The Decade in Review

Once every 10 years we have an incredible opportunity to step back and reflect on where we are as a field. As you will see in these pages, we have come a long way in the past decade. Much work lies ahead, of course, and an important objective for each of the essays in this issue was to help chart the course for future work on aspects of marriage, families, and close relationships. In this comment, I hope to describe some of the context for the 20 1 0 decade review issue, the process for selecting topics and authors, general instructions the authors were given, and plans for additional invited essays to be published later in this volume. There have been four previous decade review issues, most of which were published at the end of the first year of the new decade. The first was edited by Carlfred Broderick and consisted of review essays published in November 1970 and February and May 1971. Subsequent decade review issues were edited by Felix Berardo (November 1 980), Alan Booth (November 1990), and Robert Milardo (November 2000). Subjective indicators (e.g., discussions among colleagues) as well as objective indicators (e.g., citations) suggest that earlier decade reviews have been widely read by diverse audiences, including established scholars, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates. In continuing this very successful Journal of Marriage and Family (JMF) tradition, we sought ways to expand the firmly established visibility and impact of previous decade reviews. As I researched citations to review essays and how they influence journals' impact factors, it was clear that publishing the decade review essays earlier in the calendar year would be beneficial. I suggested this to the editorial board in November 2007, and they strongly agreed. One countervailing consideration was that if we planned publication for too early in 2010, it would preclude authors from being able to incorporate research published later in 2009. Given that JMF adopted a new production schedule for 2010, we decided that the optimal time to publish the 2010 decade review essays would be the June issue. The process of selecting topics for coverage was multifaceted. I began by charting the topics that were selected for discussion in each of the previous decade review issues. I also conducted a content analysis of the tables of contents and abstracts of every issue of JMF published between 1 999 and 2007 to identify research areas that received the most and the least attention from family scholars. I compiled an exhaustive list of topics and surveyed the editorial board for their input. Editorial board members (N = 57) ranked the importance of each topic, suggested additional topics, and recommended possible authors. I then deliberated with JMF\ deputy editors (Cheryl Buehler, David Johnson, Ralph LaRossa, Velma McBride Murry, and Jay Teachman) to narrow the list and to identify the names of the most widely respected scholars for each of the selected topics. Although the highest priority was to provide space for reviews of research on the most widely studied topics during the decade (e.g., parenting, marriage, family violence, divorce, and work and family), we also sought to provide space for discussion of timely topics (e.g., immigration and war and terrorism), understudied populations (e. …