Editorial: Stepping in and Stepping up: The Next 5 Years for the Journal of Pediatric Psychology

I am honored and deeply humbled to have been chosen as the Editor for the Journal of Pediatric Psychology (JPP) for the next 5 years (2023–2027). As I reflected on my experiences and qualifications for the JPP Editor position, I was reminded that I gained my first experience in an editorial role when I served as the administrative editorial assistant as an undergraduate for Social Development to Dr. Carol Eckerman, a social psychologist at Duke University in 1996. In the mid-90’s, we used a Rolodex to find reviewer names and addresses and made four paper copies of each printed manuscript to send out to reviewers. I aided Dr. Eckerman in this process and began to learn about the peer review process, which laid the groundwork for my subsequent editorial activities. It is amazing how times have changed. Over the past 5 years, I served as an Associate Editor for the JPP under Dr. Tonya Palermo’s leadership and learned a tremendous amount from her about leading the flagship journal for the Society of Pediatric Psychology. Under her editorship, the journal has flourished, and we have the highest impact factor (IF = 3.624) in JPP history to date. I hope to maintain the excellence of JPP during my editorial tenure with the help of my amazing editorial team: Marisa Hilliard, Chad Jensen, Emily Law, Cecelia Valrie, Kurt Freeman, Katie Devine, and Kristin Long.

I have been fortunate to have an overlap year with Tonya Palermo to learn and grow in this role. Through this year, we have continued Tonya’s excellent work in improving our transparent reporting, promoting student involvement through commentaries and student journal club, and highlighting our work on social media. I will continue to maintain the high standards Tonya has set. I would be remiss if I did not mention the amazing support of Ms. Susan Wood, who has also provided significant guidance during this transition year. I am so pleased that she agreed to stay on in her editorial assistant role during my editorial term. I am honored to have had the opportunity to work with our Transparent Reporting Editors (Anna Hood and Katelynn Boerner), Student Journal Club Co-Chairs (Dana Bakula and Christina Sharkey), and Social Media Chair (Christina Amaro). I want to thank them for their work and appreciate their willingness to train the next editorial team members who will begin their terms in 2023.

While I plan to continue the excellent initiatives from our past editors, which have raised the caliber of our publications (e.g., transparent reporting), I will expand JPP in new directions that continue to advance pediatric psychology science. In this editorial, I discuss my goals for the next 5 years, recognizing that these goals are iterative. If there is anything I have learned in the last 3 years through the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning that occurred in 2020, our world is not static; science should reflect contemporary and critical issues that affect children and families. It should also reflect updates in technology and improved access. For example, JPP transitioned to an online-only journal in 2022, which will continue moving forward. I also worked to expand JPP from 10 issues to 12 issues, which will begin this year (2023). These changes reflect the contemporary landscape of publishing. With the online-only option, I am excited that we can now publish a supplement issue featuring abstracts from the 2023 Society of Pediatric Psychology Annual Conference (SPPAC). The SPPAC Program Co-Chairs, Soumitri Sil and Naadira Upshaw, and I will work together to create this inaugural supplement, which will provide an important benefit to conference attendees.

Beyond these changes, I have four key initiatives with the overarching goal of continuing to grow the strong reputation of JPP, including maintenance or improvement of our IF. The key initiatives include: (a) Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in Pediatric Psychology, (b) Enhancing intervention research in pediatric psychology, (c) Expanding upon Innovative and Contemporary Issues within Pediatric Psychology, and (d) Enhancing the submission and review process.

Initiative 1: Advancing DEI in Pediatric Psychology

I am committed to focusing on DEI and ensuring our journal promotes antidiscrimination practices in research conduct and reporting. Recognizing that our DEI efforts represent a journey, not a sprint, I propose a series of steps to expand DEI in all aspects of JPP. The recent work by Buchanan et al. (2021) provides excellent suggestions on how to make our journal antiracist, with concrete examples to promote the Diversity Accountability Index. Building off the excellent presentations from the 2021 and 2022 Society of Pediatric Psychology Annual Conference and editorial on reporting guidelines around race/ethnicity for JPP (Palermo et al., 2021), I am committed to optimizing DEI efforts for JPP in the upcoming years with the following goals.

Goal 1: Special ongoing series focused on key DEI topic areas. In 2021, Tonya Palermo and I launched a call for papers focused on advancing DEI in pediatric psychology, which is ongoing. Diversity is defined as all the ways in which individuals differ and can include race and ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, language, culture, national origin, religion, age, and (dis)ability status. Equity is guaranteeing fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all individuals and eliminating barriers that prevent full participation. Finally, inclusion is bringing a variety of people who have traditionally been excluded into activities (i.e., leadership) where voices are heard and decisions are made. For this special series, we are soliciting submissions in a number of areas including but not limited to health disparities, housing and food insecurity, intersectionality, implicit bias, structural racism, recruitment and retention of diverse and underserved populations, education and training in DEI strategies, and other areas in which bias and inequity have impacted the health of children and their families. Instead of having a special issue devoted to these topics, I think it is important to highlight the excellent DEI-focused work of pediatric psychologists throughout the years. My goal is to have at least one DEI-focused paper for each issue of JPP during my editorship.

Goal 2: Enhance reporting best practices around DEI in pediatric psychology. The race/ethnicity reporting guidelines were a wonderful initial start for JPP to recommend optimal ways to report on these socially defined constructs (Palermo et al., 2021). However, the landscape around diversity dimension reporting is constantly evolving. As such, I am working with the new Editor for Clinical Practice in Pediatric Psychology, Christina Duncan, to convene two workgroups of Associate Editors from both journals, as well as editorial board members with relevant expertise, to (a) broaden our reporting guidelines to include other important diversity dimensions (i.e., gender, sexuality and disability status) with the goal of optimizing inclusive language and (b) generate best research practice guidelines around DEI for the conduct and reporting of pediatric psychology focused research. In the coming year, we hope to publish these guidelines via journal editorials or on their respective websites for authors and reviewers alike. Training around these new guidelines may also occur in the form of webinars or editorial board meetings.

Goal 3. Diversification of Assistant Editors and Editorial Board Members. I believe it is critical to ensure that our Associate Editors (AEs) and Editorial Board members represent pediatric psychology research through a DEI lens, including representation in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and those with nontraditional pediatric psychology pedigrees and backgrounds. My goal is to enhance the diversity among Associate Editors and the Editorial board as a part of this vision. I would also like to make more transparent the diversity of JPP AEs and the Editorial Board to ensure readers, reviewers, and authors feel their work is both represented and reviewed by diverse colleagues. One initial step towards this was the creation of a positionality statement of the new Editor/Associate Editors, as well as the inclusion of their biographies and pictures on the JPP website (https://academic.oup.com/jpepsy/pages/Editorial_Board). I hope to extend this to our Editorial Board members in the upcoming year. Notably, Oxford Press, our publisher, has synergistic efforts to assess diversity amongst authors in our Manuscript Central submission portal. Prior to 2022, there were rules that prevented us from asking authors and reviewers about their diversity dimensions in the submission portal. Oxford University Press is now a member of a large group of publishing organizations who created the joint commitment for action on inclusion and diversity in publishing. As a part of those standards, we and other publishers have recently (Fall 2022) rolled out standardized questions to collect diversity data. Questions regarding (a) gender, (b) ethnic origin, and (c) race will be systematically asked when manuscripts are submitted to JPP. Notably, authors can opt out or choose the “prefer not to disclose” option. Instructions on completion of these items will include information on why the data are being collected, how it will be used, and who will have access to the data to improve transparency for authors. Our DEI-focused workgroups will discuss ways that we may be able to use these data in the future.

Initiative 2: Enhancing Intervention Research in Pediatric Psychology

My second initiative is to encourage the submission of intervention research. Pediatric psychologists have developed a number of effective interventions that are not often reflected in JPP. I am interested in submissions of clinical trials across the behavioral science translational pipeline (Hommel et al., 2015) from exploratory to confirmatory to implementation. Pilot and/or feasibility studies play a critical role in rigorous behavioral intervention development in pediatric psychology and learnings from these studies enable us to assess whether something can be done, whether we should proceed with further testing, and if so, how we should proceed (Eldridge et al., 2016).

