Editorial Report and Acknowledgement of Reviewers, 2025

Overview of the Journal in 2025

In 2025 we continued to work as a team of four co-Editors-in-chief and 22 Associate Editors, based in 17 different countries across the globe: Belgium, Chile, China, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, South Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, the UK, and the U.S. Several of our Associate Editors are currently concluding their term, however. We thank Joaquín Bahamondes, Maria Fernandes-Jesus, Müjde Peker, Klaus Michael Reininger, and Inari Sakki for their years of service and contributions to the journal!

The journal published 22 articles in 2025: Issue No 1 of 2025 includes nine original research articles, one commentary, and our editorial report. It also includes a correction to a previously published article. Issue No 2 includes one commentary, and twelve original research articles. The published articles represent a range of different topics, research methods, and contexts: They include research on intra-minority solidarity, political and non-political goals among activists and non-activists, online dementia activism, decolonial approaches to feminist scholarship, structural inequality within academia, radical healing, polarization regarding Catalan independence, constructions of citizenship during nation formation, national nostalgia, identity claims of political leaders, socioeconomic status and right-wing voting intentions, threats and populist right-wing discourse, different subtypes of authoritarianism, right- and left-wing utopian thinking, conceptualizations of leftist ideology, social dominance orientation and political attitudes, differences between minority and majority groups in conspirational beliefs, human security, dangerous and competitive worldviews during the COVID pandemic, and lay theories about racial disparities during the pandemic. Research methods represented in the published articles in 2025 include surveys (including several representative surveys and longitudinal surveys) and other correlational studies, experiments, interview research, focus group interviews, (critical) discourse analysis and rhetorical psychology, thematic analysis, and various other qualitative methods. The contexts (countries in which samples were recruited or other data were from) represented in the articles published in 2025 include Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Palestine and the Palestinian diaspora, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the US. Eleven additional manuscripts comprise our list of forthcoming articles (which authors can make available as author-accepted manuscript versions; see https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/aam).

Despite the relative diversity represented in the articles published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology in 2025, which is a main aim of our journal, several continents and regions in the world continue to remain underrepresented in our journal. For example, European contexts are overrepresented and we only published one article each from South America and Africa, and two from Asia. We welcome and invite more submissions from these regions, and encourage authors to carefully consult our review criteria prior to submission, here: https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/peer-review.

Submission Numbers and Rejection Rate

In 2024, JSPP received 509 new submissions – a sharp increase compared to earlier years (278 in 2024, 244 in 2023, 271 in 2022, 290 in 2021, 235 in 2020, 186 in 2019, 148 in 2018, 101 in 2017, and 79 in 2016). The desk-rejection rate was at 81.34% (compared to 82.0% in 2024, 83.6% in 2023, and 60.9% in 2022). While we received more submissions from underrepresented countries, many were desk-rejected due to mismatches with our criteria, with submissions often being outside JSPP's focus and scope (see https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/peer-review). Notably, our review criteria deviate from more general journals in the subdiscipline, and include several aspects that are more specific to our journal with the aim of reserving journal space for manuscripts that include underrepresented methodological approaches, topics, and contexts in our field and encourage these submissions. To avoid delays and unnecessary labor for both editors and authors we urge authors to consult these criteria before submitting their manuscript to the journal. In light of the high number of unsuitable submissions (of which some may be AI-generated manuscripts), we are currently developing a systematic pre-screening system where authors will be asked to indicate how and where they engaged with the review criteria posted on our journal website to screen each manuscript before we assess it more closely.

In contrast to the high desk-rejection rate, the post-review rejection rate was merely 5.5% (in 2024: 3.2%). The average number of days to reject a manuscript was 23, which is another slight improvement compared to the previous year (where it was 26 days, compared to 50 days in 2023). The average number of days to accept (which can include multiple rounds of reviews and revisions) improved to 370 (compared to 468 in 2024 and 500 days in 2023).

We have noticed the rise of AI-generated tools being used in academic writing, which may partly explain the improvement in writing quality as well as the increase in the number of submissions. At JSPP, the use of AI is permitted for specific tasks (see “Use of Artificial Intelligence” here: https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/policies#author-policies). Beyond this, however, the use of AI for other academic purposes is not allowed, even if it is disclosed.

Publications, Citations, and Download Statistics

To date, JSPP has published (not including our editorial articles) 438 peer-reviewed articles (21 of which published in 2024). According to Google Scholar, these articles have been cited 16,062 times (as of March 3, 2026; see http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=knb2n1kAAAAJ).

The number of downloads of articles in JSPP has further increased, in fact almost doubled, from 282,402 downloads in 2024 to 555,424 in 2025. The top ten most frequently downloaded (as PDF) or viewed (as HTML or XML) articles (as of March 3, 2026) are listed in Tables 1 and 2. Table 1 includes all articles that have been published so far in JSPP since its first issue; there are two new entries to the list compared to last year (Niemi et al., 2023, and Ochoa & Ong, 2022). Table 2 shows only those articles published in 2025. While the overall top ten comprises almost exclusively articles from Anglo-American based authors, with two exceptions, from Somaliland and the Philippines, the top ten of 2025 includes several articles from authors in various European countries as well as Hong Kong.

Acknowledgment of Reviewers

Finally, we are grateful for the reliable and helpful support that we have received from the following 147 colleagues, who provided peer reviews for JSPP in 2025: