Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS) Update
Simine Vazire
(Editor in Chief)
UC Davis
On July 1, 2015, I began my position as Editor in Chief of Social Psychological and Personality Science. Together with 10 associate editors, including ARP regulars Wiebke Bleidorn and Greg Webster, our editorial team has handled about 180 new submissions in the last three and a half months. This is about the same submission rate SPPS has experienced for the last year or two. The desk rejection rate has also stayed the same as the in recent years (about one third). It's too early to say what the acceptance rate looks like under the new team, as not many manuscripts that have gone out for review have received a final decision yet. In June SPPS received its first impact factor: 2.56.
We receive excellent submissions from ARP members and encourage personality researchers to continue to consider SPPS as an outlet for their work. Indeed, SPPS is a natural home for personality research, as ARP is one of the organizations that co-owns and sponsors the journal. This means that ARP shares in profits from SPPS subscriptions,* so by submitting your work there, you are directly supporting ARP.
The other organizations that co-own and sponsor SPPS are the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the European Association of Social Psychology. The journal is also co-sponsored by the Asian Association of Social Psychology and the Society of Australasian Social Psychologists, and is managed by SAGE. We publish articles on all topics within social/personality psychology, using a wide range of designs, methods, and populations.
Several changes went into effect when our editorial team started, most of which are described in my editorial, which is available online (http://spp.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/09/29/1948550615603955.full.pdf+html). Most of these changes are geared towards increasing the transparency of both the research process and the peer review process. For example, we are now asking authors to disclose data exclusions, all conditions, and relevant measures, and to disclose how sample size was determined. In addition, we will begin printing the handling editor's name with each published manuscript, starting with manuscripts accepted under the new editorial team. We also now ask authors to report effect sizes and 95% confidence intervals for key results. Finally, we explicitly state that we will consider replications studies and studies that present non-significant results.
Statistical power will be a consideration when evaluating all submitted work. This is not new, but to reflect the growing understanding of the need for larger samples in most between-person designs, we now require authors to discuss the statistical power of their studies, and this will be a major factor in the review process. Underpowered studies are sometimes justified (e.g., when collecting a large enough sample to have 80% power is extremely difficult), but authors should give a justification, and should circumscribe their conclusions given the greater uncertainty and lower precision associated with results from underpowered studies. In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, researchers should assume they are studying an effect that is no larger than the typical effect in social/personality psychology (d = .43, r = .21; Richard, Bond, & Stokes-Zoota, 2003), and, whenever possible, should aim for at least 80% power to detect an effect this size.
Another important change is that the 5,000 word limit no longer includes tables, table notes, figures, and figure captions. This is to encourage authors to report all relevant statistics about their data and analyses.
We also welcome exploratory results, and ask that they be clearly presented as such. If a confirmatory study would be easy to run, including one will greatly enhance the chances of the paper being accepted. We realize this is sometimes hard for personality research (e.g., longitudinal studies, behavioral observation, round-robin designs, etc.), and as such we are open to publishing purely exploratory results so long as the conclusions are calibrated.
In short, our goal is to continue to make SPPS a home for the best social/personality research. We hope to keep the journal on the exceptional trajectory it has been on, and to continue to encourage transparency and rigor—the hallmarks of good science.
*Technically SPPS has not turned a profit yet (which is normal for a 6-year old journal), but it's getting close._________
Reference
Richard, F. D., Bond Jr, C. F., & Stokes-Zoota, J. J. (2003). One hundred years of social psychology quantitatively described. Review of General Psychology, 7(4), 331.