Editorial.

Changes in the editor team

The team of editors has undergone some changes in 2021. Arthur Bakker has ended his term as Co-Editor-in-Chief. The whole community, and in particular the community of ESM authors, ESM reviewers, and ESM editors, highly appreciated his immense service, starting in 2014 as Associate Editor, becoming Editor-in-Chief, and restructuring in 2020 to share the load between two Co-Editors-in-Chief starting in 2021. Arthur has done fantastic work with excellent organization, and a lot of energy and enthusiasm, proactively shaping the culture of the journal and thoughtfully including very different ideas and voices. We heartfully thank Arthur for his leadership in the field!

Wim Van Dooren has also stepped away from his role as Associate Editor to focus on his leadership role in the International Group of the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Wim served in this role since 2015 and brought strong technical knowledge and wisdom to his work managing peer review and editing many ESM papers. Ángel Gutiérrez will also be stepping away from his role as Associate Editor to focus on leadership roles in his university. Ángel served in this editorial role since 2011, characterized by thoughtful judgment and a wealth of international connections. We heartfully thank Ángel and Wim for their service to the field!

Susanne Prediger has replaced Arthur Bakker and will now serve with David Wagner as joint Editors-in-Chief. The departures of Arthur, Ángel and Wim opened opportunities to welcome three new Associate Editors, Michèle Artigue, Demetra Pitta-Pantazi and Michal Tabach. We also recently welcomed Angelika Bikner-Ahsbahs into the role in response to an increase in manuscript submission rates. Furthermore, Jill Adler joined our editor team in the role of Consulting Editor earlier in 2021. We already appreciate the significant contributions of Angelika and Jill, and we look forward to working with Demetra, Michal and Michèle.

Trends

After seeing a huge increase of submitted manuscripts in 2020 (560 manuscripts in total after 431 in 2019) that we explained by writing capacities in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of submissions seems to have settled to the previous trend: with 416 submitted papers by December 3, 2021, we expect almost 450 by the end of 2021.

Table 1 shows a steady increase in the journal’s impact factor. It is necessary to note that a change in the method for calculating impact factor caused an artificial jump in ESM’s impact factor as for other journals (counting also online first papers besides the two recent published years). Nevertheless, ESM’s increase is greater than the expected artificial increase.

Table 1

Impact factor, ESM, 2014–2020

Year	Impact factor
2014	0.579
2015	0.839
2016	0.959
2017	1.100
2018	1.292
2019	1.500
2020	2.402

We have been working at speeding up our processes to reduce the number of days for the review processes, but we have found this to be a challenge during the pandemic. The quality of the peer review process remains important, and we find that since the beginning of the pandemic, potential reviewers are declining invitations more and more, and reviewers are taking longer to do their reviews. Given the importance of peer review to our field (and others), we encourage readers to take the responsibility to contribute to the process seriously.

Reviews in equity and diversity perspectives

As editors, we are interested in more than impact factor numbers. Our editor team has talked at length about the journal’s role in hosting papers from diverse regions and addressing readers internationally. One way to do this is to recruit reviewers who write high-quality reviews and who understand diverse international readers. We have articulated what we consider to be a good review in our previous editorial (Mesa et al., 2021). Complementing this editorial, we have discussed how to support and develop equitable practices in our field, especially in our roles managing peer review. An earlier editorial reflected some of these discussions (Wagner et al., 2020). And our Editors-in-Chief participated in a wider dialogue about these questions among journal editors in our field.

Between September 2020 and June 2021, a group of editors from various journals of mathematics education research met monthly to pursue an initiative to develop anti-racist editorial practices in Mathematics Education, convened by Jeffrey Choppin and Daniel Battey, and under Dorothy White as chair. One outcome of this initiative is the following joint statement, also available at: https://mathematicseducationjournals.com/.

Joint statement to reduce reviewer bias

We seek to cultivate mathematics education as a field of research that is inclusive of all its contributors. We are committed to the principle that the review process must practice anti-discrimination while it exercises its role in helping authors improve their production and helping editors ensure the scholarly excellence of published manuscripts. We acknowledge that discrimination is still present in reviews, on the basis of physical ability, class, culture, gender, race, religion, sex, language, and national origin sometimes directed to authors and other times to the research contexts authors examine.

Presumptions of racial and cultural superiority in reviewing have in that way added to a chronic silencing of the voices of authors from historically oppressed groups in society at large. While such acts of discrimination may be unintentional, they affect the authors who receive them and eventually prevent our international community from becoming as inclusive as possible in its cadres of knowledge producers. This, in turn, limits the productivity, the quality, and consequently the prestige of our field of mathematics education.

We aspire that the good intentions of reviewers be informed by the lived experience of those who have been discriminated against in reviewing. We must thus move toward a future in which we are all more cognizant of the effects of our words. We also promote thoughtfulness about who is cited in the papers our journal publishes and who reviewers promote as needing citation, to pay attention to research from regions and groups that are often underrepresented.

We are all builders of a more inclusive field and also learners in this quest; thus, this commitment seeks to encourage learning and empathy rather than to dismiss individuals by attaching permanent labels to them. We appreciate the effort our reviewers put into their volunteer work and we continue to expect their assistance in identifying good research. Within this appreciative embrace, we encourage reviewers to face the reviewing task for our journal also considering the potential impact of the language they use in reviews and by learning about the lived experiences of scholars from groups that have been historically excluded in our field and about other contexts and frameworks for knowledge generation that may also contribute to enrich our scholarship.

Thanks

Last, we would like to express our gratitude to the Associate Editors, all Editorial Board members, and reviewers who continue to write high-quality reviews that help the authors and the field of mathematics education research further.