: 75; Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy: 59; Psychology of Women Quarterly, 53; Evolution and Human Behavior: 47; Sexual Abuse: 40). We even had more citable items than Journal of Sexual Medicine (144). Of course, quantity does not equal quality. Moreover, one should recognize that to “maintain” an IF the numerator must keep pace with the denominator. Enjoy perusing Table 1.