Editorial Report and Acknowledgement of Reviewers, 2018

What’s New in 2018?

As in previous years, in 2018 we saw a continuing trend of increasing numbers of submissions (see below) to the Journal of Social and Political Psychology (JSPP). Therefore, we further extended the editorial team and welcomed the following new Associate Editors: Hélder Vinagreiro Alves (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain), Lucas A. Keefer (University of Southern Mississippi, United States), Zoe Leviston (Edith Cowan University, Australia), Silvia Mari (University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy), Alessandro Nai (University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Seth Oppong (Tubman University, Liberia), Tobias Stark (Utrecht University, the Netherlands), Clifford Stevenson (Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom), and Jasper van Assche (Ghent University, Belgium). We would also like to thank Glenn Adams, Guy Elcheroth, Małgorzata Kossowska, Ioana Maria Latu, Winnifred Louis, and Thomas Teo, who finished their terms 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. Issue No 1 of 2018 includes ten original research articles covering a variety of topics and approaches in social and political psychology, based on research conducted in various countries (Australia, Germany, Israel, Kenya, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States), as well as one commentary applying self-determination theory to Australian prime ministers (Eidenfalk, Forner, Jones, & Parrish, 2018). Issue No 2 includes nine original research articles (based on research conducted in Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and the United States), one commentary (about a “Pro-Truth Pledge” as an attempt to address the problem of fake news; Tsipursky, Votta, & Mulick, 2018) and one theoretical article discussing the role of psychosocial interventions with political trauma survivors for comprehensive subjective recovery (Donoso, 2018). Issue No 2 also includes a Special Thematic Section with 15 articles from a broad range of contexts on “Rethinking Health and Social Justice Activism in Changing Times” that was guest-edited by Catherine Campbell, Flora Cornish, and Cristian Montenegro, focusing on community psychology from the perspective of scholar-activists in the field of community health (see Cornish, Campbell, & Montenegro, 2018). Our thanks to the guest-editorial team for organizing such a fascinating Special Thematic Section, as well as to all authors!

Some of the articles we published include non-technical summaries and/or summaries in an additional language (see, e.g., Kahn et al., 2018) – both of which we encourage to facilitate user engagement.

One Special Thematic Section is currently still in progress, and 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).

Submission Numbers and Decisions

Outside the Special Thematic Sections, 148 (compared to 101 in 2017 and 79 in 2016) new manuscripts were submitted to JSPP in 2018. 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 19 days (range: 0 to 93), the average duration from submission to the first decision was slightly above three months (M = 99.9, SD = 47.5; ranging from 34 to 232 days).

Publications, Citations, and Download Statistics

To date, JSPP has published (not including our editorial articles) 185 peer-reviewed articles (37 of which were published in 2018). According to Google Scholar, these articles have been cited 1671 times (as of 25 January, 2019) (see http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=knb2n1kAAAAJ). Table 2 summarizes in which countries the authors of these 185 articles are based. Authors based within the Anglo-American world (USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) dominate, but 42 percent of all (co-)authors are based outside this group of countries. Altogether the authors are based in 39 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 2017 are included in the columns on the left. The numbers of downloads have further increased, with a spike in April and a gap in July and August 2018.

The top ten most frequently downloaded articles (as of 25 January 2019) are listed in Tables 3 and 4.

Table 3 includes all articles that have been published so far in JSPP since its first issue. The first nine entries are the same as last year, but there is one new “shooting star” (Bäck, Bäck, Gustafsson Sendén, & Sikström, 2018). Table 4 shows only those articles published in 2018.

Acknowledgment of Reviewers

Finally, we are grateful for the reliable and helpful support that we have received from the following 247 colleagues, who provided peer reviews for JSPP in 2018: