Expanded Coverage and Expanding Our Editorial Team

As Journal of Media Psychology enters its 34th volume, we are pleased to see the journal continue to grow to meet the evolving, expanding, and increasingly interdisciplinary field of media psychology.

Most exciting for JMP is that we will be expanding the number of total issues published with each volume – expanding from four annual issues to six annual issues. This growth has been made possible by an increased impact factor (as of 2020, 1.634; 5-year impact factor of 3.043) and a marked increase in submissions to the journal, which have pushed our rejection rate upwards of 90%. This growth has also been represented by an increase in submissions from around the globe and beyond North American and Western European contexts, which has been an ongoing consideration for the journal (and in the social sciences broadly; Kupferschmidt, 2019). Our hope is that by expanding to a bi-monthly rather than a quarterly publication cycle, we can both make room for the expansion of media psychology as a field while also publishing accepted research much more quickly. We have also recently expanded our editorial board to more than 80 scholars and will continue expanding this body, so that we have a reserve of dedicated scholars able to provide expert feedback on submitted scholarship.

As we enter 2022, we also have a “changing of the guard” with our editorial team, as we will say goodbye to Dr. Christoph Klimmt, who was the Editor-in-Chief for volumes 30–32. Christoph was a driving force in the journal’s growth over the last few years, helping lead efforts to establish our online presence and encourage submissions from a broader and global community. Most recently, Christoph organized our efforts to encourage a deeper elaboration on the trajectory of theory in media psychology research – the first efforts of which were recently published (Klimmt & Bowman, 2021) and we’re eager to publish the other essays in that collection in the coming year. The journal thrived under Christoph’s leadership, and I have been able to learn quite a bit from him over the last year of our overlapping editorial tasks.

With Christoph’s departure, we are also pleased to bring on-board a new member to our Associate Editors team in Dr. H. H. J. “Enny” Das of Radboud University in The Netherlands. At Radboud U, Enny is the chair of communication and persuasion and bring an extensive background in the study of persuasion and health communication. She is a highly cited scholar with nearly 4,000 individual citations as of this writing (according to Google Scholar) and more than 50 published manuscripts with at least 10 citations. More importantly, she is an incredibly thoughtful and thorough peer reviewer who has made recent contributions to JMP as an author as well (with an upcoming manuscript focused on the narrative processing of tragic entertainment). Already as 2021 comes to a close, Enny has taken to her associate editorship enthusiastically, and we are grateful to have her voice among our editors.

As the journal expands in size and scope, I want to renew our calls for increased transparency. The last two years have severely challenged many of the structures of traditional academic publishing, and one thing we have learned is that our authors and our reviewers are under immense personal and professional strain. Through our social media (Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JournalOfMediaPsychology and Twitter @JMP_Hogrefe) we provide bimonthly updates about our review times and acceptance rates. We’ve also worked with our editors (and our editorial assistants) to stay in constant contact with our authors, and we encourage you to reach out to use with any questions, comments, or concerns. We collectively own the future of media psychology and likewise, the trajectory of JMP.