I am also interested in enhancing the publication of studies using contemporary clinical trial designs, which can increase the rigor and sophistication of research in our field. Contemporary clinical trial designs could include enrichment designs, and adaptive and sequential multiple assignment randomized trials which aid behavioral trialists in better understanding who benefits from intervention and who may require additional behavioral strategies during a trial.

While I recognize that many of us submit larger randomized clinical trials (RCTs) to medical journals, I would like to enhance the attractiveness of JPP for trial-related submissions. We currently have a call for submissions for clinical trials in an effort to achieve this goal, with (a) guidance on how to write pilot/feasibility trials through an editorial written in 2021 (Hilliard et al., 2021) and (b) guidance from a transparent reporting editor to enhance the quality of all clinical trial submissions. We will feature the clinical trial manuscripts in a labeled section of future JPP issues, with the potential to have commentaries highlighting the work.

Initiative 3: Expanding Focus on Innovative and Contemporary Issues within Pediatric Psychology

My plan to expand focus on innovative areas within pediatric psychology will be accomplished through special issues and focused efforts to invite experts in their respective fields to either contribute or guest edit special issues. For example, pediatric psychologists are increasingly becoming involved in systems-level initiatives, including national learning health systems and dissemination and implementation science. In these roles, pediatric psychologists help to evaluate psychological outcomes, institute standardized processes with reliable measurement, and identify ways to translate interventions tested in clinical trials to clinical care systems, reducing the 17-year research to practice gap (Green et al., 2009).

In addition, JPP has published a number of key statistical and methodological papers that advance pediatric psychology, including the validity of data collected from randomized controlled clinical trials during the COVID-19 pandemic and variation in longitudinal data using latent growth mixture modeling (Mara & Carle, 2021; Mara & Peugh, 2020). Guidance on how to interpret results from trials conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic will be especially important to pediatric psychology researchers. I encourage authors to submit papers focused on innovative statistical approaches and designs as they relate to pediatric psychology.

Beginning with the inception of pediatric psychologists working in primary care in the 1970’s (i.e., Dr. Carolyn Schroeder), integrated behavioral health programs within pediatric primary care are still burgeoning amongst pediatric institutions. I anticipate the science evaluating outcomes from such efforts in the current clinical landscape is forthcoming. As such, we have a call for submissions for JPP related to prevention, which includes studies in integrated behavioral health within primary care, that could serve as a good vehicle for submissions. Finally, I would also like to update the 2014 special issue on evidence-based interventions in pediatric psychology (Palermo, 2014), which focused on key areas of pediatric psychology (i.e., adherence, sleep, feeding, and obesity). These serve as seminal papers in our field and an update with a decade worth of new science seems fitting.

Initiative 4: Enhance the Submission and Review Process

With new initiatives comes the opportunity to enhance the submission process for authors and reviewing process for our editorial board members and reviewers. In the upcoming year, I plan to streamline our instructions to authors and create checklists to facilitate the submission process. Ensuring our manuscript portal and instruction to authors matches, with clear yet succinct instructions is one of my first goals for 2023. Recognizing that our new DEI-focused guidelines will need to be easily incorporated into our submission process requires us to think about the instructions to authors as a living and dynamic document. Thus, I encourage authors to revisit the instructions with each manuscript submission.

In alignment with recent editorials and recommendations, I would also like to explore the Transparency and Openness Promotion Guidelines for JPP, which calls for increased openness around citation standards, data transparency, analytic methods (codes) transparency, research materials transparency, design and analysis transparency, pre-registration of studies, pre-registration of analysis plans, and replication (Freedland, 2021; Nosek et al., 2015). Implementation of these standards over time will enhance the scientific rigor of papers published in JPP. As the first step in transparency, we are now requiring all manuscripts to add information regarding Level 2 data availability for their research studies (https://academic.oup.com/jpepsy/pages/research-data-policy-statement).

Summary

In summary, I am honored to be the Editor for JPP. I have been fortunate to have been mentored by extraordinary pediatric psychologists in our field, including former editor Dennis Drotar. He gave me a great appreciation for how this Editor position allows you to shape the field of pediatric psychology and instill excitement in the next generation of pediatric psychologists. I look forward to stepping into this role and facilitating stepping up pediatric psychology science through the four initiatives I set forth.