Editorial Report and Acknowledgement of Reviewers, 2017

What’s New in 2017?

Due to the continuing high number of submissions (see below) to the Journal of Social and Political Psychology (JSPP), in 2017 we substantially extended our editorial team and were joined by the following new Associate Editors, from eleven different countries: Mark J. Brandt, Tilburg University, the Netherlands; Ana Figueiredo, Universidad Mayor, Chile; Debra Gray, University of Winchester, United Kingdom; Karolina Hansen, University of Warsaw, Poland; Sherianne Kramer, Amsterdam University College, the Netherlands; Ioana Maria Latu, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland; Giovanna Leone, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy; Winnifred R. Louis, University of Queensland, Australia; Müjde Peker, MEF University, Turkey; Idhamsyah Eka Putra, Persada Indonesia University and Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia; Inari Sakki, Helsinki University, Finland; and Thomas Teo, York University, Canada – a warm welcome! We would also like to thank Boris Bizumic, Siew Fang Law, Nurit Shnabel, and Shahnaaz Suffla, who finished their assignments as Associate Editors, for their valuable contributions to the journal over the last years.

JSPP has continued with the publication of two issues per year. In addition to our editorial report for 2016, Issue No 1 of 2017 includes ten original research articles covering a range of topics and approaches in social and political psychology based on research conducted in various countries (Cameroon, Finland, Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, United States), as well as two commentaries on support for Trump and on Islamist suicide terrorism. Issue No 2 includes eight original research articles (based on research conducted in Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Sweden, and the United States) and one action teaching report elaborating a winning entry of Social Psychology Network’s Action Teaching Awardⁱ. It also includes a Special Thematic Section on “Collective Memories and Present-Day Intergroup Relations: A Social-Psychological Perspective”, guest-edited by Ana Figueiredo, Jonas Rees, Borja Martinovic, and Laurent Licata, which resulted from work within the Cost Action IS 1205: Social psychological dynamics of historical representations in the enlarged European Unionⁱⁱ. This selection of ten articles (plus an introduction) investigate the antecedents of collective memories, the contents and structure of collective memories, the transmission of collective memories, and socio-psychological correlates of collective memories in present-day societies. Our sincere thanks to the guest-editorial team for organizing this Special Thematic Section, as well as to all other contributors!

To facilitate user engagement, over the past year we have started to encourage authors to include an abstract in their local language as well as “non-technical summaries”; some of the recently published articles already include one of both of these possibilities; as an example, see Kende, Lantos, Belinszky, Csaba, and Lukács (2017).

Two Special Thematic Sections are currently in progress. One is scheduled to appear this year: “Multiple Perspectives in Conflict Settings: From Diversity to Pluralism” (guest-edited by Sandra Penic, Guy Elcheroth, Steve Reicher, and Ramila Usoof-Thowfeek), and another next year: “Rethinking Health and Social Justice Activism in a Post-Liberal World” (guest-edited by Catherine Campbell, Flora Cornish, and Cristian Montenegro).

We are also pleased to note that JSPP is now indexed in PsycINFO, Scopus, PubPsych, OpenAIRE, DOAJ, BASE, Google Scholar, CNKI Scholar, and Genios.

Submission Numbers and Decisions

Outside the Special Thematic Sections, 101 (compared to 79 in 2016) new manuscripts were submitted to JSPP in 2017.ⁱⁱⁱ The first decisions and editorial status of these submissions are presented in Table 1. For these submissions (without those that were desk-rejected, which took place on average within 18 days (range: 0 to 77), the average duration from submission to the first decision was around three months (M = 92.7, SD = 40.2; ranging from 30 to 209 days).

Publications, Citations, and Download Statistics

To date, JSPP has published (not including our editorial articles) 148 peer-reviewed articles (32 of which were published in 2017). According to Google Scholar, these articles have been cited 1023 times (as of 3 March, 2018).^iv Table 2 summarizes in which countries the authors of these 148 articles are based. Authors based within the Anglo-American world (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) dominate, but 40 percent of all co-authors are based outside this group of countries. Altogether the authors are based in 36 different countries, including several African, Asian, and Latin American countries.

The number of articles downloaded from JSPP’s website over the year is presented in Figure 1, by month. For comparison, the average monthly downloads for 2014 to 2016 are included on the left side. The numbers of downloads have further increased, with a few spikes in March, August, and December 2017.

The top ten most frequently downloaded articles (as of 2 March 2018) are listed in Tables 3 and 4. Table 3 includes all articles that have been published so far in JSPP since its first issue, and Table 4 only those published in 2017.

Acknowledgment of Reviewers

Finally, we are grateful for the reliable and helpful support that we have received from the following 188 colleagues, who provided peer reviews for JSPP in 2017: