Abstract
It has now been 1 year since I started my editorial term at EJP, and despite the amount of work that goes into this job, I am delighted and grateful to be able to contribute to our field in this way. It is inspiring and extremely rewarding to work with a wonderful team of associate editors, motivated authors, and constructive reviewers with the common goal of making personality science as good as it can possibly be. The guiding principles of my editorship continue to be high–quality control in the science we publish, openness in the scientific content and formats, and curiosity about what authors and reviewers have to offer. We as editors at EJP want to publish excellent contributions to personality science and provide profound conceptual and methodological quality control. At the same time, we are well aware of and open to the wide variety of recipes that can produce an excellent paper, and we are curious to learn about new ways to conceptualize, assess, and analyze various aspects of personality. We are also curious about and willing to take chances on novel publication formats to see what they can offer. In this editorial, I will briefly comment on some of the recent developments at EJP as well as those ahead of us.
I thank Maarten von Zalk—who had to quit his term as Associate Editor—for his committed contribution to EJP. A warm welcome goes to new Associate Editors Erika Carlson, Malgorzata Fajkowska, and Odilia Laceulle who joined Joshua Jackson, Christian Kandler, René Mõttus, and Cornelia Wrzus on January 1st, complementing our team of Associate Editors. I also want to introduce our new Research Communications Editor, Joanne Chung, who joined the editorial team last summer. Joanne is happy to help authors communicate their work, and she is hosting EJP's social media accounts, including the EJP blog (www.ejp–blog.com). All personality psychologists who are interested in contributing to our blog are warmly invited to do so. Finally, I thank the European Association of Personality for supporting the ongoing development of EJP.
For those who care about numbers: They have remained stable, which means they are pretty good. With a 2–year Impact Factor of 3.71, EJP consolidated its strong position as one of the leading journals in our field. We desk–reject about 55% of submitted papers, and the overall rejection rate is around 90%. Papers that enter the review process have a fair chance of being published in EJP, particularly if the authors are truly responsive to the constructive comments made by both editors and reviewers. With a mean overall time to first decision of around 20 days, we continue to provide a very fast turnaround. There are also a number of papers for which we invite the authors to resubmit a new manuscript that is based on a more substantive reworking and additional data. Such invitations are rendered either at the initial stage of submission (i.e., in the form of a desk–rejection) or after review, and in both cases, these are serious invitations. That is, if you as an author decide to go the extra mile and collect additional data and/or rework your paper substantially, thereby providing a more substantive contribution, the paper has a pretty good chance of ultimately getting accepted.
One of the major changes we implemented last year was the mandatory confirmation of so–called transparency statements during the submission process. That is, for a manuscript to be considered further, the authors have to confirm that it explicitly deals with open science issues. Whereas we allow authors to solve these issues differently (e.g., to make the data openly accessible or not), we ask them to be transparent about their choices. As one exemplary clarification, I want to emphasize that being transparent about the data does not mean including a sentence stating that readers are welcome to contact the authors to ask for access (of course they can). Instead, authors should either provide a link to the data in the main manuscript or include a sentence in the main manuscript explaining why they are not willing or able to do this. We encourage authors to consider providing as much transparency as is possible. I also want to be clear about the fact that it pays off to include open science practices in one's original submission. When we evaluate the relative merits of each paper submitted to the journal, we consider open science practices to be on a par with other major criteria such as scientific rigor, creativity, and relevance. Being transparent about your research can help you get above the threshold for publication at EJP. I was also very happy to see that our new guidelines have already led to a major increase in the transparency of published papers. In fact, almost all published empirical papers that have been submitted since the introduction of our new guidelines have earned Open Science badges from the Center for Open Science.
To facilitate a smooth process, I encourage all authors to take a close look at our detailed Author Guidelines prior to submitting a paper to EJP. If you have questions about these guidelines, you can contact me. I am also happy to receive suggestions for how to further improve and/or clarify our guidelines and the submission, editorial, and review process. I would like to add two notes regarding issues that come up repeatedly. First, please note that EJP will of course consider submitted articles previously available as preprints on noncommercial servers such as PsyArXiv. Similarly, authors are encouraged to share their accepted papers via such preprint servers in line with Wiley's Self–Archiving Policy. Second, please note that we now allow authors to ask for a streamlined review. To this aim, authors should indicate their request and the journal the paper was rejected by in the cover letter and add copies of the original (i.e., unaltered) decision letter and reviews as supplementary material (not for review). We as editors will take this information into account. If the reviews allow us to render a decision without or with a smaller number of reviews, we will do so.
