Where Are We, and Where Should We Go? An Introduction to Davis et al., "Sixty Years of Studying the Sacred: Auditing and Advancing the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality"

This article is an introduction to a distinctive and unusually important article, appearing in this issue, by Ward Davis and his colleagues who conducted a remarkably detailed bibliometric analysis of all articles published in three eminent journals in our field: the Archive for the Psychology of Religion, the field's oldest journal; The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion; and this journal, the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. Their review spanned from 1962 to 2022, resulting in a massive corpus of 1,802 articles. Within these, they focused on empirical research articles, coded for features such as sampling, design, methodology, topic, use of Open Science practices, and so forth. They also analyzed trends over time in these features. In effect, this bibliometric analysis tells us who we are and how we know what we know: Who we study, what topics we study, what designs and measures we use, our use of Open Science practices, trends over time in our research, and even how frequently research in this field is cited. Davis and his team also offer recommendations for higher quality and rigor in our research. I elaborate on several of the improvements raised by Davis et al. to move us toward a more valid and representative psychology of religion and spirituality: The Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic problem that permeates our field, changing trends in our samples, and the need for more qualitative and mixed-methods research.