Greetings and Welcome to Blackwell Publishing’s Social and Personality Psychology Compass (SPPC)! This is a new electronic journal with a pioneering vision – social and personality psychology has had nothing like it before. SPPC combines the quality of a traditional scholarly journal with the flexibility and speed of electronic publishing with search engine integration and continuously updated features.
SPPC will be an on-line outlet for original, relatively short (approximately 5,000 words), peer-reviewed surveys of recent research and/or theory, on-going debates and ideas for fresh areas of inquiry in social and personality psychology. Authors will be encouraged to present their unique vision of the research topic that they review in SPCC and controversy will not be discouraged. The majority of articles will be commissioned (although submissions also will be welcomed) by an international team of semi-autonomous Section Editors and by an editorial board who will represent distinct areas of the field. Each state-of-the-art review will be supported by a comprehensive bibliography and written to be accessible to an international readership of social and personality psychologists, scholars in related fields and teachers and students.
Our aim is to make SPPC an indispensable tool for teaching, researching essays, preparing lectures, writing research proposals or just keeping up with new developments in a specific area of interest. Because divisions among different parts of the field of social and personality psychology are to some extent arbitrary and creative efforts vitally depend on the importation of new concepts and methodologies, we intend to foster close cooperation across topic sections to insure that the boundaries remain permeable. A basic philosophy of the Editor-in-Chief is the need for the continuing recognition and appreciation of the symbiotic relationship between social psychology and personality psychology. SPPC will be edited with this mission in mind, as well as having the most knowledgeable and fluent authors to present classic, current and on-the-edge topics.
The launch date for SPPC is January 2008, by which time we aim to have 110 review articles available on-line. Articles typically will be published online 8 to 10 weeks from receipt of the final version. The usual queue to publication will be eliminated; an article will be published as soon as the production process is complete. This means that authors can be assured of seeing their work appear promptly and that their surveys are up-to-date in a way that conventional paper journals can rarely approach. Also, because the articles will be published on-line, color illustrations and links to websites and other supporting media will be possible.
Compass authors also will have their own profile page on the journal site and receive free personal access to the journal.
Articles are not traditional reports on research but surveys of recent research and/or theory, on-going debates and suggestions for fresh areas of inquiry. The papers are targeted at a broad audience who will be able to find the results of the latest research and argument surveyed in a single convenient place. SPPC will be the place to come, whether you are a student looking for reliable information for a paper topic, a researcher attempting to become familiar with a subject outside your speciality, or an interested layperson.
Jerry Suls
Editor-in-Chief
jerry-suls@uiowa.edu
Social and Personality Psychology Compass
