A post by Editor-in-Chief René Mõttus
The European Journal of Personality (EJP) now has its highest-ever Impact Factor (IF) of 5.84.
Although most journals saw an IF increase in 2020 due to changes in how the IFs are calculated, EJP has retained its very strong position among personality journals. Alongside Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, EJP continues to publish the most impactful empirical personality research.
As EJP Editor, I am very proud of the journal's recent and ongoing developments. I am grateful to its past and current Editors, Associate Editors, Editorial Board, Reviewers and Readers.
EJP — European Journal of Personality; JPSP — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; PSPB — Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin; JOPY — Journal of Personality; JRP — Journal of Research in Personality; SPPS — Social Psychological and Personality Science; PAID — Personality and Individual Differences.
Especially, I am grateful to the Authors who have chosen EJP as the outlet of their excellent work. It is important for EJP that our Authors include not only well-established researchers, but also those at the early stages of their careers. I am glad that they represent a range of countries and work on diverse topics. Such diversity is very important for EJP, and will be even more so going forward.
Obviously, there is much more to a journal than its IF. Most of all, EJP aims to be an outlet for the personality research community that promotes transparency and rigour in research as well as diversity among authors and topics. Through its outreach activities, EJP aims to disseminate research beyond its regular readers. Moreover, besides publishing research submitted to it, EJP aims to pro-actively identify emerging research trends and promote them, through target articles and special issues, for example.
Going forward, EJP aims to maintain and increase its positive impact by:
• Continually attracting the highest-quality submissions: EJP aims to be the first journal researchers have in mind for their best work.
• Continued full commitment to open science: EJP already has one of the highest Top Factor scores in psychology and most submissions have openly accessible data and materials.
• Fast editorial processes: average time to first decision is currently 27 days.
• Clear Evaluation Criteria used by Editors and Reviewers.
• Proactively soliciting papers on key and emerging topics that can shape the future of the field, besides regular submissions.
• Post-publication dissemination via the EJP Blog (now open for guest posts), Twitter, Facebook, EJP Newsletter, and Personality Psychology Podcast
• Active efforts to include less represented regions among readers, reviewers and authors.
To give the research community a heads-up, here are a few changes that will happen soon:
• Due to an increased number of high-quality submissions, EJP submissions will soon have to comply with a (generous) maximum word count, so that we can accommodate more great research without excessive backlogs.
• Where possible, authors will be encouraged to share Markdowns showing the details of their statistical analyses: besides enabling greater transparency, this can help to shorten parts of the main text; detailed instructions will be provided soon!
• Multi-lab, multi-culture cross-replications will be actively encouraged for greater rigour and generalisability of the findings, as well as for widening the range of researchers who publish in the journal.
Thankfully,
René Mõttus