Publications and Communications Board: 2024 Annual Report

APA Publishing serves three important functions, as a content provider of high quality scholarship, as a standard setter for scholarly publishing in psychology, and as APA’s primary source of income. Total revenue for APA’s core scholarly and professional publishing program (including APA Journals, APA Books, APA Style and Publication Manual, Academic Writer, PsycInfo, PsycLearn, PsycTests, and PsycTherapy) totaled over $112 million in 2024. 

The P&C Board is pleased to have made three editorial appointments to APA Core journals in 2024, naming the following Editors to six-year terms, beginning in 2025 as the Editor-elect year (and 2026 as the debut masthead year). 

• Jonathon Crystal, PhD, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition
• Steven Paul Woods, PhD, Neuropsychology
• Fred Oswald, PhD, Psychological Methods 

In addition, the P&C Board made nine editorial appointments for journals in the Educational Publishing Foundation (EPF) imprint of specialized and co-owned journals: 

• Michael Kelley, PhD, Behavior Analysis: Research and Practice
• Nathan Bowling, PhD, International Journal of Stress Management
• Elizabeth Crouch, PhD, Journal of Rural Mental Health
• Etzel Cardena, PhD, Psychology of Consciousness
• Pam Fenning, PhD, School Psychology
• Joseph Currier, PhD, Spirituality in Clinical Practice
• Valerie Earnshaw, PhD, Stigma and Health
• Richard N. Landers, PhD, Technology, Mind, and Behavior
• Thanos Karatzias, PhD, Traumatology 

In 2024, the P&C Board also opened 10 searches for the following APA Core and EPF journals; incoming editors to begin in 2026:  

• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Journal of Applied Psychology
• Journal of Educational Psychology
• Psychological Bulletin
• Psychology of Addictive Behaviors
• Couple and Family Psychology: Research and Practice
• Journal of Threat Assessment and Management
• Practice Innovations
• Psychology of Popular Media
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology 

APA Journals produces an array of scholarly journals that cover the spectrum of psychology. Journals published more than 63,480 pages in 2024 across 89 journals and two Clinician’s Research Digests, representing almost 5,190 articles assigned to 515 journal issues.

Table 1. Five-year count of APA journal submissions and pages published

*Number of journals excludes Clinician’s Research Digests, and counts the three sections of Journal of Social and Personality Psychology as one journal 

During 2024, editors at 26 APA Core journals recruited editorial fellows to serve in the 2025 publication year, increased from the 18 participating journals during 2024. To date, 139 fellows have served on APA journals, with another 89 recruited for 2025 service. In a survey of the fellows delivered in June 2024, 90% of respondents reported that they were somewhat or extremely satisfied with the program; 94% indicated they were likely to recommend the program to their peers. 

The P&C Board approved an Editor Code of Conduct that compiles the guidance already available to Editors into one document, which Editors will now receive during onboarding and can refer to throughout their terms. The benefits of the Editor Code of Conduct include increasing transparency for authors and reviewers about what to expect when engaging with a journal’s editorial board, and emphasizing the integrity of the editorial and peer review processes of APA Journals by sharing expectations for journal management. 

During 2024, APA Journals signed two new journals to its portfolio. Starting in 2025, APA will publish Journal of Pediatric Neuropsychology in collaboration with the American Academy of Pediatric Neuropsychology. Starting in 2026, APA will publish the new Educational Psychology for Policy and Practice in collaboration with Division 15, Educational Psychology. 

In 2024, APA Journals published more than 65 special issues or sections of journals. The following are examples of special issues: American Psychologist’s Ethical Challenges in the Use of Digital Technologies in Psychological Science and Dismantling Racism in the Field of Psychology and Beyond; Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts’ Racial and Cultural Issues in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts (Part 2); Psychology and Aging’s Adult Age Differences in Language, Communication, and Learning from Text; Asian American Journal of Psychology’s Expanding the Frontier of Asian American Cancer Control and Survivorship Research; Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology’s Cultural Stress and Cultural Stress Theory; Decision’s The Interface Between Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Decision Research; Psychology of Men & Masculinities’ The Future of the Psychology of Men and Masculinities; Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology’s Social Norms and Peace; Practice Innovations’ Multicultural Considerations; Spirituality in Clinical Practice’s Spirituality in Clinical Practice: Integrating Who We Are With What We Do; Stigma and Health’s Time in Stigma and Health Research; Training and Education in Professional Psychology’s Training and Educating Antiracist Psychologists; Translational Issues in Psychological Science’s Psychology in Digital Age; and Psychology of Violence’s We Can Do Better: Perspectives on Research and Interventions that Address Sexual, Intimate Partner, Youth, and Community Violence.

APA publishes books to meet the needs of scholars, clinicians, researchers, and students in all areas of psychology. The product lines encompass an array of resources, including the APA Books and Magination Press imprints, APA Style, and APA Videos.

Since its release in October 2019, the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association has broken records set by the previous edition and continues to make an impact in academia. As of December 2024, more than 2 million copies of the Publication Manual have been sold, inclusive of all ebook and print formats. The APA Style team also released electronic versions of the Publication Manual and the Concise Guide to APA Style on Bookshare that were optimized for accessibility to provide people with print disabilities global equitable access to these resources.

Use of the APA Style website increased significantly in 2024 as compared with the previous year, with nearly triple the number of website visits (20.5 million), visitors (9.5 million), and page views (34.2 million). Increased use of the website reflects the increase in sales of the Publication Manual and Concise Guide to APA Style, both of which refer readers to additional resources on the website.

Working with Books Marketing, the APA Style team also launched a new YouTube seriesopens in new window with external creators to reach new audiences. The teams also launched an APA Style LinkedIn pageopens in new window in Q4 2024. Part of the growth in website visits and social media channels is due to a strategic investment approved by the Board of Directors in 2021, enabling the APA Style team to increase adoption of the Publication Manual and other Style products in psychology and nursing, and increase outreach to other disciplines.

In 2024, APA Style sponsored critical conference events to help further our reach with important partners, including the American Library Association (ALA), American Education Research Association (AERA), the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), Conference of English Leadership (CEL), Psi Chi, and more. The teams also expanded this engagement via the APA Style Monthly email newsletter, which reached 36,000 subscribers in December.

In 2024 APA Publishing released 46 scholarly and trade titles, 1 three-volume reference handbook (APA Handbook of Health Psychology) and 20 Magination Press (APA’s children’s book imprint) titles. In addition, APA Books released titles to ProQuest Ebook Central, EBSCO, OverDrive, RedShelf, and VitalSource, JSTOR, and Amazon Kindle. Magination Press books are found on online reading platform Epic! (129 digital books), as ebooks on Amazon Kindle (233 ebooks), and available as digital copies on various online bookshops and library platforms such as Overdrive, B&N, or bookshop.org (233 books).

In 2024, Magination Press relaunched the bestselling What to Do series -- two books from the original five published in 2005 (What to Do When You Worry Too Much and What to Do When Your Temper Flares), two popular books from the past few years (What to Do When Mistakes Make You Quake and What to Do When the News Scares You), plus two brand new books (What to Do When You Panic and What to Do When Climate Change Scares You.

Book awards and honors bestowed upon APA titles are generous. Included here is a list of awards and honors received for Magination Press titles.

California Eureka Nonfiction Awards
True or False? The Science of Perception, Misinformation, and Disinformation: Silver Medal 

Amazon #1 Bestseller in Category
True or False? The Science of Perception, Misinformation, and Disinformation
What To Do When the News Scares You 

CBC Children’s Favorites Award 2024, for books published in 2023. Nationwide, thousands of students in classrooms, school libraries, public libraries, and bookstores read and voted on the books and the results are in. All told there were over a half million total votes! 

