ARSR: committed to quality and breaking new ground.

As the incoming editor of the Annual Review of Sex Research (ARSR), I was asked to state my goals for the forthcoming series of issues, and I gladly take this opportunity. From the early years of my own work in sex research, the ARSR has been one of my most important resources. Its contributions always brought me comprehensiveness and scholarly excellence, whatever the topic of the article. Thus, it may not come as a surprise that I am dedicated to maintain this high standard of quality and comprehensiveness of the reviews that make it into ARSR. Below, I highlight some of the quality criteria that color my view of what are good and worthwhile review articles. What determines the quality of review articles? First of all, it needs to be emphasized that the quality of any narrative or meta-analytic review necessarily depends on the quality of the studies aggregated by the authors (''compiled excellence'' vs. ''garbage in, garbage out''). One of the noteworthy findings in this respect is that bad research typically tends to overestimate the magnitude of its demonstrated effects. Conversely, studies of higher methodological quality tend to be associated with smaller effect sizes. Methodo-logical rigor, thus, may help to keep the researcher from erroneously finding what he or she desires most to find in the absence of a true effect. Unfortunately, this association of research quality and outcome magnitude can—until now—only be gleaned from publications in other fields of study. For example, Klein, Jacobs, and Reinecke (2007) found that, compared with earlier studies , more recent studies of cognitive-behavioral therapy for adolescent depression tended to yield smaller effect sizes (but with narrower confidence intervals), but also that higher-quality studies produced smaller effect sizes. This was recently replicated in a meta-analysis of studies of psychotherapy for adult depressive disorder (Cuijpers, van Straten, Bohlmeijer, Hollon, & Andersson, 2010). Such direct association of metho-dological quality with the outcome of investigations should caution ARSR authors, and reviewers who evaluate ARSR manuscripts, not to lean on publications with unclear or dubious methodology. I am happy to have already discovered that authors indeed are critical about the choice of articles for their manuscripts, and that ARSR reviewers do pay critical attention to the quality of the publications that are reviewed and referenced. Causality is another crucial issue in the research on which review articles are based. Most of the study designs that are used …