A Rise Beyond Expectations
Last year I wrote an editorial that reflected on the perspective for a further rise of the impact factor of the European Journal of Psychological Assessment (Schweizer, 2010a). At that time the impact factor was 1.561, and there had already been a steady increase from about 1 in 2007 over 1.262 in 2008. Considering the complicated situation of assessment journals, I concluded that we should not expect a further rise of the impact factor of this journal. It was therefore quite surprising to learn recently that for 2010 the European Journal of Psychological Assessment had in fact achieved an impact factor of 1.824. There would seem to be only two other assessment journals with larger impact factors.
A search for possible explanations for this astonishing development reveals two possible reasons: improved international visibility and improved quality management.
Although international visibility of the journal may be a major reason for the rise of the impact factor, the emphasis in fact lies on the visibility in non-European countries (assuming that the visibility within Europe is already good). One indicator of international visibility is the number of manuscripts submitted by international authors and – more importantly – finally accepted for publication in the European Journal of Psychological Assessment. The number of such manuscripts increased from 2009 to 2010, including papers written by groups of authors who are completely non-European as well as papers by mixed groups of authors both non-European and European.
In 2009 only four papers by non-European authors appeared in the journal (Altin & Gencöz, 2009; Bachner-Melman, Bacon-Shnoor, Zohar, Elizur & Ebstein, 2009; Kreitler & Casakin, 2009; Stankov, Jihyun, & Paek, 2009). Furthermore, there were two papers written by mixed groups composed of European and non-European authors (Hirschfeld & Brown, 2009; Tsaousis & Georgiades, 2009). Taken together 16.5% of the papers published in 2009 can be considered international.
The increase in international visibility from 2009 to 2010 is obvious because the number of papers by non-European authors doubled: Eight instead of four papers originating from non-European authors were published (Cui, Teng, Li, & Oei, 2010; Daoud, & Abojedi, 2010; Gignac, 2010; Kazarin & Taher, 2010; Laverdiere, Diguer, Gamache, & Evans, 2010; Lopez, Quan, & Carvajal, 2010; Newman, Limbers, & Varni, 2010; Wright, Creed, & Zimmer-Gembeck, 2010). Furthermore, there was an even more impressive increase in the number of accepted papers by mixed groups composed of European and non-European authors. The number rose from two in 2009 to nine in 2010 (Backenstrass, Joest, Gehring, Pfeiffer, Mearns, & Catanzaro, 2010; Balzarotti, John, & Gross, 2010; Caballo, Salazar, Irurtia, Arias, Hofmann, & the CISO-A Research Team, 2010; Coretti, Schwartz, Fermani, & Meeus, 2010; Di Giunta, Eisenberg, Kupfer, Steca, Tramontana, & Caparara, 2010; Kuntsche, Knibbe, Engels, & Gmel, 2010; Maiano, Morin, Monthuy-Blanc, & Garbarino, 2010; Rivero, Garcia-Lopez, & Hofmann, 2010; Ruch, Harzer, Proyer, Park, & Peterson, 2010). This increase indicates that international cooperation in the field of assessment is becoming more and more important. Again, combining both types of papers to get the percentage of papers with international authorships results in 47% of the 2010 papers being international in origin.
The other reason for the increase of the impact factor are developments in the quality management during the review process. Over the last years special emphasis was given to enhancing quality management with respect to the manuscripts submitted to the European Journal of Psychological Assessment. A total of five editors have shared the burden of managing the review process. However, it would be unfair to claim that the previous editors were not as much concerned with quality management. What makes the current team of editors special was that they served for the journal on the basis of guidelines and performed according to special selectivity criteria. Guidelines are especially appropriate for emphasizing the selected standards. They also support the editors’ position in the negotiations with authors. We therefore compiled guidelines with respect to topics that have become especially important for the journal (Schweizer, 2010b, 2010c). The first topic was the evaluation of the outcomes of confirmatory factor analysis – an important topic since there is a concentration on confirmatory factor analysis as a method for investigating structural validity in manuscripts submitted to the European Journal of Psychological Assessment (see Alonso-Arbiol & Van de Vijver, 2010). Our concentration on this point is not surprising since in most studies there are clear expectations concerning the structure of a measure based on theoretical reasoning or the results of previous studies. Second, we compiled guidelines concerning the adaptation of measures to one of the European languages. A considerable number of papers published in this journal report on such adaptations. Another point is selectivity: The present team of editors was in the favorable position to give more weight to selectivity than the previous teams since there was a considerable rise in the overall number of submissions over the last years. Having more manuscripts helps us to organize the selection process according to especially elaborate criteria.
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