Editorial

During the 21 years of Personality and Social Psychology Review (PSPR), the journal has established itself as one of the most important outlets for theoretical innovation in psychological science. PSPR was created to be a forum within social and personality psychology where authors could advance new ideas that enrich, intrigue, and alter the field. The data suggest that PSPR is achieving this mission. It is the journal with the highest impact factor in social and personality psychology (2016 impact factor = 9.361, #1 out of 62 in Psychology, Social; Clarivate Analytics, 2017). Not only well cited, PSPR is also well decorated. Four PSPR articles (Bastian, Jetten, Hornsey, & Leknes, 2014; Cushman, 2013; Gawronski & Cesario, 2013; Strack & Deutsch, 2004) have won the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize, which places it, along with Psychological Review, as the journal with the highest number of the recipients for that award.

Behind these impressive achievements, there have been five editors at PSPR: Marilynn Brewer, Eliot Smith, Galen Bodenhausen, Mark Leary, and Monica Biernat. Alongside these editors who have shaped and oversaw PSPR, there have been many associate editors who have guided, reviewers who have assessed, and, of course, authors who have contributed manuscripts. We, as two Editors who will jointly oversee the journal, are honored to join this group of individuals who have shared their judgment, time, and insight and have brought PSPR to where it is now.

The new editorial team will have three associate editors—Kentaro Fujita, Richard Robins, and Jacqueline Voreaur—who will enable us to cover the wide breadth of research encompassed by the field of personality and social psychology. We are tasked with an exciting mission, to publish high-impact articles in social and personality psychology that review what has been done in the past with novel and illuminating perspective and drive the research of the field forward with creativity and insight. In short, our goal is to maintain and build upon the excellent foundation that 20 years of PSPR has produced.

Thankfully for us, the excellence of PSPR means that we do not need to make any structural or procedural changes to the journal. However, as with all of the editors before us, we must be attuned to the changes in our field. Thus, we would like to draw attention to the existing mechanisms to enhance the impact and significance of the work published in PSPR. In the past 5 years, approximately 16% of the articles published in PSPR were meta-analyses. With the increased focus and determination of the field to improve the dependability and replicability of its research, meta-analysis has potential for greater influence. Consequently, the transparency and rigor of meta-analyses—as with all research in social and personality psychology—is paramount (Funder et al., 2014).

Thus, we expect authors of meta-analyses to comply with the standards for meta-analyses recommended by the American Psychological Association (APA; APA Publications and Communications Board Working Group on Journal Article Reporting Standards, 2008). Moreover, we also encourage authors of meta-analyses to archive their databases so that the strength of the evidence leading to the meta-analytic conclusions can be assessed (see Nelson, Simmons, & Simonsohn, 2018, for discussion). We also note that the option to submit supplemental materials is available for authors to provide additional details on meta-analyses as well as for narrative reviews. We hope that PSPR will continue to be an outlet for articles that develop the state of the art in how we conduct our science, whether they focus on statistical (e.g., MacKinnon & Pirlott, 2015), methodological (e.g., Murayama, Pekrun, & Fiedler, 2014), or meta-theoretical issues (e.g., Van Lange, 2013).

But the bread and butter of PSPR will continue to be the groundbreaking, theoretically innovative articles that seek to unravel the complexities of people and their social worlds. A review paper that analyzed journal citation data over 40 years from 17 APA journals concluded that “personality and social psychology is located at the heart of psychological knowledge” (Yang & Chiu, 2009, p. 349). We believe that PSPR exemplifies what it means to be at the heart of psychological knowledge, both a source and a connector of energy that circulates throughout the field, to the rest of psychological science, and beyond.