Regarding the scope of EJP, we continue to be committed to featuring papers that advance personality science in its broadest sense. Looking back at the past year's publications, I was very happy about the diversity of the topics that were covered, including genetic and environmental pathways underlying personality and perceived stress (Luo, Derringer, Briley, & Roberts, 2017), social dynamics of college roommate relationships (Boucher & Cummings, 2017), the implicit self–concept of personality (De Cuyper et al., 2017), personality differences between job applicants and nonapplicants (Anglim, Morse, De Vries, MacCann, & Marty, 2017), narcissism and prejudice (Cichoka, Dhont, & Makwana, 2017), and relations between cross–cultural values and well–being (Sortheix & Schwartz, 2017), to name just a few. This diversity is also apparent in this year's first issue, including a case study of a mentally tough athlete (Coulter, Mallett, & Singer, 2018), a genetically informed study on the coupling of personality and health changes in old age (Kornadt, Hagemeyer, Neyer, & Kandler, 2018), a meta–analytical examination of a common procedure that is applied to control for shared variance between personality predictors (Vize, Collison, Miller, & Lynam, 2018), and a meta–analysis of social value orientation, expectations, and cooperation (Pletzer et al., 2018). Many high–quality submissions are student papers, and as is done every year, the editorial team will award a prize for the journal's best publication by a student. For 2017, this Wiley Award goes to Jean–Baptiste Pavani for an intriguing paper in which he presented a network approach to personality and affect regulation dynamics (Pavani, Le Vigouroux, Kop, Congard, & Dauvier, 2017).
We will also continue to publish papers that try to tackle fundamental questions regarding the structure, processes and development, and consequences of personality. Baumert et al. (2017) provided a pointed call for more integration across these fields, which led to a lively discussion (Allik et al., 2017) that I hope will continue and be documented in our journal. An upcoming special issue by Associate Editors Christian Kandler and René Mottus, for example, will take on no less than one of the most fundamental questions in personality psychology: How can the field move from documenting correlations to providing causal explanations. Besides reading about studies that dig deeper into the fundamentals of personality psychology itself, I am also looking forward to receiving future empirical and conceptual contributions that flesh out the integrative potential of personality science in relation to neighboring disciplines. As one example, in another recent target article, Lievens (2017) highlighted the potential of integrating insights and methods from personnel selection research into mainstream personality science. There are a number of target articles in the making, each of which tackles issues that are fundamental to the understanding of personality and the relation of personality science to neighboring fields. If you have an idea for a conceptual piece that will initiate new lines of research and theory, provide a coherent framework for existing theory and lines of research, or focus on critical or controversial issues that have important consequences for personality research, I encourage you to send me a proposal.
We also aim to further increase the diversity of publication formats. EJP is open to all sorts of empirical and nonempirical contributions that will move the field forward, including original empirical studies, comprehensive meta–analyses, preregistered replications of previous relevant findings, and papers that present a relevant conceptual or methodological innovation. In addition to these, and continuing our adoption of open science practices, we will include Registered Reports (RRs) as a regular publication format. RRs are a new type of empirical paper in which manuscripts that contain a study proposal are reviewed prior to data collection. That is, authors will have the chance to submit a paper that includes the theoretical and empirical background, the main research questions and hypotheses, and a detailed Method section that includes the planned study procedure and measures, plans for sampling and analyses, and pilot data (if applicable). Submitted manuscripts can propose new original studies or replications of previous studies. They typically include confirmatory tests of specified hypotheses, but exploratory research questions can be added as well. RRs are evaluated on the basis of a two–stage review process with successful papers at Stage 1 receiving an in principle acceptance (IPA). If the study is subsequently conducted in line with the peer–reviewed procedure and provides open access to its materials, data, and codes and a sensible interpretation of its findings (checked in Stage 2), the manuscript will be published regardless of the results. As explained in detail elsewhere (e.g., Chambers, 2013; Munafò et al., 2017; Nosek & Lakens, 2014; also see https://cos.io/rr), RRs offer an elegant and straightforward way to increase the representativeness, trustworthiness, and robustness of our field's findings. They also come along with a number of advantages for authors, including in–depth conceptual and methodological feedback before the start of data assessment (i.e., feedback that can indeed be considered without having to start anew) and a much faster and result–independent security regarding the publication of one's research. The concrete guidelines for submitting RRs at EJP will be fleshed out in the very near future, but authors who are potentially interested in submitting an RR are encouraged to contact me any time. I am also happy to discuss further creative formats that can help promote personality science. For example, meta–scientific comments or even more dynamic meta–scientific discussions that are highly relevant to the field might be prepared and submitted as nonempirical papers.
I am very much looking forward to your future submissions to EJP!