Disrupting Racism and Global Exclusion in Academic Publishing: Recommendations and Resources for Authors, Reviewers, and Editors

The need for the ACEMAP task force to combat racism and global exclusion in academic publishing stems directly from the history of mainstream psychology (and of scientific institutions and higher education systems, more broadly). Mainstream academia’s scientific culture, institutions, and practices originated in a system created by, for, and about wealthy, white, non-disabled, English-speaking, straight, cisgender male scholars from a small subset of countries (including the U.S., Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; see e.g., Berscheid, 1992; Bulhan, 2015; Clancy & Davis, 2019; Gonzales, 2018; Guthrie, 2004; Klimstra & McLean, 2024; Selvanathan et al., 2023; Thalmayer et al., 2021). Unsurprisingly, then, scientific methods and practices tend to uphold a system of advantage and disadvantage that prioritizes the experiences of this narrow set of people while increasingly deprioritizing and harming those further from that included center (Bahlai et al., 2019; Cheryan & Markus, 2020; Ledgerwood et al., 2022; Onie, 2020; Padilla, 1994; Prather, 2021; Reddy & Amer, 2023; Thomas et al., 2023; Thompson & Sekaquaptewa, 2002).

As just one example, consider the distinction often made in reviews and editorial decisions at so-called “top-tier” psychology journals between “mainstream” topics often deemed relevant to a broad audience versus “specialized” topics often deemed more suitable for a specialty journal. A study examining how predominantly white U.S. college student participants evaluate a series of similarly aged white male faces is likely to be categorized as the former, whereas a study examining Indian adult participants’ beliefs about vegetarianism is likely to be categorized as the latter. Such a distinction is obviously not about the size of the world population for whom the study might be relevant, but rather a subjective judgment of importance grounded in the history of the field—that is, which topics and populations have been deemed interesting, relevant, normative, and worth studying by scholars who occupy positions of relative power and prestige (see e.g., Corral-Frías et al., 2023). Thus, the history of the field—who it was designed by and for—continues to shape assumptions and practices like publication decisions in ways that can reproduce racism (by prioritizing white psychology) and global exclusion (by prioritizing U.S.-centric and Eurocentric psychology).

Addressing these longstanding and pervasive patterns of exclusion is urgent but not easy. Despite stated goals of societies like SPSP to upend societal inequity, the expressed values of many academics to support equity and inclusion, and even specific tools and plans outlined by academic colleagues that can help to reduce racism and global exclusion (e.g., Buchanan et al., 2021b), progress tends to be limited (Bou Zeineddine et al., 2022; Matias et al., 2022; Roberts et al., 2020). As prior work attests, there are often gaps between intention and policy implementation (e.g., Hutchings et al., 2021) that the ACEMAP task force endeavored to help bridge.

There can also be seemingly conflicting needs that must be navigated. For example, as SPSP began working to address racism in in a variety of spheres, including publication practices, a seeming tension arose between (a) counteracting anti-Black racism in a U.S. context (a crucial and much-overdue endeavor) and (b) counteracting global exclusion (also a crucial and long-overdue endeavor for an organization that purports to be international and yet has been primarily by, for, and about psychologists in the U.S.).⁴ The ACEMAP task force grew out of the view that the apparent tension can be largely resolved by refocusing on the shared origin of anti-Black racism and global exclusion, both of which are rooted in the same colonial, white supremacist history that gave rise to systems and institutions designed by, for, and about a narrow subset of people. That is, we believe that in the context of scientific publishing practices, it should be possible to address multiple interlocking dimensions of exclusion simultaneously by drawing on an intersectional approach (Cole, 2009; Combahee River Collective, 2014; Crenshaw, 1989; Ledgerwood et al., 2022; Overstreet et al., 2020; Warner et al., 2018). More broadly, we credit many of the scholar-activist principles that informed the design of this task force to lessons learned by task force members while engaged with A4BSW. As noted above, A4BSW involved programming and hands-on curriculum designed to teach “non-Black academics to honor the toll of racial trauma on Black people, resist anti-Blackness and white supremacy, and facilitate accountability and collective action” (Academics for Black Survival and Wellness, 2021).

We built on a crucial foundation and momentum created by the SPSP Equity and Anti-Racism (EAR) task force (which had launched in fall 2020) and the SPSP International Committee to develop recommendations and resources to counteract the ways in which our publication methods and practices uphold a system of advantage and disadvantage that prioritizes the experience of white, affluent, non-disabled, English-speaking, straight, cisgender male researchers from a small subset of countries (e.g., U.S., Canada, countries in Western Europe), while increasingly marginalizing those further from that included center. Our goal was to develop recommendations and resources that could address multiple, interlocking dimensions of exclusion in the publication process, with the reasoning that this overarching approach would ensure that our recommendations would not fix one person’s problem of marginalization at the expense of another’s. Although we contextualized and tailored our recommendations and resources for SPSP and its journals at one particular period in time (i.e., 2021-2023), we believe that the approach and processes we used could work well more broadly and that our recommendations and resources could provide a useful starting point for those interested in addressing longstanding and pervasive patterns of exclusion in scientific practice in our discipline and beyond (e.g., Arnett, 2008; Nielsen et al., 2017; Palser et al., 2022; Pollet & Saxton, 2019; Rad et al., 2018; Singh, Killen, & Smetana, 2023).

As the task force began to take shape, the task force chair and early members wanted to find a way to compose and structure the ACEMAP task force that would help address two key challenges that often arise when doing diversity and inclusion work: (1) mitigating cultural taxation and (2) attending to multiple dimensions of exclusion.

First, it seemed essential to navigate the fact that the scholars with the most expertise in racism and global exclusion (or interlocking dimensions of exclusion more generally) are often also already overburdened with service. Padilla (1994) dubbed this phenomenon cultural taxation when describing how people of color⁵ are asked to engage in much more diversity and inclusion work than their white counterparts, and research and our own eyeballs told us that marginalized faculty are more likely to spend time and effort on this work (Jimenez et al., 2019; Syed, 2017). Challenge #1 was therefore: How could a task force center expert guidance and yet spread out the substantial workload of the task force across people who would collectively have sufficient time and bandwidth (including those who experience less cultural taxation)?

A related challenge emerges with respect to the apparent seriousness of efforts for institutional change around racism and global exclusion. Historically, organizations fail to make progress toward equity and justice, despite a stated commitment to these goals and significant mission and monetary commitments to them (e.g., Jan et al., 2021). Often, the stated commitments to institutional change or the creation of a task force are seen as accomplishing the goals themselves (Ahmed, 2012; Kaiser et al., 2013). For instance, in the U.S., the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme court decision deemed it unconstitutional to separate public schools on the basis of race and is often hailed as the end to school segregation in the U.S., but schools remain highly segregated and unequal today (Onyeador et al., 2021). Therefore, we needed to demonstrate that this task force would be different from its predecessors.

To try to address this set of challenges, the task force chair—in conversation with members of the EAR task force and the SPSP Member-at-Large for Diversity, and with support from the SPSP Board—decided to try a non-traditional committee structure composed of a Central Advisory Team (people who have lots of expertise but perhaps not much time), supported by an Implementer Team (people who have more time and bandwidth to contribute, with varying levels of expertise; see Figure 1). The ACEMAP task force chair would support the Implementer Team, help integrate diverging perspectives, and foster a culture of prioritizing the Central Advisory Team’s expertise while minimizing the demands placed on their time. SPSP placed value on the time and expertise given by Central Advisory Team members by waiving their next conference registration fee or providing equivalent monetary compensation.

Task force members recognized that we were working in an area where marginalized scholars had already made a number of recommendations for combating racism and global exclusion in scientific publishing, both within and beyond psychology (e.g., Bou Zeineddine et al., 2022; Buchanan et al., 2021a; Bulhan, 2015; Malherbe et al., 2021; Nyúl et al., 2021; Rad et al., 2018; Roberts et al., 2020). Therefore, the Implementer Team’s first step was to survey and organize the landscape of existing recommendations across psychology so that we could follow the lead of the scholars who had already been thinking deeply about these issues for some time (see Step 1 below) without creating any additional time demands.

Second, the task force chair and collaborating members of the EAR (Equity and Anti-Racism) task force wanted to find a way to navigate the challenge described earlier—namely, that solutions designed to address one dimension of exclusion will often reproduce other, unattended dimensions of exclusion (Crenshaw, 1989; Warner et al., 2018). For example, a speaker series in a U.S. university designed to bring in more women scientists, in an effort to address gender disparities but without considering additional dimensions of exclusion, is likely to result in more white, U.S.-based, non-disabled women speakers without bringing in more women scientists of color, disabled women scientists, women scientists from the Global Souths, and so on. Challenge #2 was therefore: How can we create a task force that will have on its collective radar multiple interlocking dimensions of exclusion, and that will center perspectives that are often marginalized in our existing publication system?

To try to address this challenge, the task force chair sought to include experts on the Central Advisory Team (i.e., the team who would provide expert guidance with low time commitment) with vantage points that historically have been especially excluded from publication decision-making, including multiple members who are Black, Indigenous, LGBTQ, and/or grounded in countries in the Global Souths. She also prioritized expertise in intersectionality and decolonial perspectives.

To help expand beyond insider networks, the task force chair asked for nominations from EAR task force members, the SPSP Publications Committee, the International Committee, the Predominantly Undergraduate Institution Committee, the SPSP Member-at-Large for Diversity and the Member-at-Large for Application, the PSPB and PSPR Editors, and multiple scholars outside of SPSP positions. All task force members were invited based on their extensive expertise relevant to inclusive science and to collectively map a broad range of research contexts (e.g., institution types including small liberal arts college, public state college, non-governmental organization, research-intensive university; research traditions including cultural psychology, personality psychology, political psychology, experimental social psychology; methods including qualitative, longitudinal, experimental; roles ranging from author to Editor-in-Chief and from lab manager to full professor). The chair also asked task force members to alert her if they noticed a gap in who was represented in our Central Advisory Team, which was helpful because people coming from different vantage points and experiences noticed different gaps. Team members are listed in Table 1 and responses to a task force demographic survey are reflected in Table 2.

The task force pursued its work by following four basic steps (outlined in Figure 2). Readers familiar with participatory action research approaches may recognize similar principles and practices in our approach, including bringing together and integrating diverse expertise and skill sets, centering and valuing the expertise of direct experience, and adopting a cyclical or spiral-like process of collaboratively identifying a problem, designing an action to address it, and then taking action and creating mechanisms to observe the action’s impact (Cornish et al., 2023; Kindon et al., 2007).

We began by looking for and learning from what experts before us had already done. The Implementer Team assembled articles relevant to improving inclusive excellence in scientific publishing practices in psychology, added the list of recommendations from the EAR task force and a list of recommendations from SPSP’s International Committee, and then asked the Central Advisory Team to alert the chair of any gaps in the reading list (see Supplemental Materials for the full reading list). The Implementer Team met once over Zoom to develop a shared sense of

history, context, and general approach for the task force’s work and to decide together how to approach the reading list (subsequently, members collaborated via email, Google Docs, and Google Sheets). The team decided to divide up the readings so that two people read each article to understand it more deeply and then extract key recommendations into a shared spreadsheet. Team members also coded each recommendation for whether (a) implementing it would be easy/immediate or harder/long-term (or somewhere in the middle); (b) the recommendation would involve changing something in the journal submission system or guidelines; and (c) the recommendation would require developing guidance for editors, reviewers, and/or authors, and any additional notes or comments (these codes were mainly useful in providing a sense of the scope of the recommendations). Together, they assembled a list of 133 recommendations for improving publication practices, many of which are structural in nature (in that they focus on changing policies, procedures, and default gatekeeping practices rather than only encouraging grassroots behavioral change at the level of individual authors).

The Implementer Team then asked the member with qualitative methods expertise (JV) for advice on how to approach the next challenge of condensing and organizing the long list of recommendations. Following her suggestions, the chair read through all the recommendations and identified some broad overarching themes that many of the recommendations could fit within, coded each recommendation with a theme label, and then created a new spreadsheet with the recommendations grouped by theme (similar to thematic qualitative analysis; e.g., Loyd et al., 2023). Implementer Team members then read through the list and gave feedback on whether anything should be moved and where to put a few uncategorized recommendations. Members then worked on the recommendations within each theme to: (a) group and condense similar recommendations and (b) reassign recommendations that did not fit well. This process substantially consolidated the list into 87 recommendations. The qualitative expert then advised further condensing recommendations that overlapped or could be listed as separate steps within a broader recommendation, which resulted in a shorter list of 50 unique recommendations, organized within 13 thematic clusters (see Figure 3; full list in Supplemental Materials).

Next, the Implementer Team wanted to follow the lead of the Central Advisory Team in prioritizing which recommendations were most urgent to implement at SPSP journals (given that finite time and resources meant it was not possible to implement and design effective resources for everything at once), as well as what concerns or potential pitfalls would be important to consider when implementing these recommendations for SPSP’s particular journal context and at this particular moment in the field’s development. For example, Central Advisory Team members could draw from their research and policy expertise as well as their direct experiences as authors, reviewers, and editors with journals that have and have not followed these recommendations to guide prioritization and flag potential problems. The Implementer Team programmed a Qualtrics survey to gather input from the Central Advisory Team in a straightforward and time-efficient way. The survey presented one cluster of recommendations per page and asked experts to rate their own sense of how highly to prioritize implementing each recommendation at SPSP journals (PSPB and PSPR). At the bottom of each page, Central Advisory Team members were given an open-ended textbox to provide any general feedback on the cluster, including any challenges or pitfalls they foresaw if we implemented the recommendations as described, anything missing, or any particular aspect of a recommendation that seemed especially crucial. After rating all 50 recommendations on a scale from 1 (Least important) to 7 (Most important), respondents were asked to prioritize among the clusters: “Obviously, there is a lot of work to do, and all of these clusters need to be addressed. But assuming we can’t effectively implement all 50 recommendations right away, where should we focus first? Please select the 1-3 clusters that you personally think are MOST urgent to address at SPSP journals.”

Central Advisory Team members offered expert guidance from a wide array of vantage points that collectively mapped out areas of consensual enthusiasm, areas with diverging opinions about potential benefits and harms, and areas where successful implementation of a recommendation would require effectively navigating potential pitfalls. Four thematic clusters were most highly prioritized by respondents: (a) improve representation, (b) introduce accountability, (c) avoid overgeneralizing, and (d) create reviewer and author checklists to help avoid common racist practices.

Central Advisory Team members also thought carefully about potential benefits, challenges, and harms that could result from implementing each recommendation, and often highlighted potential pitfalls that the Implementer Team alone would have missed. For example, in response to the recommendation to “Require author positionality statements that detail the intersectional identities and cultural context of authors, how authors are positioned relative to their participants, and how that positionality has shaped their scholarship and perspective,” respondents expressed enthusiasm for the abstract ideal but strong concerns about the harm that such a requirement could cause in practice. One expert noted: “This is nice and useful when done by informed researchers. But, the field is not steeped enough in reflexivity to require this. Thus, much of it will be pro forma, misguided, or even potentially offensive.” Another expert coming from a very different vantage point said something very similar: “This would be great if done well/if reflexivity were truly exercised throughout the entire research process, but this isn’t standard training for scholars who do quantitative work and they might end up writing positionality statements just for the sake of the journal requirement (which defeats its purpose).” Another expert expressed concern about the impact this requirement would have on already marginalized authors: “As a ‘BIPOC’ person, I can tell you we already conten[d] with enough prejudice and bias from our colleagues. This feels like creating room for more of that.”

As another example, Central Advisory Team members raised valuable insights in response to the recommendation to “Solicit replication articles that re-examine WEIRD [Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic; Henrich et al., 2010]⁶ findings in different cultural contexts or across different types of samples.” One expert pointed out that collaborators from non-WEIRD countries are often “added onto projects as afterthoughts and aren’t the ones leading these collaborations, which can also become exploitative.” Thus, for such a recommendation to mitigate rather than reproduce global exclusion, cross-cultural projects would need to place collaborators from marginalized countries into leadership roles and decenter collaborators from dominant countries (including the U.S., Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Another expert highlighted the importance of “learning what kind of new insights emerge from varied contexts rather than simply attempting to (re)verify WEIRD findings which have their own epistemological/ontological baggage that affected the study question, design, measures, which straightforward replications don’t account for” (see also Malherbe et al., 2021; Saab et al., 2022).

