SPPS Editor's Report
Vincent Yzerbyt
As many of you know, 2012 is only the third year of publication of Social Psychological and Personality Science. Needless to say, we now have a much better feel for whether or not this outlet is going to be a major player in the field. The answer is clearly positive: SPPS is definitely joining the handful of journals in which people aspire to publish their very best work. By all standards, SPPS is an unprecedented success in the history of scientific publications.
Mind you, things were not that obvious three years ago when the consortium decided to go ahead with this project. To be sure, ARP, EASP, SESP, and SPSP all had solid experience with scientific publications and the joint venture was appealing to a great many observers. Of course, my associate editors and I could all count on sound knowledge of what editorial duties entailed and we had an ambitious set of goals for our editorial term. But there is a difference between dream and reality.
Thanks to the efforts of a wonderful group of people, namely the editorial assistants from Sage, the representatives of the consortium but also, and most importantly, the dozens of members of the editorial board, the hundreds of ad hoc reviewers, and the thousands of readers, this journal has established itself as a must in any list of publications of contemporary social and personality psychologists. As of November 1, the journal office had received a stunning 1375 new submissions and 398 revisions. This means that since the journal website was launched in May 2009, we received close to 46 original manuscripts and more than 13 revisions each and every month. In short, two manuscripts land on my desk every single day. To be entirely correct, though, there has been a steady increase over the 30-month period since the launch of the journal. In all likelihood, these numbers will keep on growing.
Of these 1375 submissions, an impressive total of 1302 manuscripts had already met with at least one decision. In total, 166 (13%) manuscripts were desk-rejected, 858 (66%) manuscripts were rejected (almost all of them after the first round of reviews), and some 208 (16%) manuscripts were eventually accepted for publication. As to the remaining 5% of manuscripts, they had met with at least one major or minor revise and resubmit, and a fair proportion of these papers should reach the journal in the future, after having been rewritten. Clearly, these numbers are not only imposing in absolute terms, but they also explain why the journal was able to launch four issues in its first year of operation and to jump to six issues as soon as its second volume. We should stick to six issues during 2012!
On a related note, another important achievement of the SPPS has been to keep the time between submission and decision very short. On average, any given submission (i.e., an original paper or a revised version) has received a decision after only 38 days! If one excludes both the accepted papers and those excluded after triage, the average decision time across the remaining papers is approximately 42 days. This means that six weeks after a paper was submitted, the handing editor sent news to the author(s). This is a very fast turnover indeed.
So, what are the goals now? Well, quite modestly, the current editorial team is going to keep up the good work. As a journal with the ambition to address researchers from all over the planet, we are very proud that 40% of the original submissions originate from outside the U.S. Still, we will continue to invest time and effort in order to ensure that SPPS proves attractive to a worldwide scientific community. Also, it is a clear ambition of SPPS to try and meet the requirements for the calculation of the well-known “impact” statistics. Although for obvious reasons this decision is not in the hands of the journal or its publisher, every effort is being made so that the authors can count on some objective information regarding the international standing of the SPPS as soon as possible. On top of the fact that every potential author should be able to get a better idea of the visibility of an SPPS publication, the journal has also been disseminating the research that it publishes via a series of additional channels. For all this, we can count on the skills and wisdom of Chris Crandall as our public communications director. When Chris senses that some findings are newsworthy, he gets in touch with the author(s) and sees that the message reaches beyond our standard readership by spreading it via the wider media.
Let me end this editorial note by wholeheartedly thanking associate editor Tom Postmes for his wonderful contributions since the beginning of the journal. From July 2011 on, Tom has been looking forward to new editorial duties and I really wish him the very best. At the same time that Tom was stepping down, two new associate editors joined the team to help us handle the growing number of submissions. Embodying the international focus of SPPS, one of them, Michael Platow, is based in Australia and the other, Catrin Finkenauer, is active in Western Europe. As for the other associate editors, Olivier Corneille, Michele Gelfand, Sam Gosling, Kerry Kawakami, Christoph Klauer, Paula Niedenthal, and Carolin Showers, they will continue to serve with the same efficiency and enthusiasm until June 2012, which is the official end of our editorial term. Let me thank them here most sincerely for their competence and dedication. After all, it is this mix of professionalism and passion at all levels of the editorial process that makes the journal a must-read for all members of ARP, EASP, SESP, and SPSP, and for a great many more!