My term as CDEMP Editor started on January 1, 2019 and ends on December 31, 2024.

The mission and vision of the journal has changed due to significant changes in the composition of editorial board members, also known as consulting editors. I have significantly expanded both the number of consulting editors and the field of psychology they represent. Traditionally, counseling psychologists were the mainstay of editorial board members and publications in CDEMP. I have expanded that focus to be more broad, with editorial board members and publications that encompasses developmental psychology to cognitive to health psychology. These changes have resulted in the impact factor increasing from 2.147 in 2019 to 3.30 in 2022.

We are seeing more interest in discriminatory experiences than ever before. Different forms of discriminatory experiences, as it applies to populations not traditionally examined in the past, such as LGBTQ individuals with racial/ethnic minority identities. Discriminatory experiences are also being increasingly examined in national datasets, and experiences of discrimination across the globe are also being examined.

A specific focus on minoritized and marginalized groups in psychological sciences is important, given the increasing population size of such individuals in the U.S. Moreover, giving a voice to marginalized populations helps to decenter psychology’s traditional focus on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations.

All journals published by CDEMP come with a public significance statement to make the paper more accessible to the public/community. We can also include accompanying policy reports and video abstracts for the public/community to make the research more accessible.

Engaging with the editorial review process is key, starting with reviewing journal submissions, getting appointed as a consulting editor of a journal, and then Associate Editor to handle the manuscript review process of a manuscript, to become a future journal editor.

The journal should encourage more authors to do registered reports. This is a novel form of publications in the field, where the methods and proposed analyses are peer reviewed prior to the research being conducted, and can be provisionally accepted with the intention by the journal to publish the findings regardless of study findings. More registered reports can help us reduce the bias towards publishing papers with only significant research findings.

Future journals should more seriously consider the diversity of the study samples they publish, and be explicit in having authors disclose the sample characteristics to better situate the research findings in the context of study participants’ background characteristics.

I am planning to focus more on my research and advance the mission of CDEMP//Division 45 by continuing to examine factors that can dismantle the factors that disproportionately affect marginalized communities that lead to health disparities.