• How to Handle STRESS for Middle School Success
• How to Handle STRESS for Middle School Success
• How to Handle STRESS for Middle School Success
• How to NAVIGATE Middle School
• Something Happened to Our Planet 

Child Mind Institute 2024 Kids Books that promote mental health.
What to do When you Worry Too much, 2^nd Edition 

Goddard Riverside CBC Youth Book Prize for Social Justice, 2024 shortlist
Rhythm 

International Literacy Association Social Justice Silver Prize
Something Happened to Our Planet 

Golden State Readers
Video interview for Jacob’s Missing Book 

Trade Journal Reviews
Quiet as Mud, Jacob’s Missing Book, Sarah Gilligan and the Search for Voice, Waffle Can’t Decide 

National Publicity
Los Angeles Times, People, The Week Junior, Good Morning America 

APA Books also garnered awards, recognition, and praise, including: 

Doody’s Review Service 5-star review
A Psychological Approach to Diagnosis: Using the ICD-11 as a Framework 

Doody’s Review Service 4-star review
Interviewing Children: The Science of Conversation in Forensic Contexts, Second Edition 

Choice’s ALA 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles
Motivation and Morality: A Multidisciplinary Approach 

Review in Communiqué, the journal of the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP)
Applying Multiculturalism: An Ecological Guide to the APA Guidelines 

#1 New Release on Amazon and also selected as one of Cal Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center’s favorite books of 2024
Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion 

#1 New Release on Amazon
Deliberate Practice in Interpersonal Psychotherapy 

#1 New Release in Medical Ethnopsychology on Amazon
Decolonial Psychology: Toward Anticolonial Theories, Research, Training, and Practice

Prose Award for Social Sciences: Psychology and Applied Social Work
APA Handbook of Adolescent and Young Adult Development 

Finalists for the Prose Awards included:

• Speaking the Unspoken: Breaking the Silence, Myths, and Taboos That Hurt Therapists and Patients
• Attention: Selection and Control in Human Information Processing
• Death as an Altered State of Consciousness: A Scientific Approach 

#1 New Release on Amazon
Online Sexual Offending: Theory, Practice, and Policy

Submitted the book to the American Writing Awards
Applying Multiculturalism

Frank W. Putnam Award from the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation
The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls

Selected as one of Cal Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center’s favorite parenting books of 2024
Parenting with Temperament in Mind

Received a great review in ALA Choice
Shame and Anger in Psychotherapy

Distinguished Publication Award from the Association of Women in Psychology
The Psychology of PCOS

Several titles were named to 2024 Doody’s Core Title list:

• Handbook of Rehabilitation Psychology, Third Edition
• Clinical Handbook of Fear and Anxiety
• Assessing Capacities of Older Adults
• Integrated Behavioral Health in Primary Care
• Testifying in Court
• Practical Ethics for Psychologists

The Video division of APA Books released 10 individual video titles in both DVD and in streaming format (through our distributors), including Multicultural Orientation in Psychotherapy with Cynthia de las Fuentes, Working With Refugees with Fred Bemak and Rita Chi-Ying Chung, Pregnancy Loss with Rayna Markin, and The Basics of Group Therapy with Cheri Marmarosh and Joshua DeSilva. Also published this year was a video program on how elements of strengths-based psychology can be incorporated into all types of psychotherapy, Strengths and Flourishing in Psychotherapy, hosted by Steven J. Sandage and featuring Sarah Crabtree, Todd Farchione, Heidi Levitt, and Joel Y. Wong.

The Video division also released a total of 23 videos into APA PsycTherapy^®, APA’s database of streaming psychotherapy videos.

APA’s platform (PsycNet) and databases (PsycInfo, PsycArticles, PsycBooks, PsycTests, and PsycTherapy) are supported by the Product Management and Content Management departments in APA Publishing. 

