Editorial Report and Acknowledgement of Reviewers, 2015

In 2015, the Journal of Social and Political Psychology (JSPP) has continued to develop well. It was the first year in which two issues of JSPP were published (instead of a single issue), with 10 and 5 regular articles, respectively. In addition, each issue included a Special Thematic Section: “Decolonizing Psychological Science” (with abstracts in English and Spanish), guest-edited by Tuğçe Kurtiș, Luis Gómez, Ludwin Molina, Ignacio Dobles, and Glenn Adams in issue No. 1, and “The Social Psychology of Citizenship, Participation and Social Exclusion”, guest-edited by Clifford Stevenson, John Dixon, Nick Hopkins, and Russell Luyt in issue No. 2. We are grateful for these important contributions and express our heartfelt thanks to the two guest-editorial teams!

The guest-editors for the “Decolonizing Psychological Science” section decided to continue with their work and issued a call for papers for additional submissions to an ongoing series on the topic (see http://jspp.psychopen.eu/pages/view/decolonizing_psychological_science_virt). We hope that JSPP can strengthen critical perspectives on social and political psychology through this initiative.

Another Special Thematic Section is currently in progress and is scheduled to appear in the current issue, Vol. 4, No. 1 – “Rethinking Prefigurative Politics”, guest-edited by Jan Haaken, Flora Cornish, Sharon Jackson, and Liora Moskovitz.

Submission Numbers and Decisions

Outside the Special Thematic Sections, 84 new manuscripts were submitted to JSPP in 2015. The first decisions and editorial status of these submissions are presented in Table 1. For the new submissions (without those that were desk-rejected, which took place within 1 to 29 days), the average duration from submission to the first decision was slightly below three months (M = 87.0, SD = 41.8; ranging from 33 to 210 days). In addition to the new submissions, 26 submissions from 2013 or 2014 are still under editorial consideration; 5 of these have now been accepted for publication.

Publications, Citations, and Download Statistics

To date, JSPP has published 82 peer-reviewed articles (34 of which were published in 2015),ⁱ which, according to Google Scholar (see http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=knb2n1kAAAAJ), have already been cited 242 times (as of 1 February, 2016). Table 2 summarizes in which countries the authors of these 82 articles are based. If one considers the frequencies for all coauthors, 31 percent are based outside of the Anglo-American world (USA, UK, Canada, and Australia); in total the authors are based in 26 different countries, including 5 African (Rwanda, South Africa, Egypt, Ghana, Somaliland), 3 Asian (Israel, Malaysia, India), and 2 Latin American countries (Brazil, Costa Rica).

The number of articles downloaded from JSPP’s website over the year has also steadily increased and is presented in Figure 1, by month. For comparison: In 2014 there were, on average, 4531 downloads per month.

The top ten articles published between 2013 and 2015 in terms of download frequencies (as of 1 February 2016) are listed in Tables 3 to 5.

Acknowledgment of Reviewers

Finally, we are grateful for the reliable and helpful support that we have received from the following 219 colleagues, who provided peer reviews for JSPP in 2015: