From the Editors

Editorial Report and Acknowledgement of Reviewers, 2023

J. Christopher Cohrs*1, Ana Figueiredo2, Idhamsyah Eka Putra3,4, Johanna Ray Vollhardt5
[1] Philipps University Marburg, Marburg, Germany. [2] Universidad de O’Higgins, Rancagua, Chile. [3] Persada Indonesia University, Jakarta, Indonesia. [4] Universitas Sumatera Utara, Medan, Indonesia. [5] Clark University, Worcester, MA, USA.

Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 2024, Vol. 12(1), 1–4, https://doi.org/10.5964/jspp.14017

Published (VoR): 2024-03-06.

*Corresponding author at: Philipps University Marburg, Department of Psychology, Gutenbergstr. 18, 35032 Marburg, Germany. Phone: +49 6421 2826632. E-mail: christopher.cohrs@uni-marburg.de

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

What Was New in 2023?

The Journal of Social and Political Psychology (JSPP) experienced several changes to the editorial team in 2023. Several of our associate editors finished their terms. We are grateful to Charlie Rose Crimston (University of Queensland, Australia), Blerina Kellezi (Nottingham Trent University, UK), Alessandro Nai (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands), and Rashmi Nair (Ashoka University, India) and thank them for their service and contributions to the journal over the last years! At the same time, we extended our team following a successful call for applications. We welcome our new associate editors: Joaquín Bahamondes (Universidad Católica del Norte, Chile), Sharon Coen (University of Salford, UK), Lusine Grigoryan (University of York, UK), Waleed Ahmad Jami (Bridgewater State University, USA), Maja Kutlaca (Durham University, UK), Wenqi Li (Nanjing University, China), Emma O'Dwyer (University of Greenwich, UK), Danielle Ochoa (University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines), Sandra Penić (University of Geneva, Switzerland), Zsolt Péter Szabó (Corvinus University of Budapest and Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary), and Maria Xenitidou (University of Western Macedonia, Greece). Our team currently includes 27 editors located in 18 different countries on six continents (see https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/editors).

Issue No 1 of 2023 includes 23 original research articles, one theoretical article, and our editorial report. Issue No 2 includes one review article and 17 original research articles. Six additional manuscripts comprise our list of forthcoming articles (some of which with author-accepted manuscripts available; see https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/aam). Our backlog of accepted manuscripts has been reduced, possibly due to our new review criteria (see https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/peer-review) that are now used in screening incoming manuscripts to further increase adherence to our journal aims and mission. We are currently undertaking bibliometric analysis of all articles published in JSPP to date to evaluate more systematically to what extent they reflect our aims and mission. Findings will be published in due course.

Submission Numbers and Rejection Rate

In 2023, JSPP received 244 new submissions (compared to 271 in 2022, 290 in 2021, 235 in 2020, 186 in 2019, 148 in 2018, 101 in 2017, and 79 in 2016). 204 submissions (83.6%) were desk-rejected (compared to 60.9% in 2022), due to not meeting one or more of our review criteria, which can be found here: https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/peer-review. The post-review rejection rate was 6.2%. The average number of days to reject was 50, the same as in the previous year. The average number of days to accept (which can include multiple rounds of reviews and revisions) was 500.

Publications, Citations, and Download Statistics

To date, JSPP has published (not including our editorial articles) 399 peer-reviewed articles (42 of which were published in 2023). According to Google Scholar, these articles have been cited 10438 times (as of January 26, 2024) (see http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=knb2n1kAAAAJ).

The number of downloads of articles in JSPP has further increased, from 172,438 downloads in 2022 to 228,714 in 2023 (a 32.6% increase). The top ten most frequently downloaded (as PDF) or viewed (as HTML) articles in 2023 (as of January 26, 2024) are listed in Tables 1 and 2. Table 1 includes all articles that have been published so far in JSPP since its first issue; the list remains the same as last year, with some articles swapping places. Table 2 shows only those articles published in 2023.

Table 1

Top Ten Most Frequently Downloaded Articles Published Between 2013 and 2023 (in Brackets Listed After the Authors Is the Country Location of the First Author at the Time of Publication)

Article title and authors Downloads Publication date
The role of the media in the construction of public belief and social change (Happer & Philo, UK) 50973 Dec 16, 2013
Decolonising Australian psychology: Discourses, strategies, and practice (Dudgeon & Walker, Australia) 17647 Aug 21, 2015
Empathy and the liberal-conservative political divide in the U.S. (Morris, U.S.) 14936 Feb 28, 2020
Social psychological perspectives on Trump supporters (Pettigrew, U.S.) 12574 Mar 2, 2017
Recurrent fury: Conspiratorial discourse in the blogosphere triggered by research on the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial (Lewandowsky et al., UK & Australia) 12487 Jul 8, 2015
Stages of colonialism in Africa: From occupation of land to occupation of being (Bulhan, Somaliland) 10791 Aug 21, 2015
Mistrust and misinformation: A two-component, socio-epistemic model of belief in conspiracy theories (Pierre, U.S.) 8245 Oct 12, 2020
Who coined the concept of ethnocentrism? A brief report (Bizumic, Australia) 7656 Jan 31, 2014
Do conspiracy beliefs form a belief system? Examining the structure and organization of conspiracy beliefs (Enders et al., U.S.) 6631 Jun 29, 2021
Investigating right wing authoritarianism with a very short authoritarianism scale (Bizumic & Duckitt, Australia) 5889 Apr 25, 2018
Table 2