The Content Management department oversees and implements policy and program development in all matters related to content for the PsycInfo and PsycTests databases. Initiatives to ensure the quality of the PsycINFO database are ongoing. In 2024, the following additions were made: 

• More than 208,370 records were released into the PsycInfo database and by the end of the year, the database contained over 5.6 million records. Of these 1,151,942 records have ORCID IDs and 429,559 are Open Access. In addition, the database contains more than 165 million cited references.  The number of journals covered by PsycINFO at the end of 2024 was 2,351. 42 journals were dropped primarily due to problems receiving the journal or to journal’s ceasing publication and 54 new journals were added.    
• PsycInfo also includes the metadata records for the PsycArticles and PsycBooks databases:
  Over 5,600 metadata records were added to the PsycArticles database, bringing the total number of records to 244,386.
  Approximately 498 APA book and chapter records were added to PsycBooks. At the end of the year, PsycBooks contained 74,862 book and chapter records.  
  The PsycTests database grew by 3,355 new records, totaling 78,157 records by the end of the year. Nearly half of the metadata records are accompanied by full tests.  
  The PsycExtra database has been transformed into an archive for APA and APA-related content only. More than 700 such archival records were added to PsycExtra in 2024.   

APA PsycInfo is the most trusted, authoritative abstracting and indexing service in the behavioral and social sciences featuring both global and multidisciplinary content. In 2020 APA launched a free, customized, AI-powered research service with seamless access to full text to assist researchers with keeping up to date with the latest research in psychology. As a researcher engages with research content, the service adapts to the researcher’s preferences resulting in an experience personalized to individual interests. With APA PsycInfo serving as the foundation, the service includes research from nearly 2,300 journals in psychology and related disciplines, dissertations, preprints, PubMed, and national and international conference data. 

In 2024, APA enhanced the service based on researcher feedback to include an enhanced “Analyze and Filter” tool to help identify prolific authors, isolate prevalent research methodologies, and track research trends over time. A new content discovery and engagement tool, “Discover PsycInfo”, is a starting point to gain insights into journals, books, and dissertations that are trending or most frequently read.  An author mapper feature was developed to provide researchers the opportunity to visually explore relationships between authors and co-authors, including their citations.  And, to support the author mapper feature, new author information pages are available directly in the platform.  The author pages show a snapshot of an author’s works covered and cited in APA PsycINFO with additional information on affiliations, coverage years, and even links to ORCID profiles.  

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technology and large language models, we created an APA Research Assistant, which allows researchers to interact with a prompt-based tool, similar to ChatGPT, and a new search feature utilizing semantic technology.  These tools go beyond standard search using Booleans tools and give researchers the ability to query, analyze, and gain serendipitous knowledge from the most recent as well as historical psychological science found in APA PsycInfo and APA PsycArticles. 

All of these new features support the research process and brings APA PsycInfo, as well as other content, deeper into the workflow of researchers, including students, thereby providing greater and faster discoverability of psychological research content while keeping researchers informed and up to date in their specialty areas. 

In 2024 APA PsycNet, the publishing platform for APA's scholarly content introduced significant enhancements, focusing on improved search outcomes and user experience. New features, architecture updates, expanded database coverage, and accessibility improvements contributed to strong platform usage growth of 30% over 2023, with more than 10 million article and book chapter downloads by institutional subscribers and APA members. Additional 6 million articles and chapters were downloaded from APA PsycNet via the “Get access” authentication service that streamlines access to APA content for subscribers on any vendor platform, regardless of their starting point, location, and device. 

APA PsycNet traffic remains one of the highest of all APA sites with 2.5 million user sessions per month. More than 72 million requests for APA journal articles, books & chapters resolved to PsycNet in the past year from links followed by researchers, students, clinicians, and general public on Google Scholar, PubMed, ResearchGate, social media, and various discovery services. 

In 2024 we expanded the functionality of our Journal and Test Lookup tools, launched support for article infographics, doubled the search results export limit, and refreshed Dictionary of Psychology links & term definitions in APA journal articles. Another key improvement was the revamped Cited References search results functionality with new filters and sorts by citing author, times cited, publication year, etc.

We also updated security and privacy measures on the platform to include text mining and AI protections, as well as safeguards for sharing records and search results. 

These enhancements have not only made the platform more accessible and interactive but also significantly improved search outcomes by enabling more accurate retrieval, streamlined analysis, and richer insights into the impact of published work. 

At the end of the strategic investment fund (SIF) period for Academic Writer Direct (B2C) that was approved by the Board of Directors in 2021, the decision was made to sunset the product. Subscription renewals were discontinued in November. Additionally, following the 2023 decision to discontinue Academic Writer Course Adoptions (B2B), our sales teams began customer outreach with the goal of conversion to institutional licenses.

