Richard Lucas Editor, Journal of Research in Personality
Bio: Richard E. Lucas is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University and a Research Professor of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW, Berlin). He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of subjective well-being. In particular, he has studied the association between extraversion and positive affect, focusing on the extent to which various factors including differences in social activity or differences in reactivity to pleasant stimuli can explain this association. In addition, he has examined the extent to which various life circumstance variables are associated with well-being. Most recently, he has used large-scale panel studies to examine the extent to which people adapt to major life events like marriage, widowhood, unemployment, and the onset of disability. Finally, Dr. Lucas is interested the measurement of well-being, and he has published research evaluating the psychometric properties of well-being measures (including a co-authored book entitled Well-Being for Public Policy which examines the utility of well-being measures in more applied settings). Dr. Lucas has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and the Journal of Happiness Studies, and he recently served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Personality Processes and Individual Differences.
Editor's Letter
I have now been reading manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Research in Personality for about six months. During that time, my vision for the future of the journal has solidified. Like the previous editors, I believe that an important role for JRP will be to highlight the most innovative research that is being conducted within the area of personality psychology, broadly defined. Personality is a hub field that links all areas of psychology. My hope is that JRP will continue to attract a broad range of innovative and interesting papers that span all of these areas. And as I noted in a recent editorial, the current editorial team will take a broad perspective on what counts as innovative. In some cases, innovative research might be work that evaluates a novel theory using newly developed methods. In other cases, an innovative study may be one that applies the most rigorous but underused methods to well-established theories and research questions. I see a place for a broad range of research in the pages of JRP.
It is also worth pointing out that JRP is unique in the diversity of material that it publishes. We accept all types of articles ranging from multiple study papers that systematically test sets of predictions from a theory, to strong single-study papers with a relatively narrow focus, to theoretical papers and broad reviews. In addition, the brief-report format provides additional flexibility, allowing us to publish studies that make small but important contributions, studies that provide critical replications of previously published findings, or studies that provide null results. So this diversity of formats is something to consider both when thinking about which journals to read regularly and when considering the appropriate home for the work that you are producing.
One goal for the next three years will be to continue the improvements in editorial efficiency that the previous editorial teams have made. As authors, we are all concerned about the length of time it takes for our research to see the light of day. Journals that take many months to make decisions or that require multiple revisions before publication will be unlikely to be seen as a first choice for authors who have an ever-increasing number of outlets from which to choose. I hope that the review process at JRP will be perceived as being quick and efficient, and that this efficiency will enable JRP to attract the highest quality and most innovative research that is being conducted within personality psychology. To that end, I will continue many of the policies that my predecessors put into place—including the innovative and successful “streamlined” review process. For those who are unfamiliar with this policy, JRP allows authors who have had papers rejected at an APA or APS journal to submit those papers, along with the original reviews and decision letter, to JRP. Of course, authors should revise their paper in response to the reviews they received, and they should describe how they have changed the paper to address the concerns that were raised. In most cases, we can make an editorial decision without sending the paper out for further review. This greatly reduces reviewer burden, and it can lead to a dramatic reduction in the amount of time it takes for a submission to be published. I strongly encourage ARP members to take advantage of the streamlined review process (and please mention it to your colleagues in related fields who might not know about it).
In addition to maintaining existing policies, the editorial team has reviewed all aspects of the submission process with an eye towards making things work as smoothly as possible. We have considered ways that we can improve each step in the process—from the number of reviewers we recruit and the default amount of time that they are given to complete their reviews to thinking carefully about when revised papers should be sent out for a second round of reviews. Combined with a very efficient production process on the publisher's end, these policies will hopefully lead to a relatively short time between submission and publication. We have already had papers go through the review process and be published on-line within just two months of their initial submission. Some streamlined papers have been published on-line just two weeks after they were submitted. Of course, not all papers will move through the system this quickly, but we hope that for all papers the process is a quick, efficient and pleasant one.
A final goal for my term as editor will be to ensure that JRP continues to be known for publishing the highest quality research. This does not mean that the studies that are published here must be perfect; we all know that every study has flaws. Instead, I hope that JRP can be seen as a model of transparency and adequate reporting. Recently, one of our associate editors, Brent Donnellan, published a paper showing that widely accepted reporting practices are often not followed, which impedes understanding of the research that is presented (Kashy, Donnellan, Ackerman, & Russell, in press). In most cases, the guidelines that are being ignored are uncontroversial and are not overly burdensome for authors (e.g., reporting basic descriptive statistics, including effect sizes, providing adequate information about the variables that are included in regression models). I firmly believe that research articles can be interesting and exciting, while still providing enough methodological details to allow readers to evaluate the claims that are made therein. Authors who submit to JRP can facilitate the review process by including in their initial submissions the information that current guidelines suggest is necessary for evaluating the work (again, see Kashy et al., in press, for some excellent suggestions in this regard). I also encourage authors to include additional material (e.g., covariance matrices that enable structural equation modeling results to be replicated) as on-line supplements when submitting their work. Technological advances mean that important details about the research process can easily be included with the work without adding unnecessary length to the papers that we publish.
The previous editorial team did an excellent job with the journal, and the members of ARP owe them our gratitude for the work they have done. The number of submissions has been increasing dramatically over the past few years, and the impact factor has been rising more quickly than that of any other personality journal. I hope we can continue to build on the successes of these past years, making the official journal of ARP an even stronger outlet that is known for publishing the most interesting and exciting research from within personality and from related fields.