The Implementer Team read carefully through all of the qualitative feedback and then (a) created a list of recommendations from the four clusters most prioritized by the Central Advisory Team, revised to incorporate that team’s qualitative feedback and (b) created a list of readily achievable recommendations from the remaining clusters that would be relatively high impact but easy to implement (i.e., they would not require intensive work to develop new resources to implement them effectively and would not run into potential pitfalls identified by the Central Advisory Team). This process resulted in a list of nine first-priority recommendations with an array of proposed resources to support authors, reviewers, and editors in implementing the recommendations effectively and navigating potential harms. We detail the recommendations and resources in Part II of this paper. The SPSP Board voted to approve these recommendations and to approve and fund the proposed resources at its board meeting in July 2022.

One of the concerns with developing a task force is also providing a mechanism to continue the work of that task force once recommendations have been submitted. This mechanism for continued work is critical for at least two reasons. First, though forward progress toward innovation is common across domains of social life, there is evidence that inequalities and exclusionary practices persist (Kraus et al., 2019), and even spread to new domains (Benjamin, 2019; Obermayer et al., 2019). The permanence of racism and global exclusion is a core principle of critical race theory (Bell, 2018), and returning to the status quo is both a motivational process of conservatism (Jost et al., 2003) and an outcome of the desire to preserve or enhance social inequality (Sidanius & Pratto, 2001). Therefore, in the absence of countermeasures, we can expect retrenchment. Second, an intersectional framework highlights that whenever we stop actively attending to one or more dimensions of power and inequality, the unattended dimensions will tend to reproduce themselves and power will tend to remain in the hands of the powerful (Kessi & Boonzaier, 2018; Ledgerwood et al., 2022; Lorde, 1984; Warner et al., 2018). Therefore, in the absence of continued attention and action toward the ways in which racism, global exclusion, and intersecting dimensions of exclusion are manifesting in the current context and moment, we can expect them to reappear in new forms.

From this perspective and by this logic, our task force created a mechanism to continue its work. In collaboration with the Executive Committee, ACEMAP recommended (and the SPSP Board approved) reimagining and expanding SPSP’s Publications Committee to incorporate the ongoing work of developing recommendations and resources to enhance open and inclusive practices at SPSP journals. The newly named Promoting Inclusive Excellence in Publications Committee “develops policy and provides resources to promote anti-racist/-colorist/-Eurocentric, open, and globally inclusive practices at SPSP journals,” in addition to the more traditional activities of a publications committee. It also now includes three members (a student member, early career member, and full member) that “should have experience with promoting inclusive research practices that counteract a system of advantage/disadvantage that prioritizes the experience of white, affluent, straight, cis men from a small subset of countries (e.g., U.S., Canada, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand) while increasingly deprioritizing and harming those further from that included center.” These changes involved substantially revising the committee’s charter, which the SPSP Board then voted to approve.

Over the next six months, the Implementer Team (with some turnover, which brought in important additional perspectives⁷) worked to develop the proposed resources and to solicit and incorporate feedback from Central Advisory Team members and other members of the Implementer Team. They also worked to incorporate feedback from the SPSP Publications Committee, the SPSP Member-at-Large for Diversity and Community, the PSPB and PSPR Senior Editorial Teams, the SPSP Presidents, the SPSP Executive Director, and members of the SPPS consortium. Finally, the task force chair worked in close collaboration with the SPSP Executive Director to manage the implementation of recommendations and distribution of resources (e.g., designating a specific person to implement each component of a recommendation; overseeing the process of posting author and reviewer resources on the SPSP website; meeting with editors to discuss next steps and address remaining questions and concerns).

One recurring challenge we navigated at various points in this process was continually (re)establishing and persuading other parties to take seriously the expertise of our task force. These reactions are anticipated by a large body of evidence indicating that the recommendations of people from marginalized backgrounds are often subject to additional interrogation and scrutiny (e.g., Thai et al., 2021; Torrez et al., 2024a; Wallace et al., 2024). This enhanced interrogation occurs because positions that advocate for reducing marginalization and rejecting the status quo are often threatening to dominant group member audiences who respond by questioning the objectivity and legitimacy of marginalized perspectives (Collins, 2022; Torrez et al., 2024b). For example, in discussions with various stakeholders, the task force chair needed to actively advocate for task force members in order to elicit some level of buy-in from leadership that task force members were indeed experts. It often took additional time and effort to remind stakeholders that the task force recommendations were grounded in considerable expertise and lived experiences. The task force chair often needed to reiterate that task force members are some of the leading experts in research and practice on reducing global exclusion and inequality in social-personality psychology, with relevant and extensive experiences in research and policy as well as their own lives. The task force chair found that task force expertise was less often questioned when she began each presentation, conversation, or email thread by re-summarizing the task force’s extensive process and emphasizing task force members’ editorial credentials (e.g., experience as an Editor-in-Chief or Associate Editor, which often seemed more readily valued than research, lived, or policy expertise related to anti-racism and global inclusion).

We now turn to discuss each of our nine first-priority publication recommendations in more detail. We discuss the potential benefits of each recommendation (why it would be important to implement) as well as potential pitfalls or costs. We describe how we tried to navigate these complexities as we honed the recommendations and developed resources to support authors, reviewers, and editors in implementing the recommendations. Where relevant, we note challenges we navigated during the implementation process in case this information can be helpful to others. We aimed to produce recommendations that were clear and concrete enough that they were likely to be adopted, while also being sufficiently flexible to account for researchers’ varying cultural and geopolitical realities, as well as the field’s evolving understanding of diversity and inclusion. This is not an easy balance to strike. Indeed, it may not be possible to fully realize this kind of balance in one set of recommendations and resources. We did not intend, therefore, for these recommendations to be the final word on how to disrupt racism and global exclusion in academic publishing. Instead, we hope this article contributes to ongoing conversations about, and efforts toward, anti-racism and global inclusion in academia (cf. Phoenix, 2022; Ratele & Malherbe, 2020).

Recommendations and resources are summarized in Table 3. Many of the listed resources are openly available at https://osf.io/edwm9/ and can be freely used or adapted with attribution.

Multiple publication recommendations in the existing literature emphasized the importance of increasing the representation of reviewers and editors from historically marginalized backgrounds (Bowleg, 2021; Buchanan et al., 2021a; see also Lin & Li, 2023; Puthillam et al., 2023). Central Advisory Team members also placed high priority on this goal. In the context of the field’s exclusive history, it is unsurprising that in the absence of strong counteracting policies, white and U.S.-based researchers from R1 (i.e., research-intensive and especially well resourced) universities occupy a disproportionate number of editorial gatekeeping roles. Improving representation among scholars in these roles can help diversify the positionalities that gatekeepers bring to their decisions.

For example, those who have experienced multiple, interlocking dimensions of oppression are often particularly well positioned to notice and question dominant assumptions (Crenshaw, 1989; Salter & Adams, 2013), such as the assumption that white people’s experiences are widely generalizable rather than a very specific and privileged racialized position (Remedios, 2022).⁸ In addition, seeing “people like me” in leadership positions can provide crucial signals of belonging for marginalized group members (Johnson et al., 2019; Rosenthal et al., 2013), which can help counteract the many signals marginalized scholars face on a daily basis suggesting they do not belong in a field that was not designed for them (Cheryan & Markus, 2020; Ledgerwood et al., 2022).

Potential Pitfall: Improving One Aspect of Representation at the Expense of Another. At the policy level, a potentially effective intervention for improving representation is to require incoming editors to create a plan for increasing the proportion of action editors, editorial board members, and reviewers from historically marginalized groups. At the same time, in shaping and implementing this policy, we needed to adopt—and develop resources to support—an intersectional lens, so that gains from efforts to increase representation would be felt in more contexts than those that are most salient and/or privileged (e.g., R1 research institutions; locations within the U.S.).

To help circumvent this potential pitfall, we elaborated the recommendation to editors to explicitly draw attention to three dimensions of representation and their intersections:

• Increasing the representation of scholars who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

• Increasing the representation of scholars from outside the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe.

• Increasing the representation of scholars from other marginalized backgrounds within their local contexts (e.g., based on religion, migration or citizenship status, disability, sexuality).