Academic Writer Institutional (B2B) licenses are actively being sold both in the U.S. and internationally, and new features released over the past year catered to this market. For example, quizzes were added to all quick guides and tutorials. Certificates of completion were also launched, allowing students to track their lesson progress and share it with instructors.

Customer features on the Academic Writer 2025 roadmap will focus on the institutional value proposition; planned updates include improvements to the Admin Center used by librarians and administrators.

PsycLearn Plus is an online delivery platform for course materials in undergraduate psychology. It employs evidence-based learning science principles to make challenging concepts more engaging and approachable, helping students deepen their understanding of course material and build learning skills. In the fall of 2024 APA Publishing began transitioning from the CogBooks platform and entered into an agreement with VitalSource to support the PsycLearn products on their Acrobatiq platform.  The goal is to release the four PsycLearn products (Research Methods, Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, Introduction to Social Psychology, and a Combined Approach to Research Methods and Statistics) by summer 2025 APA Publishing maintains an agreement with Cambridge University Press & Assessment (CUPA) to market and sell PsycLearn globally.

Since the pivot to developing and releasing short courses (PsycLearn Essentials) for the global upskilling market on MOOC platforms, the Product Management team has released 7 specializations in Coursera consisting of 3-4 courses per specialization totaling 22 courses and 3 programs in edX totaling 8 courses. The specializations/programs cover: Research Methods in Psychology;  Student Success; Psychology of Anxiety, Mood, Substance Use, and Addictive Behaviors; Methods for Qualitative Research in Psychology; Data Exploration in Psychology; Basic Inferential Statistics;  Discover Yourself, Build Relationships, and Navigate Groups; and Psychology in Action. We will be releasing another 2 specializations in Coursera and 2 courses in edX in 2025.

July 2023-June 2024 P&C Board Members

• Danny Wedding, PhD (2019–25) Chair
• Michael C. Roberts, PhD, ABPP (2020–26) Chair-elect
• Pamela Trotman Reid, PhD (2022–24)
• Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett, PhD, IBCLC, FAPA (2019–25)
• Steve W. J. Kozlowski, PhD (2021–27)
• Mo Wang, PhD (2021–27)
• Hortensia Amaro, PhD (2022–28)
• Catherine Haden, PhD (2023–29)
• Heejung Kim, PhD (2023–29)
• Michael Hendricks, PhD (APA Treasurer, ex-officio, non-voting)
• Arthur C. Evans Jr. (APA CEO, ex-officio, non-voting)

Chief Editorial Advisor
Jennifer Crocker, PhD (2019–24)

Council of Editors
Katie Witkiewitz, PhD (Chair)
Elena L. Grigorenko, PhD (Chair-elect)

Open Science Methodology Expert Panel Chair
Katherine (Katie) Corker, PhD (Chair)
Lisa DeBruine, PhD (Chair-Elect)

July 2024-June 2025 P&C Board Members

• Michael C. Roberts, PhD, ABPP (2020–26) Chair
• Steve W. J. Kozlowski, PhD (2021–27) Chair-elect Danny Wedding, PhD (2019–25)
• Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett, PhD, IBCLC, FAPA (2019–25)
• Mo Wang, PhD (2021–27)
• Hortensia Amaro, PhD (2022–28)
• Catherine Haden, PhD (2023–29)
• Heejung Kim, PhD (2023–29)
• Cecil R. Reynolds, PhD (2024-2030)
• TBD (APA Treasurer, ex-officio, non-voting)
• Arthur C. Evans Jr. (APA CEO, ex-officio, non-voting)

Chief Editorial Advisor
Jennifer Crocker, PhD (2024)
Anne Kazak, PhD (2025)

Council of Editors
Elena L. Grigorenko, PhD (Chair)
John Ruiz, PhD (Chair-elect) (Chair-elect)

Open Science Methodology Expert Panel Chair
Lisa DeBruine, PhD (Chair)