Editorial

Each year, we at the European Journal of Personality publish a special issue of European Personality Reviews. The purpose of these reviews is to stimulate discussion of conceptual and theoretical issues in personality psychology, particularly those emerging as critical in understanding how our science can be integrated with the broader community of biological, social, and physical sciences. In publishing these articles, we seek commentaries on them from colleagues with related interests to encourage readers to further engagement with the material. This year, we feature an article addressing how our field can improve the level of replicability of published studies.

The fact that replicability appears to be rather low among psychological studies has received considerable attention in the last couple years, and consensus is growing that we need to make changes in the methods we use to document and analyse our data, our publication processes, and our incentive structures. The article we feature is the outgrowth of an expert workshop last summer that was sponsored by the European Association of Personality Psychology following its bi–annual conference in Trieste, Italy. The workshop was an intense but structured brainstorming session spanning 3 days, focussed on developing practical proposals. Of course in such a group, agreement was far from complete, particularly when it came to relative emphases and priorities. Still, consensus was considerable. All attendees have contributed to the article, with the exception of me, as Editor of the journal publishing the article. It is safe to say, however, that I stand behind its spirit and general recommendations as well, and I am adopting the ones relevant to reviewing and editing within EJP.

To invite comments on the article, I approached researchers who have written on the topic themselves, many of whom are also undertaking their own individual initiatives to improve the robustness of our field. I also approached the editors of several of this journal's competitors, and response rates were good from both, not mutually exclusive, camps. This makes for interesting debate in some areas, as you will see. I hope the article, the comments, and the authors‘ response stimulate the readers‘ own thoughts in this area and help to spurn us all to action to ensure the integrity of our science.