SPPS Editor’s Report
Allen McConnell
I wanted to provide an update on Social Psychological and Personality Science, which just began publishing its fourth volume in January. Our new editorial team has been handling manuscript submissions since July 2012, and we encourage researchers from all areas of psychology, including those who study personality and individual differences, to consider SPPS as an outlet to publish their work.
As you probably know, SPPS is a special outlet for a number of reasons. First, it only publishes short report papers (5000 words or less), and its mission is to get innovative, groundbreaking, impactful work into the scientific conversation quickly. Also, the journal is unique in that it is published for the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP), the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), and it is co-sponsored by the Asian Association of Social Psychology (AASP) and the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists (SASP). No other journal in our field enjoys such diverse support from our leading research organizations. Indeed, more than 7000 scholars in social and personality psychology throughout the world receive complimentary subscriptions to the journal, which means papers published in SPPS enjoy a large, interdisciplinary audience.
In addition to having a broad, international readership, SPPS furnishes valuable, to-the-point editorial feedback in a timely fashion to authors. In fact, during our first six months of handling submissions, the average time from author submission to editorial decision has been 38 days. Part of our ability to provide fast turn-around comes from encouraging reviewers to focus only on central issues in their commentary. Also, we desk-reject papers where, in our judgment, positive reviews are highly unlikely. At present, we are rejecting 23% of submissions without soliciting reviews, and this increase in our desk rejection rate is coming from papers that, historically, were rejected with reviews in the past. Our ability to be agile relies on a balance of judicious desk rejections and providing authors with direct, focused feedback on their work from expert reviewers, which helps us manage the more than 700 manuscript submissions we receive each year (more than 500 of which are brand new papers).
By any measure, SPPS is an unqualified success. Since its inception, the journal has received nearly 2000 submissions and published more than 250 papers in print with more already accepted and available on-line. Historically, the acceptance rate for the journal is 17%. Although the journal has not yet received an impact factor score from Thomson Reuters’s Journal Citation Reports (it usually takes a few years for even the most successful journals to do this), preliminary benchmark data suggest that SPPS will compare quite favorably to many of our leading journals.
For researchers who study personality and individual differences, SPPS is an excellent outlet to consider for publishing research. First, SPPS is an official publication of ARP and SPSP, and thus, personality and individual difference papers published in SPPS will be widely disseminated to like-minded scholars. Second, because SPPS is affiliated with our other leading research associations throughout the world, SPPS is an especially attractive outlet for research that extends personality and individual difference research into new areas, such as social cognition, group decision making, the self, intergroup relations, emotions, and judgment and decision making (just to name a few). As someone whose own training was in classical social cognition, I know that some of my most satisfying recent work has married the study of mechanism and process (e.g., self-concept representation, impression formation, the experience of affect) with important personality and individual difference phenomena (e.g., Five-Factor Model of personality, implicit theories, attachment style). SPPS is well positioned to publish work that truly is interdisciplinary and integrative, and we encourage researchers to consider this as one of the attractive features of the journal (though to be clear, we are interested in publishing mainstream personality and individual difference research as well).
While discussing issues of special interest to readers of this newsletter, I would like to note that we have an explicit policy to not publish scale validation papers. In our view, 5000 words is simply not enough space to adequately validate a new scale (e.g., structural studies; replications with multiple samples; tests of discriminant, convergent, content, and criterion validity), and this is a perspective that was shared by the previous editorial team (and has now been explicitly inculcated into our team’s editorial policy). We understand that scale validation is important, but the constraints of SPPS make it too difficult to do well in 5000 words or less. Accordingly, scale validation papers will be desk rejected and authors will be encouraged to seek more suitable journals.
If you believe SPPS is an appropriate outlet, we encourage you to submit your research to the journal. A quick scan of our editorial team should give you great confidence that thoughtful, well-trained scholars will handle your work. Further, the editorial board is composed of leading researchers in the field, and thus, our editors have a great pool of talent to draw upon for reviews. I would also encourage all interested individuals to read our team’s editorial policy (McConnell, 2013), which appears at the beginning of the January 2013 issue of SPPS. We discuss a number of pertinent issues, such as our views on replication, covariates in data analyses, mediational and path analyses, and that we take the 5000 word limit seriously (i.e., we really will send your paper back without review if it’s too long)!
Before closing, I wish to acknowledge how remarkable, inspiring, and humbling it is to be Editor in Chief of SPPS. As I noted in my editorial, I am reminded each day that our field is a wonderful collection of thoughtful, creative, and passionate scholars who all work in an interdependent fashion. We rely on each other for theory and findings, we provide important feedback and critiques that improve our work, and we serve each other in many roles (e.g., authors, reviewers, editors). Recent events have shown us that when we disrespect this interdependence, we all (individually and collectively) suffer. It is especially fitting that social and personality psychologists are in a position to truly appreciate the importance of these lessons, and this perspective guides us in our work each day.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge and thank my excellent editorial team: Shira Gabriel, Rob Holland, Kurt Hugenberg, Dan Molden, Simone Schnall, Yuichi Shoda, Pamela Smith, Gerben Van Kleef, and Simine Vazire. They work tirelessly and thoughtfully on each manuscript that we receive, and they provide sound feedback and guidance that helps to improve individual papers and our field as a whole. I also benefit from the excellent support provided by the Consortium of Social and Personality Psychology (chaired by Carsten de Dreu, with ARP representation provided by Lynne Cooper). We are also fortunate to have a very excellent team of professionals at Sage Publication who do great work behind the scenes. And finally, I wish to express my gratitude to scholars like you who fill our journal pages with research and provide critical feedback to our submitting authors through your thoughtful reviews. I trust that our editorial team will continue to ensure that you view SPPS as an outlet worthy of your work.
Reference
McConnell, A. R. (2013). Editorial. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 4, 3-5.