Asian Journal of Social Psychology Continues to Grow in 2019

Professor Allan B. I. Bernardo
Editor, AJSP and Chair of AASP’s Research and Publication Committee

The middle of 2019 brought several good news about the growth of the Asian Journal of Social Psychology (AJSP).
In June, the 2018 CiteScores (3-year impact factors) published by Elsevier and Scopus showed the CiteScore of AJSP rising to 1.30, which is highest Citescore since the citation index was compiled. The CiteScore ranks the AJSP at the 50th percentile of journals in Social Psychology, putting at the threshold of Q2 ranking. The CiteScore ranks AJSP at the 78th percentile in General Social Science, putting it in the top quartile.
The following month, the 2018 Journal Citations Reports (2-year impact factors) published by the World of Science and Clarivate Analytics also showed an increase in AJSP’s impact factor to 1.070, a sizable increase from 0.740 from 2017, but still below the 2015 impact factor of 1.261. While these are certainly positive developments, the citation indexes indicate that there is still so much room for growth in the AJSP.
Some more growth seems to be in the offing, if other indicators are considered. The download trend for AJSP articles reached an all-time high of 120,571 downloads, indicating a continuous growth trend in reader downloads since 2014 when downloads were below 90,000.
The downloads are matched by the submissions to the journal. There were 535 manuscripts submitted to the AJSP in 2018, again an all-time high (compared to the previous high in 2017 of 346 manuscripts). This suggests that more scholars are considering the journal as a viable publication venue for good social psychology research. Unfortunately, the acceptance rates remain low at about 8%, which is average for the journal’s history.
Even as the acceptance rates are low, we can also report good author experiences, and there are significant improvements in the speed of the review process. For example, the median number of days from submission to first decision in 2018 is 4 days, compared to 31 in the previous year. The median number of days from submission to acceptance in 2018 is 245 days or approximately 6 months. The average number of days from acceptance to early view publication in 2018 is 55 days (compared to 79 days in 2017), and with our publisher’s collaboration, we aim to reduce that to 22 days.
I am in the second year heading the editorial team of AJSP, and I still share Editor-in-Chief duties with Angela Leung and Yohsuke Ohtsubo. In the previous year, we had a very hardworking team of Associate Editors, namely: Chi-Ying Cheng (Singapore Management University), Bobby Cheon (Nanyang Technological University), Takeshi Hamamura (Curtin University), Sammyh Khan (Keele University), Yu Niiya (Hosei University), Sang Hee Park, (Chungbuk National University), Lin Qiu (Nanyang Technological University), Kim-Pong Tam, (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Zou Xi (Nanyang Technological University), and Xinyue Zhou (Zhejiang University). But because of the surge in number of manuscripts submitted in 2018, we recruited four more new Associate Editors, namely: Emma Buchtel (Education University of Hong Kong), Xiaowan Lin (University of Macau), Sun Woong Park (Korea University), and Sawa Senzaki (University of Wisconsin-Green Bay).
During the recently concluded AASP Conference in Taipei, the editorial board had a meeting to better strategies about the future plans and processes of the journal. The editorial board was joined by the AASP President Emiko Kashima and two of the Senior Editorial Advisers, Susumu Yamaguchi and James Liu.
Also during the AASP Conference, the Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors conducted a session for scholars interested in publishing the journal. I presented a summary of recent developments in the journal, and Co-Editor-in-Chief Angela Leung and several Associate Editors gave very valuable suggestions and advise to prospective authors.
During the conference, the virtual issue on “Social and Cultural Aspects of Well-Being” was launched. Readers can still access this virtual issue
at AJSP website (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/1467839x/homepage/social-and-cultural-aspects-of-well-being?) and access the article for free until 15 September 2019.
There are forthcoming special issues in the journal. These include the Special Forum on “Countering Terrorism in Indonesia” (Guest editor: James H. Liu) and the Special Issue on “An application of the theory of sociocultural/cultural models in social and cultural psychology” (Guest editor: Valery Chirkov). There is also a current call-for-submission to the Special Issue on “Social Psychology of Climate Change in the Asian Context” (Guest co-editors: Kim-Pong Tam, Angela Leung, and Susan Clayton).
There is certainly so much activity in the Asian Journal of Social Psychology and the editorial team is working very hard to ensure that all these activity come together to further the growth of the AASP’s flagship journal.