Top Ten Most Frequently Downloaded Articles Published in 2023 (in Brackets Listed After the Authors Is the Country Location of the First Author at the Time of Publication)

Article title and authors Downloads Publication date
Conspiracy theory vulnerability from a psychodynamic perspective: Considering four epistemologies related to four developmental existential-relational positions (Webb & Rosenbaum, U.S.) 1045 Mar 23, 2023
Returning community psychology to the insights of anarchism: Fragments and prefiguration (Malherbe, South Africa) 728 May 24, 2023
How do those affected by a disaster organize to meet their needs for justice? Campaign strategies and partial victories following the Grenfell tower fire (Tekin & Drury, UK & Turkey) 587 Mar 23, 2023
‘I’m going home to breathe and I’m coming back here to just hold my head above the water’: Black students’ strategies for navigating a predominantly white UK university (Osbourne et al., UK) 573 Sept 19, 2023
From primary to presidency: Fake news, false memory, and changing attitudes in the 2016 election (Grady et al., U.S.) 532 Mar 23, 2023
Social invisibility and discrimination of Roma people in Italy and Brazil (Melotti et al., Italy) 506 Mar 23, 2023
The influence of perceived threat and political mistrust on politicized identity and normative and violent nonnormative collective action (Chan et al., Hong Kong) 487 Apr 13, 2023
Judging job applicants by their politics: Effects of target–rater political dissimilarity on discrimination, cooperation, and stereotyping (Sinclair et al., Sweden) 462 Mar 23, 2023
The online educational program ‘Perspectives’ improves affective polarization, intellectual humility, and conflict management (Welker et al., U.S.) 427 Aug 21, 2023

Acknowledgment of Reviewers

Finally, we are grateful for the reliable and helpful support that we have received from the following 97 colleagues, who provided peer reviews for JSPP in 2023:

  1. Aya Adra

  2. Yarden Ashur

  3. Lara K. Ault

  4. Joaquin Bahamondes

  5. Edward Bell

  6. Ella Ben Hagai

  7. Monique Borsenberger

  8. Pierre Bouchat

  9. Rosa Cabecinhas

  10. Joseph Chan

  11. Adrian Cherney

  12. Wing-Yee Cheung

  13. Becky Choma

  14. Edward John Roy Clarke

  15. Golda Cohen

  16. Jarret T. Crawford

  17. Paul DeBell

  18. Mirko A. Demasi

  19. Marcos Dono

  20. Tânia dos Santos

  21. Georgi Dragolov

  22. Richard Eibach

  23. José-Miguel Fernandez-Dols

  24. Lucia Freira

  25. Juan Diego García Castro

  26. James L. Gibson

  27. David Giles

  28. Theofilos Gkinopoulos

  29. Vukašin Gligorić

  30. Shahrzad Goudarzi

  31. Dmitry Grigoryev

  32. Eemeli Hakoköngäs

  33. Niki Harré

  34. Stefanie Hechler

  35. Yeshim Iqbal

  36. Anna Ivanova

  37. Hu Young Jeong

  38. Tyler Jimenez

  39. Taduesz Jones

  40. Sanya Kenaphoom

  41. Barbara Lášticová

  42. Yphtah Lelkes

  43. Figgou Lia

  44. Laurent Licata

  45. Carmen Sarah Lienen

  46. Filipa Madeira

  47. Sramana Majumdar

  48. Nick Malherbe

  49. Leena Malkki

  50. Larsen Mandi

  51. Silvia Mari

  52. Jari Martikainen

  53. Ali Mashuri

  54. Dan McAdams

  55. Bryan McLaughlin

  56. Maurits Meijers

  57. Cristina Montiel

  58. Davide Morselli

  59. Vhuwhavho Nekhavhambe

  60. Brian Newman

  61. Dennis Nigbur

  62. Mukadder Okuyan

  63. Oana Ometa

  64. Joseph Pierre

  65. Lotte Pummerer

  66. Maaris Raudsepp

  67. Geetha Reddy

  68. Eduardo Rivera-Pichardo

  69. Nimrod Rosler

  70. Marco Salvati

  71. Elif Sandal Önal

  72. Ozge Savas

  73. Christoph Daniel Schaefer

  74. Celia Soares

  75. Irina Soboleva

  76. Rachel R. Steele

  77. Emmanouil Takas

  78. Cristian Tileagă

  79. Michelle Twali

  80. Ikechukwu Ujoatuonu

  81. Joseph Uscinski

  82. Joshua Uyheng

  83. Mete Sefa Uysal

  84. Viktor Valgardsson

  85. Alain Van Hiel

  86. Valerie van Mulukom

  87. Pascaline Van Oost

  88. Daudi van Veen

  89. Chiara Vargiù

  90. Milica Vdović

  91. Sara Vestergren

  92. Morgan Weaving

  93. Steven Webster

  94. Cynthia Willis-Esqueda

  95. Maria Xenitidou

  96. Dannagal Young

  97. Karyofyllis (Lakis) Zervoulis

Funding

The authors have no funding to report.

Acknowledgments

As always, our sincere thanks go to the PsychOpen team – most notably Judith Tinnes and Armin Günther, as well as Gerrit Fröhlich – for their consistent and valuable support of the journal throughout the year. We also thank our Editorial Assistant, Michaela Bölinger, for her administrative support.

Competing Interests

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.