Current developments and challenges for the British Journal of Psychology

Despite the BJP’s name and history, the journal is becoming more and more international in terms of both authorship and readership. At the same time, we believe the journal’s reputation in the field has developed well. For those who prefer this kind of metric, an inspection of the development of the journal’s impact factor (IF) in the past two decades will underpin this – although bear in mind that the interpretation of single esteem indicators such as IF always requires critical reflection (Schweinberger, Edwards,&Neyer, 2015). The joint development of the journal’s esteem and international scope, an explicit editorial goal 5 years ago, may be evaluated not only in terms of IF, but also in terms of a fewother numbers from thepast twodecades. Between 2000 and2005, theBJPpublished a total of 216papers, ofwhich almost 80% (169) came from theUnitedKingdom,with only 8%, 4%, and 3%, of papers from the United States, Australia, and Canada, respectively. In contrast, between 2006 and 2011, theBJPpublished a total of 342 papers, but by then less than half of those (47%) had come from the United Kingdom. Contributions in significant numbers nowcame from theUnited States andCanada (19% each), and also fromAustralia (7%). Remarkably perhaps, numbers of contributions from other European countries had remained very low during that period, with the possible exception of Germany (4%) and Spain (3%). Regarding theBJP’s editorial board, this included, in 2014,more than 65%UKbased researchers (10), with three associate editors from the United States, and one each from Canada and Australia. As of today, while UK-based researchers still form the biggest group (10), the editorial board has been expanded with a special focus on international representation. Thus, further associate editors from Germany (five), Australia, Belgium, Canada, Italy, and Switzerland (two each), as well as Austria, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore, and the United States (one each), complement the current board. Table 1 provides somemore current data for submission activities and publications in the more recent period between 2013 and 2016. These suggest (i) a steady increase in annual submissions and (ii) a rather constant proportion of published against submitted manuscripts in the region of 14%. In parallel, BJP’s rejection rate that has remained in the region of 85% for some time. Table 2 focuses on submission activity and shows that while