Increasing Scientific Quality in the Expanding Field of Personality Science

Ironically, procrastination helped me kick off this overdue editorial. As it does every year, EJP’s editorial team is presenting a Wiley Award for the best publication by a student that is based on a PhD or Master/Diploma thesis—and as I am every year, I was a bit late in gathering, re-reading, and ranking all the eligible papers (no less than 15 in 2018) and asking the associate editors for their independent ranks. Finally completing all of this in a very brief amount of time was a dense and extremely difficult but also extremely gratifying task. The conceptual and methodological quality of all the papers, the straightforward implementation of transparency standards, and the rich variety of phenomena and questions they focused on simply made me happy—they showcase what we at EJP would like to publish. I would like to congratulate Elien Mabbe, who won the 2018 Wiley Award for her co-authored article titled ‘The Role of Child Personality in Effects of Psychologically Controlling Parenting: An Examination at the Level of Daily Fluctuations’ (Mabbe et al., 2018). Young researchers are strongly represented in our journal, and I am delighted to see the quality of their work. Another case of procrastination—opening the emails that were popping up in my inbox while I should have been focusing on writing (this editorial)—reinforced this positive mood (and thereby helped me keep on writing). When the latest entry in our EJP blog popped up, I ended up re-reading interview after interview, many of which were with authors of papers I had just read for the Wiley Award selection. To experience how much enthusiasm and genuine intellectual curiosity our authors have when they tackle their work and to learn about the background of this work from a very personal perspective were again very gratifying and offered much insight. I want to thank Joanne Chung and Lisanne de Moor for their excellent work with the EJP blog (https:// www.ejp-blog.com/). It is a worthwhile source of information for anyone who is interested in personal views on how personality psychologists approach their work, what aspects of their work they are most excited about, where they are heading next, and how they experience publishing in EJP and pursuing a scientific career more generally. Both recent experiences strengthened my confidence in the potential of our field, in its ability to self-correct and improve, and in the value of expert-based feedback that focuses on increasing scientific rigour. Personality science might be ready to sustainably increase its conceptual, methodological, and reporting standards as well as its heterogeneity, breadth, and crosstalk with other fields. Scientific journals can contribute more or less to this development depending on whether and how they set the respective quality standards, evaluate and help to increase the quality of the papers accordingly, and welcome the whole variety of relevant contributions. In this editorial, I will reflect on EJP’s criteria for deriving editorial evaluations and recommendations and on the various shapes and forms of valuable contributions to EJP. I will also report on some recent developments and planned highlights. As always, my biggest thanks go to EJP’s wonderful team of associate editors: Erika Carlson, Malgorzata Fajkowska, Christian Kandler, Odilia Laceulle, Jan-Erik Lönnqvist (who joined the team in 2018), René Mõttus, and Cornelia Wrzus. They all ensure that our high standards for scientific quality also apply to the editorial and review process. Our goal as editors is to help the authors realize their best possible products, and we invest a lot of time and intellectual resources in carefully digesting each paper, in pinpointing critical issues and those that can be optimized, and in providing detailed and constructive feedback. This policy is, obviously, something reviewers of our journal are well aware of. Since the beginning of my editorial term, I have not seen a single review of the ‘lazy’, ‘meaningless’, or ‘unfair’ types that seem to lead many of our colleagues to describe the peer-review process in general as erratic, arbitrary, or hopelessly unreliable. This is not at all what we experience at EJP. I am deeply grateful for the quality feedback our reviewers provide: They really help our authors produce better science. Citation-wise, the numbers stayed high with a 2-year impact factor (IF) of 3.5. The 5-year IF (which one might regard as the more robust developmental indicator given the publication speed of our field) went up for the fourth time in the row and is now at 4.2 (2.9 in 2013, 3.4 in 2014, 3.6 in 2015, and 3.7 in 2016). For both IF variants, EJP secured its position as the second highest empirical journal in the social-personality field (after JPSP) and as the journal with the highest impact factor among all journals that are exclusively devoted to the science of personality. We have a stable overall rejection rate of around 85%, and roughly 55% of submitted papers are desk-rejected. Although the introduction of this editorial might indicate otherwise, we do not tend to procrastinate and are comparatively fast with an average time to first decision of 25 days. In 2018, we continued to foster the transparency of work published in EJP, and successfully so. Ever since we introduced a new policy that was geared toward increasing Open Science practices in manuscripts submitted to and published in the journal in 2017, we have seen a steady increase in transparency. One way of quantifying this trend is to look at the number of papers with one or more open science badges that are awarded to papers that meet the standards for Open material, Open data, and/or Preregistration (see European Journal of Personality, Eur. J. Pers. 33: 3–6 (2019) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/per.2192