We also created a template that editors could use to develop their plan for increasing representation (see Table 3 for link). Drawing on Buchanan et al. (2021a) and Carter et al. (2020), the template invites editors to set concrete objectives with a timeline and clear metrics by which editors will assess success. To help scaffold editors in simultaneously addressing multiple dimensions of exclusion, the template provides a table for setting target proportions of editors, editorial board members, and reviewers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color as well as who are from outside the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe. It also reminds editors to “please keep in mind that whereas hierarchies and systematic exclusion translate globally, specific racial/ethnic categories do not.” In a separate section, it asks editors to set a plan for explicitly considering additional dimensions of exclusion and offers a menu of possible strategies (e.g., “My senior editorial team will intentionally recruit disabled scholars, trans and nonbinary scholars, and scholars from the Global South and non-English-speaking countries”).

Potential Pitfall: Exacerbating Cultural Taxation. The Central Advisory Team raised a second important concern to navigate: namely, that increasing the reviewing and editorial service asked of marginalized scholars could further exacerbate issues of cultural taxation. This problem would be heightened to the extent that editorial service is hidden and uncompensated, and to the extent that editors seeking to improve representation draw on the same small subset of marginalized scholars already well integrated into their networks (e.g., U.S.-based scholars of color at elite, research-intensive institutions who are able to regularly attend conferences in person and whose theoretical approach and methods are welcomed at mainstream psychology journals).

To help mitigate this potential harm, we included a section on addressing cultural taxation in our Editorial Plan Template, asking editors “how will you (a) recognize and reward editorial service work and (b) expand the set of people being asked to do this work beyond the same small subset of minoritized scholars?” The template offers a menu of specific recommended strategies from which editors can select, including: “Create/maintain mentorship programs for junior reviewers and editors that can set the stage for tenure letters from senior scholars (e.g., PSPR’s Emerging Editorial Board initiated in 2022; SPSP’s 2023 Pilot Editorial Fellowship program, APA’s Editorial Fellows);” “Go beyond personal (real life and social media) networks when inviting scholars to join journal teams, with a particular focus on bridging to networks in the Global South;” “Require all [AEs/editorial board members/both] to attend a training, workshop, and/or group discussion of articles on disrupting racism and enhancing global inclusion in the editorial process.”

With support from the SPSP Board and in close collaboration with the PSPR Senior Editor Team, we also developed and launched a new pilot Editorial Fellowship Program designed to create a supportive pathway to editorial leadership for psychologists from communities that have been historically excluded from these roles. PSPR seemed like a particularly good home for the pilot program: The PSPR Senior Editorial Team had already invested considerable time and effort in building a collaborative editorial team structure (e.g., regular team meetings, collaborative problem-solving) that could provide effective support and mentorship to a Fellow who did not already have substantial editorial experience while also reciprocally learning from the expertise and experiences that the new Fellow would bring.

This program was modeled on APA’s Editorial Fellowship program and adapted to address ACEMAP and SPSP’s specific goals and context. For example, the PSPR team and ACEMAP task force collaboratively considered that APA had just created multiple APA Editorial Fellowships prioritizing early career scholars of color (APA, 2022), a program that we suspected would be particularly effective at supporting early career scholars of color in the U.S. with established track records of publishing in and reviewing for mainstream outlets. We wanted to think about who would be left out of such a support system and whether we could design an effective complement. The PSPR Senior Editorial Team was also eager to further expand the range of positionalities represented on their team, which (although already encompassing a range of perspectives along dimensions including race, disability, sexual orientation, gender, career stage, and institution type) at the time included only scholars from and working in the U.S. and Western Europe.

Grounded in these considerations, the PSPR Senior Editorial Team and ACEMAP task force collaboratively decided to focus the first call for applications on scholars who are from and/or working in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, as well as Indigenous scholars in any country, without restricting the call to a particular career stage. Central Advisory Team members across three different continents provided multiple essential rounds of feedback on the Call for Applications to ensure that it would be clear, accessible, and welcoming to an international audience. (The task force chair encountered a minor challenge at this stage of the process, when the PSPR Editor-in-Chief made a number of edits to the Call for Applications that undermined some of the global accessibility that had been added by Central Advisory Team members; the chair was able to address this challenge by reinstating Central Advisory Team wording and respectfully explaining the rationale for each change to the Editor-in-Chief.) Central Advisory Team members also played an invaluable role in disseminating the call for applications beyond existing SPSP members (since many qualified scholars from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America are not SPSP members). The PSPR Senior Editorial Team felt strongly that the Editorial Fellow should be an equally paid member of their team, and ACEMAP reallocated funding from our budget to support this idea. The call was very successful, and the PSPR Editors selected two exceptional candidates from a pool of over 60 applications to be the first two Editorial Fellows (see Figure 4 for a map of applicants’ countries).

Many members of the Central Advisory Team placed high priority on recommendations designed to introduce accountability and clear metrics for improving inclusive excellence at SPSP journals, including accountability and metrics for progress on Recommendation 1 (increasing representation in gatekeeping positions). Buchanan et al. (2021b) recommend that journals annually assess and report the number of reviewers and editors who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color and use this information to promote diversity of participants at all stages of the publication process (see also Bowleg, 2021; SPSP Equity and Anti-Racism Task Force, 2021). Similarly, the SPSP International Committee recommended monitoring and reporting the number of international researchers on editorial boards and acting as reviewers at SPSP journals (SPSP International Committee, 2021). Empirical evidence highlights the importance of accountability and public commitment for translating goals and policies into actual behavior change (e.g., Kalev et al., 2006; McCaul et al., 1987). Likewise, clear metrics are essential for setting concrete goals and assessing progress (Buchanan et al., 2021a; Carter et al., 2020).

Potential Pitfall: Reproducing U.S.-centrism. A Central Advisory Team member flagged one major pitfall that we would need to navigate in collecting demographic data, asking: “Who determines what are the social identities that matter to people? Are we (the American psychological establishment) going to determine that? That is an aggressive act of colonizing other cultures….” Indeed, whereas the history of colonialism, anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism and violence, and systems of domination and oppression more broadly are global phenomena, the specific dynamics of domination and oppression and the social identities that matter most to people are particular to a given location’s specific history and social structures (Busey & Coleman-King, 2023; González et al., 2022; Mosley, 2024; Park, 2008). Even the labels used to describe identities such as race, gender, and sexuality vary substantially from place to place, and preferred and appropriate labels can vary across time, context, and from person to person (e.g., Agyemang et al., 2005; Bogart & Dunn, 2019). Moreover, certain marginalized identities are illegalized in particular places and times (e.g., National Public Radio, 2023).

At the same time, the strongest dimensions of exclusion in our field stem from the common origin of who our systems and policies were designed to serve, as described earlier. Measuring demographics related to these dimensions is essential to monitoring progress toward more inclusive systems and policies (Freeman, 2020). We therefore needed to find a way to create a form for demographic data collection that (a) would be experienced as clear, inclusive, and safe across many different international contexts, (b) would protect the anonymity of respondents by sufficiently aggregating data before reporting, and (c) incorporated a mechanism for continual updating in response to feedback over time.

The Implementer Team solicited feedback on the form questions and response options from Central Advisory Team members and additional consultants with experience across many different world regions; their feedback was essential for designing a more inclusive form. For example, one expert pointed to the importance of adding another option to the gender question: “As someone who rejects the gender system overall, non-binary & prefer to not answer [don’t] really capture that distinction (the first could imply still valuing the gender system - just a different configuration of it and the second would not capture that some people would be perfectly happy to tell you they reject gender), it could help to add a term that attempts to capture that rejection: maybe ‘agender’ or ‘I do not like to label myself’ or ‘anti-gender’ or even ‘undecided.’” Another expert noted that Qualtrics does not include Palestine in its default list of countries and suggested either manually adding Palestine (and any other contested or not equally recognized territories missing from the list) to the country dropdown list, or, alternatively, adding an additional response option such as ‘Another option not listed here:___.’” Expert input also guided the formulation of a race/ethnicity question asking participants to choose all that apply from a long list of options that includes disaggregated regional classifications (e.g., Southeast Asian, Central or Eastern European, Sub-Saharan African) as well as broad racialized categories; furthermore, the question wording explicitly acknowledges that it may not translate to many global contexts and may be illegal to answer in some countries.

The form also includes an open-ended question where respondents can flag problems or suggest improvements, and we tasked SPSP’s Publications Committee with annually checking this feedback as well as evolving best practices to improve the form as needed. We also created a template for reporting the demographic data to SPSP’s Publications Committee, the SPSP Board, and the SPSP membership, with careful attention to global inclusiveness and with specific instructions to ensure adequate data aggregation (e.g., advising caution to avoid identifiability of sensitive identities when reporting numbers for small groups like Associate Editor teams).

Recommendations drawn from multiple sources pointed toward a subset of exclusive reviewer and editor practices that seemed relatively straightforward to identify and change (Brady et al., 2018; Buchanan et al., 2021a; González et al., 2022; Romero-Olivares, 2019; SPSP Equity and Anti-Racism Task Force, 2021). These recommendations included several practices that editors and reviewers might not realize contribute to patterns of exclusion in the field, but that they could easily change once the problem was raised. For example, scholars with names and/or affiliations that do not sound white and Western often experience patronizing and problematic reviewer comments about needing a “native English speaker” to correct their writing. Such comments—especially in the aggregate and when received in the context of the broader patterns of global exclusion in the field—can send the message that these scholars do not belong and that being a native English speaker is somehow synonymous with good writing (Kung et al., 2023; Romero-Olivares, 2019). Meanwhile, dominant group editors and reviewers might not have considered how these dynamics play out and might include these kinds of comments without thinking about their impact.

As another example, many dominant group members might not have considered how the exclusive history of the field shapes their default assumptions about whose experiences are especially important and generalizable. Indeed, considerable research has documented how U.S. American participants tend to assume other U.S. Americans are white and that people in general are male and straight (Bailey et al., 2020; Devos & Banaji, 2005; Ghani et al., 2023; Hudson & Ghani, 2021). Unsurprisingly, then, people—including scientists—tend to prioritize dominant (e.g., white and Western) viewpoints (Cheon et al., 2020; Fryberg & Eason, 2017; Purdie-Vaughns & Eibach, 2008; Thalmayer et al., 2021). Indeed, scholars studying marginalized samples experience frequent reviewer and editor requests to add white and/or U.S. American comparison or “control” samples, even when such samples are irrelevant to the research question (Kung et al., 2023). Likewise, scholars studying marginalized samples all too often encounter views dismissing their work as “applied,” “niche,” not interesting enough to a “mainstream audience,” or “belonging in a more specialized journal” (Brady et al., 2018; Kung et al., 2023).

Although dominant group members’ ignorance and well-learned social-cognitive biases are pervasive problems that often resist quick-fix solutions (e.g., Lai et al., 2016; Mosley & Solomon, 2023; Mueller, 2017), it seemed very possible—and empirically grounded (e.g., Tankard & Paluck, 2016)—that many reviewers and editors would be influenced by prescriptive norms and guidelines and able to easily change these specific behaviors with some scaffolding. Central Advisory Team members highlighted the vital importance of addressing these behaviors and were optimistic about the potential impact that simple guidelines or checklists could have, adding that reviewer and editor training could complement the guidelines to help scholars catch ignorance-based biases. Building on these ideas and with additional guidance from the Central Advisory Team, the Implementer Team developed new Guidelines for Inclusive Reviewing Practices (see Appendix) and a list of simple dos and don’ts for Action Editors (see links in Table 3). They also reached out to Reviewer Zero (a collaborative project to improve equity in the peer review process; see www.reviewerzero.net) and three additional experts to create globally accessible and relevant training materials (experts were paid using funds provided by SPSP).

Potential Pitfall: Assuming the Problem Has Been Solved. Although we were optimistic that these new guidelines could help reduce exclusionary practices, we were also aware that in the absence of an author feedback mechanism, we would have no way of knowing whether the same exclusionary practices persisted or when new problems arose. Given the high priority that the Central Advisory Team placed on creating accountability mechanisms, the Implementer Team developed a new Review Process Feedback Form that allows authors to provide feedback on exclusionary experiences encountered in the review process to the SPSP Promoting Excellence in Publications Committee. This form was designed to (a) provide authors with a transparent mechanism for giving feedback on exclusionary experiences (in contrast to the hidden-curriculum mechanisms of writing to the Editor-in-Chief or Publications Committee), (b) send a clear signal that such feedback is valued and will be listened to, and (c) provide the SPSP Publications Committee with an ongoing source of information about what kinds of new resources might be needed to address behaviors that have exclusionary impacts.

For the form to meet these goals, we needed to ensure that authors experiencing exclusionary practices would actually use the form, yet we knew (based on previous experience with both trying to provide feedback and trying to create effective feedback mechanisms) that this was easier said than done. Central Advisory Team members highlighted the importance of ensuring an anonymous submission option (to address concerns about retaliation), clearly communicating exactly who would be able to see the information provided in the form, and centering impact rather than intent.

The Implementer Team was also careful to re-consult Central Advisory Team experts whenever the form was revised in any substantial way, to ensure that changes implemented to address a concern from one perspective did not raise concerns from another perspective. This process was especially important for revising the feedback form because feedback mechanisms tend to elicit very different concerns from those who will be providing feedback versus receiving feedback. For example, once we had created and honed a form that we felt confident would work well for authors encountering exclusionary experiences in the review process, the task force chair sent the form to the SPSP Executive Director to implement. As part of the implementation process, the SPSP Executive Committee reviewed the form and provided additional feedback, raising concerns that were salient from their own vantage points.

For instance, the original version of the form used the term “exclusive or discriminatory experience,” and the Executive Committee asked questions about how SPSP would determine whether an action identified in the form actually counted as discrimination. The ACEMAP chair tried to dig down to identify the concern underlying this question; her sense was that the term discrimination has a specific legal meaning as well as a specific social psychological meaning, and using this term on the form raised concerns related to these meanings (e.g., how will the organization determine whether a behavior meets the legal definition of discrimination and triggers law-related actions; how will the organization determine with 100% accuracy whether a behavior meets the social-psychological definition of discrimination in the counterfactual sense that it would not have occurred had the sample or author been from a different group membership). Yet these concerns distracted from the original intention of the form as designed by and for authors facing exclusionary experiences: to alert SPSP when there are patterns of practices that can, especially in the context of longstanding societal inequalities, further marginalize historically excluded scholars and scholarship.

Consider the example of an editor or reviewer advising an author to “get a native English speaker to proofread your manuscript.” Such a comment is likely to land very differently for a white and U.S.-based author (who probably has not often encountered this type of comment specifically or comments questioning their belonging in the field more broadly) versus an Asian American author (who might hear this comment in the context of experiencing stereotypes and discrimination related to perceived cultural foreignness throughout their lives; Zou & Cheryan, 2017) versus an Arab author conducting research in the UAE (who might hear this comment in the context of globally exclusive editorial practices that repeatedly convey that their work is not valued and does not belong in mainstream psychology outlets; Bou Zeineddine et al., 2022). Thus, a reviewer who includes this comment in every review, regardless of author identity, would not be discriminating in the legal or social-psychological sense, yet the comment would still result in inequitable harm (see also Aly et al., 2023; Silbiger & Stubler, 2019).

The task force chair consulted with both the Executive Committee and Central Advisory Team members to identify a new term (exclusionary experiences) that would work equally well from Central Advisory Team members’ perspectives and did not distract as much from the purpose of the form. Altogether, this process involved many rounds of feedback and navigating perspectives that sometimes seemed to conflict. We think that the principles of (a) centering marginalized viewpoints and (b) trying to understand the concerns underlying a given piece of feedback helped us produce a final product that worked well from multiple perspectives.

Recommendations 4 and 5 built on multiple calls for journal articles to include better information about study participants and the people and contexts to whom the work is expected to apply. For example, Buchanan et al. (2021a) recommend requiring authors to report race data for all participants (including multiracial identities), in addition to ethnic and national identities as well as other intersecting categories such as social class, to avoid the assumption of homogeneity within racial groups and instead reflect heterogeneity in experiences of oppression or privilege. Likewise, Brady et al. (2018) point to the importance of acknowledging when the majority of participants are white and Western and reflecting on the implications of that sample composition for the research, and the SPSP International Committee (2021) emphasized the importance of avoiding overgeneralization (e.g., when a paper title claims very broadly that “people do X” but the samples are all U.S. college students; see also Ledgerwood et al., 2024). Rad et al. (2018) note that many published articles currently report very little sample information other than gender, and recommend that the location of the research should be disclosed in addition to other important demographic information such as nationality, ethnicity, and social class (see also Sabik et al., 2021).

On a basic level, these recommendations speak to questions of external validity and improve readers’ and reviewers’ abilities to assess the scope and applicability of the findings. They can also provide important insights into exclusions and biases in the research process that may require explicit justification (Rad et al., 2018). Another way to think about these kinds of recommendations is that they advance intellectual humility, enabling scientists to better understand the limits of our knowledge and what we do not yet know (Griffin & Tversky, 1992; Sanchez & Dunning, 2018).

In addition, these recommendations are designed to address a systematic bias in the publication system: Psychology papers are more likely to have titles implying generality (by omitting sample characteristics) when the studies focus on white participants in the U.S. than when the studies focus on non-white participants and participants in other countries (Cheon et al., 2020). Additionally, the country in which the research was conducted is more likely to be mentioned in articles with samples from outside of the U.S. (and, to a lesser extent, from outside Western Europe), and these articles tend to get less scientific attention (Kahalon et al., 2022). Presumably, editors and reviewers are less likely to request (and authors are less likely to include) sample information and careful consideration of context when studies focus on white participants in the U.S.. As Remedios (2022) succinctly summarizes: “Psychology must grapple with Whiteness—the social context of power and privilege unique to white participants—to achieve racial justice goals; however, psychologists are incentivized to conceal its influence” (p. 1).

Potential pitfall: Reproducing U.S.-centrism. As with Recommendation 2 (to track and report author, reviewer, and editor demographics), we needed to be careful to implement new guidelines for sample reporting that were sensitive to variations around the world regarding which sample characteristics would be most relevant to report. For example, caste and religion would be very relevant sample information to include for a study conducted in India, whereas race and ethnicity would often be particularly relevant for a study in Canada or the U.S..⁹ Moreover, when racial information is relevant to collect, the relevant or appropriate labels may differ vastly across contexts (e.g., different specific racial categories are used in Puerto Rico vs. Hawaii; see e.g., Garay et al., 2019; Rivera Pichardo et al., 2021). In addition, some countries ban data collection on elements of sample information even when they would be very relevant aspects of social context to understand (e.g., it is illegal to collect data on race, ethnicity, and religion in France despite the country’s colonial history; similarly, in post-genocide Rwanda, it is illegal to talk about being Hutu or Tutsi).

Thus, any simple and rigid rule (e.g., “Require authors to report percentages of the study sample who are Black, Indigenous, Asian, white, and/or Latine”) would (a) position a particular societal context as the normative and prioritized one for psychological research to take place (e.g., the U.S.) and (b) fail to translate well across different contexts (e.g., a sample of Lebanese participants). We therefore kept our recommended author guidelines broad and flexible, requiring authors to “report a more detailed set of demographic information (and any other background information) about the sample and context of the study that are relevant for understanding and interpreting the study’s findings” and reminding authors to consider “intersecting social positions that are relevant in the given context and for the research question.” Inclusive and complete reporting therefore requires reflecting on the most relevant dimensions of oppression and privilege in a given context, including those that are often taken for granted and not considered (such as social class, which is relevant in all societies but often not included in social psychological sample descriptions). It also requires considering which social categories would be particularly relevant given the topic of the study, even if they are not routinely considered in a given context. For example, for a study on collective action, political ideology and whether or not someone identifies as an activist would be important to report to better understand the generalizability of the findings. In larger countries with important regional differences, such as India or the U.S., the state might be important to report in addition to the country. We also emphasized to editors the importance of flexibility in enforcing the guidelines (e.g., “requesting clarification when needed but not rigidly insisting on a certain set of demographics to be reported for every manuscript”).

Building on these themes, we developed author Guidelines and Examples for Reporting Sample Characteristics (see Figure 5 and link in Table 3). This SPSP resource provides authors with detailed guidance on reporting more complete and inclusive sample information. It also provides concrete examples of how to implement the guidelines in actual descriptions of samples from real articles, drawn from a range of different contexts and including both qualitative and quantitative work.

Complementing Recommendation 4, Recommendation 5 requires all articles to reflect on and clearly communicate the work’s scope and to avoid misleading claims of generalizability. We originally conceptualized this recommendation as a one-size-fits-all requirement for manuscripts to include a Constraints on Generality statement, but when we asked for feedback on our initial recommendations from the PSPR and PSPB Senior Editorial Teams, the PSPR team helpfully pointed out that such a narrowly conceptualized requirement could further marginalize qualitative research for which generalizability is not the goal.

Building on this important point, the revised recommendation acknowledges that implementation will look different for qualitative and quantitative research and for empirical versus review articles. For empirical articles that use qualitative methods, where generalizability may not be the goal, this recommendation involves requiring that manuscripts follow the qualitative praxis of reflexivity and discussions of transferability of findings through a careful description of the context. For empirical articles that also or instead use quantitative methods, it means requiring a constraints on generality statement in the discussion that draws on the detailed sample characterization in the Method section required in Recommendation 4. Finally, for review articles, it means requiring a thoughtful discussion of the generalizability or transferability of the reviewed body of research.

Potential Pitfall: Requiring a New Practice that Few Authors Know How to Do. The Central Advisory Team placed high priority on this recommendation. As one member emphasized: “I think requiring Constraints on Generalizability is probably one of the most important recommendations, at least on the publication end. I read so many discussion sections that inadequately discuss limitations on sample/generalizability and assume that their results generalize to everyone when the sample is 80%+ white.” At the same time, another member highlighted the need for adequate author support: “I think some people are going to have a lot of trouble doing this and so having supportive guidelines…will be really important.”

In particular, we were concerned that in the absence of specific author guidelines and new resources, introducing a requirement for quantitative empirical manuscripts to include a constraints on generality section would not meaningfully address the tendency for authors studying white and Western samples to ignore the specific social context and privileged position of their samples. For example, in the original paper advocating for constraints on generality statements, none of the three example paragraphs mention culture, race, or status cues more generally (Simons et al., 2017). Authors seeking concrete examples of how to write a constraints on generality statement would therefore find models that omitted the very information this recommendation was designed to promote.

To address this potential pitfall, we developed a set of five specific guidelines for writing an effective constraints on generality (COG) statement that attends to race/ethnicity, social status and power dynamics, nationality, and cultural context (see Figure 6). We also assembled and organized a searchable set of strong COG statements that exemplify one or more of the guidelines, providing authors with a range of templates for crafting a COG statement that fits their own research context and names relevant dimensions of societal power and privilege (available on SPSP’s website; see link in Table 3).

Potential Pitfall: Requiring a New Practice Without Checking that Authors Actually Follow It. Given the prevalence of generics (e.g., “people do X”) in titles and abstracts (DeJesus et al., 2019) and the tendency for the racial identities of white participants and the location of U.S. samples to go unnamed while all other experiences are qualified by identity (Castro Torres & Alburez-Gutierrez, 2022; Cheon et al., 2020), we also recommended that editors institute two new checkboxes in the paper submission process. These checkboxes ask authors to confirm that they have (1) included a careful description of context (for qualitative articles) or a Constraints on Generality section (for quantitative articles), and (2) included information about the context of their study in the title and abstract. Moreover, given documented biases in how people evaluate research that does (vs. does not) specify sample characteristics (Kahalon et al., 2022), we emphasized to editors that “it is extremely important to ensure that all manuscripts include this information before going out for review! Otherwise, authors who follow the submission guidelines are likely to be unfairly penalized for doing so. We recommend adding these checkboxes to submission checklists to help reduce the editorial burden of checking these elements for each submission.”

Recommendation 6 built on existing recommendations to improve the accessibility of research for those outside well-resourced academic institutions. For example, the SPSP International Committee (2021) recommended providing free or low cost access to journal articles for scholars in low-income countries. Multiple Central Advisory Team members working in the Global Souths highlighted the importance of this recommendation.

The Implementer Team thought that the Board might be able to implement this change fairly easily (the SPSP International Committee had already successfully advocated for a similar option for conference registration and so we thought it might be easily added for membership; in addition, it seemed unlikely that such a change would dramatically affect revenue given how few scholars from low-income countries can afford SPSP’s existing membership rates). We therefore added it as an additional recommendation that would be straightforward to implement and unlikely to run into pitfalls.

During a later round of feedback, a Central Advisory Team member suggested also providing free or low-cost access to articles with direct relevance to policy, given that nonprofits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) often want to use research evidence to inform their work but have limited funds to access research articles. The Implementer Team worked with SPSP’s Executive Director and the publisher to successfully negotiate for a limited number of articles in SPSP journals with policy relevance to be made freely accessible each year.

Two of our expert sources recommended encouraging authors to more equitably cite scholars of color (Bowleg, 2021) or requiring a citation diversity statement in which authors describe how they attempted to cite equitably and the resulting diversity of their references (Buchanan et al., 2021a; see also Zurn et al., 2020). In academia, citations operate as currency: Hiring committees, promotion and tenure committees, and grant proposal reviewers all use citations as a central metric for evaluating whether to literally pay a scholar for their work (Bowleg, 2021; Faria & Mixon, 2021). Which prior work authors choose to cite, or not cite, is a decision steeped in the context of power and oppression in the field (Smith et al., 2021). Citations not only convey prior ideas and resources, but they also acknowledge (or fail to acknowledge) the people who produced those ideas and resources in the first place.

Although it may be tempting to believe that citation practices are purely meritocratic, the exclusive history of academic psychology shapes researcher citation practices by influencing what types of scholarship are seen as normative and relevant to mainstream knowledge production (Buchanan et al., 2021a; see also Settles et al., 2021). In the context of citation practices, the Matthew Effect refers to the tendency for the well-cited to become even more well-cited and the seldom-cited to remain marginalized from dominant discussions in the scientific literature (Lawson et al., 2023). This exclusion, which is exacerbated by popular citation metrics and algorithms, manifests as scholars further from the included center being cited less equitably: Black and Hispanic scholars (Liu et al., 2023), women scholars (Dworkin et al., 2020), and scholars from and/or working in the Global Souths (Reddy & Amer, 2023) receive disproportionately fewer citations than their counterparts who are U.S.-based white men. Those with intersecting marginalized identities, such as Black women living in the U.S., experience compounded exclusion in citations (Bertolero et al., 2020; see Smith, 2021 for an introduction to the Cite Black Women movement).

Potential Pitfall: Introducing a Requirement that Does More Harm than Good. Members of the Central Advisory Team agreed that improving citations practices is important, but expressed multiple concerns with implementing concrete journal requirements aimed at promoting inclusive citing. One expert noted: “I worry about backlash in encouraging or requiring citation of BIPOC authors” because “citation practice is so deeply biased, and sometimes strategic.” Another expert pointed out that “encouraging people to cite scholars of color for ‘citing sake’ might not be the best way to improve diversity and could even hurt credibility of these studies in the long run if citations are not relevant to the discussion.” Such a problem could be especially likely to occur if editors do not have the broad, interdisciplinary knowledge needed to help authors widen the base of relevant citations. Multiple experts also pointed to the lack of existing systems for accurately identifying authors’ societal positions (e.g., whether they are marginalized along racial and gender dimensions). If most authors are not already aware of the way that historical and systemic biases have created deep inequities in citation practices, or are not also motivated to invest time and effort in combating these inequities, introducing a requirement at the journal level could produce superficial compliance (e.g., using an algorithm to estimate the proportion of cited authors who are women vs. men and pasting the results into a paper) without the deeper work needed to actually improve inequities in citations (e.g., citing and engaging with relevant work conducted by Black women in an adjacent subfield or discipline).

Given these concerns and the real possibility that implementing a requirement related to inclusive citing could do more harm than good in our particular context and at this particular time, the Implementer Team instead focused on removing obstacles to improved citation practices by developing resources to (a) raise awareness about the importance of inclusive citation practices, for authors who might not have yet thought much about the power of their own citation decisions to influence the field, and (b) provide concrete how-to guidance, for authors who are already interested in improving their citation practices but do not know where to begin.

First, with funding from SPSP, the Implementer Team organized and recorded a video conversation among (paid) experts in the field on the importance of inclusive citing (see link in Table 3). The goal was to provide authors interested in learning more about the topic with an accessible and engaging introduction that could support them in thinking more deeply about their citation practices. Second, the Implementer Team developed concrete author guidelines for promoting inclusive citation practices, now available on the SPSP website (see Figure 7 and link in Table 3). This webpage provides authors with concrete guidance for taking the next step toward inclusive citation practices, with the hope that authors can find support for moving one step forward from wherever they currently happen to be. The page includes a reading list for better understanding the problem, concrete tools for diversifying citations to better include the ideas and work of researchers from historically marginalized groups, specific ideas for citing more broadly to connect beyond the borders of siloed areas, and specific examples of citation diversity statements and annotated reference sections.

Finally, we suggested adding gentle language to submission guidelines encouraging authors to “adopt inclusive citation practices that can help reduce bias in the citation process and better ground their work in the relevant literatures across different sub-areas and disciplines,” with a link to the new resources. Given concerns from the Central Advisory Team about pushback, we did not suggest adding any requirements or checkboxes to submission portals.

Almost all of the existing sets of recommendations from which we drew included suggestions for editors and journals to communicate and practice inclusive values. For example, multiple sources recommended publishing and highlighting research with authors, samples, and methods that have been historically excluded from mainstream psychology and communicating such priorities in editorials and on journal websites (Brady et al., 2018; Buchanan et al., 2021a; McCormick-Huhn et al., 2019; SPSP Equity and Anti-Racism Task Force, 2021; SPSP International Committee, 2021).

Potential Pitfall: Empty Signaling. Central Advisory Team members pointed out that these kinds of changes could be positive and fairly straightforward to implement, while also cautioning that signaling inclusive values is only useful to the extent that (in one team member’s words) “editors are also walking that walk.” In addition to compiling a list of specific suggestions for Senior Editorial Teams, we assembled a list of recommended training resources for editorial teams (see Table 3 for link) to support editorial team discussions, in the hope that such discussions could provide a foundation for editors to think more deeply about how exclusive values and norms permeate the publication process and then take steps to counteract those defaults. To introduce an additional layer of accountability for aligning values and actions, we also recommended that SPSP’s Promoting Inclusive Excellence in Publications Committee should (a) support editors in implementing inclusive values, (b) explicitly weigh inclusive values in the editorial selection process, and (c) ask prospective editors to submit a plan for increasing representation (see Recommendation 1) as part of the editorial selection process.

Our final recommendation built on existing calls for journals to use invited articles and special issues to showcase work by scholars of color and work focused on intersectionality, racism, epistemological exclusion, Community Based Partnerships and Collaborations, and critical and structural perspectives (Bowleg, 2021; Buchanan et al., 2021a; McCormick-Huhn et al., 2019; SPSP Equity and Anti-Racism Task Force, 2021). This idea seemed like a straightforward mechanism to begin counteracting the decades of policies and practices that have systematically excluded these authors and topics from mainstream psychology journals. Inviting articles on historically excluded topics could also complement the communication of inclusive values (Recommendation 8) by demonstrating that editors are not simply changing what they say they value, but also changing what kinds of papers they publish. Authors working in historically excluded topic areas might be more likely to submit their papers to a journal with a demonstrated track record of publishing “papers like mine.”

Our initial recommendation was for PSPB and PSPR to publish occasional special issues or special sections in the following historically excluded areas to better incorporate them into the center of the field:

• critical and structural perspectives

• intersectionality, including papers that reflect the full spectrum of BIPOC populations (e.g., not only low-income members of a group), and other marginalized social statuses within all racial and ethnic groups (e.g., based on disability, sexuality)

• epistemologies, ways of knowing, and epistemic exclusion

• publications by BIPOC scholars and/or scholars in the Global South on topics related to diversity and (anti-) racism

• Community Based Partnerships and Collaborations (CBPC)

Potential Pitfall: Editorial Resistance. The Implementer Team expected this recommendation to be simple and straightforward to implement. However, when the task force chair brought our initial list of recommendations to the PSPB and PSPR Senior Editorial Teams for feedback, the PSPB team raised several strong concerns. The chair listened to the editors’ concerns and learned that the journal faces rigid page restrictions from their publisher, and multiple senior editors thought that page space was already far too limited. They worried that special issues or even special sections would create an even more competitive and unsupportive environment for manuscripts coming to the journal via the regular submission process. Editors voiced the same strong concern when space considerations appeared in other recommendations in our original draft, including the suggestion for empirical journals to remove word limits for qualitative articles (whose methods often require much more space to describe; this change would remove a key obstacle to publishing historically excluded methods; Bowleg, 2021) and relaxing word limits for reference sections at journals that have word limits (which would remove a key obstacle to improving citation practices; Buchanan et al., 2021a).

In response to these concerns, the Implementer Team substantially narrowed the scope of Recommendation 9 to propose that editors set a plan and timeline to occasionally invite individual articles on historically excluded areas. (Recall that this recommendation was selected by the Implementer Team as readily achievable; the goal was to find a straightforward baby step that could be implemented easily without risking large pitfalls). We considered that one potential benefit of individual articles over special issues is that individual articles may better incorporate historically excluded topic areas as central topics regularly published by a journal, rather than siloing them in separate issues. The Implementer Team also set aside the suggestions to relax word limits for qualitative methods and reference sections and pursued other avenues toward reducing barriers for historically excluded methods and citations (see e.g., Recommendations 7 and 8).

In the year (February 2023 to March 2024) since the task force concluded its work and transferred responsibility for implementing the remaining recommendations and resources to the SPSP Executive Director, the PSPB and PSPR Editors-in-Chief, and the newly reinvented Promoting Inclusive Excellence in Publications Committee (PIE PubComm), progress has continued. Our sense is the success of this part of the process (handing off responsibility) depended heavily on the involvement of a paid staff member (in our case, SPSP Executive Director Rachel Puffer) who is deeply committed to the organization’s mission and has the skills and motivation to continually monitor, support, and nudge forward progress when needed. PSPB made a number of changes to its submission portal and submission guidelines (e.g., a checkbox for authors to confirm they included a Constraints on Generality statement or context discussion; adding relevant links to ACEMAP resources in submission guidelines; allowing authors to request an exception to length limits if using qualitative or mixed methods), began disseminating ACEMAP’s guidelines for inclusive reviewing in all reviewer invitations, and provided resources to all associate editors for checking that samples are well characterized and that claims made in the paper are appropriately calibrated to samples. PSPR created an Editorial Plan for Improving Representation using the ACEMAP template and invited submissions for a special issue on “Highlighting Personality and Social Psychological Theory from Majority World Contexts.” Other changes may have to wait for new editorial terms because societies are often reluctant to require (rather than just encourage) editors to adopt changes in the middle of their term; for example, PSPB opted to “strongly encourage” rather than require some of ACEMAP’s recommended changes in its submission guidelines; PSPR has yet to update its submission guidelines in response to our recommendations; to our knowledge, senior editorial teams at both journals have yet to engage with ACEMAP’s training resources for editorial teams.

Meanwhile, PIE PubComm developed and unanimously approved a plan for tracking representation over time in editorial gatekeeping positions and how journals are faring with respect to Editors’ plans for improving representation, a plan for providing support and accountability to Editors in the approval process for appointments of Associate Editors, and a plan for improving representation on PIE PubComm itself. It also conducted its first Editorial Search in which applicants were required to submit an editorial plan for increasing representation in editorial positions; the search committee explicitly weighed track record and commitment to inclusive excellence in evaluating applicants for the next Editor-in-Chief of PSPB.

Over a period of 17 months, the ACEMAP task force developed nine first-priority recommendations for SPSP journals and numerous supporting resources, including a template Editorial Plan for Increasing Representation, guidelines and examples for writing an effective constraints on generality section, guidelines for inclusive reviewing and citing practices, guidelines and training materials for reporting sample characteristics, a more globally inclusive form for demographic data collection, and more. Our work built on the foundation laid by experts before us and developed through an unconventional approach to committee work, which allowed us to center a broad range of perspectives that have been historically excluded from the publication process. In the grand scheme of ongoing racism and global exclusion, the outcomes of our work are small and incremental, as improvements to a broken system must often be. They will require ongoing work to maintain and improve (hopefully supported by the accountability elements and standing committee that we helped develop), and they represent one puzzle piece in what is and must be a much broader effort of people working in their own local contexts to effect positive change. If we conceptualize the work of our task force as part of an iterative, spiral process (see Figure 2), then a key next step is for the Promoting Inclusive Excellence in Publications Committee to observe the impact of these recommendations as they are implemented, identify successes and failures, and develop new plans accordingly. We hope the approach and outcomes of the work described here will be useful to scholars working to incorporate anti-racism and global inclusion in their manuscript writing, reviewing, editing, and decision-making processes, both across psychology and beyond.

The task force’s work described in this manuscript built on the expertise and efforts of many scholars of color. When searching for and selecting among relevant additional citations, we thought carefully about citational justice, particularly with respect to the historical marginalization of authors of color (especially Black and Indigenous scholars and especially women) and authors from the Global Souths.

All authors contributed to the work described in this manuscript. A.L., K.M.L., M.W.K., J. D. R., J.R.V., D.W.W., and A.K.U. drafted text. All authors edited and/or reviewed the manuscript before submission.

The authors wish to thank Academics for Black Survival and Wellness collective, the SPSP Equity and Anti-Racism Task Force, and the authors of the papers listed in our reading list (see Supplemental Materials), upon whose substantial and valuable work our task force built. We also thank Anna Kende, Franki Kung, Sumaya Laher, Angela Maitner, Rachel Puffer, and Rim Saab for their essential and deeply appreciated contributions to developing and implementing ACEMAP recommendations and resources.

Resources listed in Table 3 can be found on this paper’s project page on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/edwm9/) and several are also available at https://spsp.org/professional-development/publishing-resources/resources-for-inclusive-practices

Preparation of this manuscript was supported in part by NSF grant BCS-1941440 to A.L. and European Research Council Consolidator Grant (817577 - HONORLOGIC) to A.K.U.

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

The table above depicts some of the systematic ways that social-personality psychology research with non-dominant groups is often devalued or trivialized and the ways that research with dominant groups is privileged. To avoid unintentionally perpetuating these dynamics in the review process, we suggest following a simple list of dos and don’ts during the review process.

• Highlight the value of studies using non-dominant samples by commenting on their importance in your review.

• Recognize and comment on the value of applied as well as theoretically-driven research.

• Ensure that reviews serve a constructive, formative function by providing respectful, concrete, and specific feedback with actionable suggestions and potential paths forward.

• Request that authors include demographic information (i.e., where or among which population the research was conducted, often including age, gender, societal status cues like race/ethnicity or caste, nationality of the sample) in the title and abstract for all empirical papers and (when relevant) review papers, not only those that use or synthesize results from non-dominant samples.

• Make realistic requests taking into account the cultural and structural contexts of the research, including timing and conditions, under which the research took place. For example, do not ask authors to address points that are not possible to do in the context of the reported research (e.g., replicate a study about COVID lockdowns after the initial COVID lockdowns are over; run a computer-based study in a sample with low connectivity, etc.).

• Especially when studies rely on homogenous samples from dominant groups that are sometimes assumed to represent the norm, request that authors thoroughly discuss the constraints of generality of their findings, which may include the cultural and/or structural context.

• Demonstrate humility by describing gaps in your knowledge when submitting your assessment. This can help uncover whether judgments of quality are based on the extent to which you are familiar and/or comfortable with the cultural and/or political context of the work or the methodology, and can help the editor determine whether additional expertise would be useful.

• Promote inclusive citation practices, which includes not requesting that authors replace literature they cited from underrepresented sources and backgrounds with the literature from journals and scholars in the U.S. and Western Europe, or suggest that their literature review is insufficient without this literature.

• Don’t use phrases like “belongs in a more specialized journal” or suggest that an article isn’t really psychology or isn’t suitable for a particular journal just because of its methodological approach (e.g., qualitative methods), sample (e.g., Turkish participants), or a topic/phenomenon that may be less relevant to your own context or social position (e.g., war or occupation).

• Don’t question the relevance, importance, or generalizability of the findings just because the sample was from a non-dominant group or underrepresented context or because the research addresses a topic that is less relevant to your own context or social position.

• Don’t ask authors to add a control group from a dominant sample (e.g., a white control group) when working with data from a non-dominant sample, because this renders the dominant group as the default.

• Don’t ask authors to justify the use of a non-dominant sample if you would not have asked for justification had the authors used a sample of participants from a more dominant group.

• Don’t make assumptions about the authors’ nationality or recommend that a manuscript be edited by a “native English speaker.” When requesting language edits, only do so if these are absolutely central to being able to follow the argument, and not if the issues are simply due to a different style of expression.