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Communications Psychology volume 2, Article number: 76 (2024)
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Communications Psychology is celebrating its first birthday and has recently reached the publication of its 100th peer-reviewed paper. We mark our transition to toddlerhood by reflecting on publications, milestones, and development.
Communications Psychology is an Open Access journal. Scientists and members of the public alike can read and share our content without barriers. Looking at the traction the papers we published in our first year gained online (approximated via Altmetric scores), it is perhaps no surprise that work that addresses some of the big topics of our time—the way we spend our lives online and the connections we forge—received most attention.
One example is a paper by Daniel Racek and colleagues1 that demonstrates how the Ukrainian language (as opposed to Russian) became increasingly more popular in tweets originating from Ukraine even before the outbreak of the war in February 2022, a process that accelerated after the Russian invasion. The Article was widely discussed on X, and covered extensively in the media, including Ukrainian and Russian speaking outlets (https://nature.altmetric.com/details/158265315/news).
Twitter use was also the topic of our most retweeted paper. Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello and colleagues showed that time spent on the platform predicts lower well-being and sense of belonging, and increased outrage and polarization2. It is simultaneously ironic but unsurprising that this work received more engagement, specifically on X, than any other of our publications.
In contrast, encouraging news about real-world connections came from a paper by Laura Aknin and colleagues3. The paper established not only that people are hesitant to reach out to old friends, but also included an intervention that can nudge them to take the initiative and just “make that call”.
Communications Psychology is a research journal with a commitment to reflect its community’s interests. For our review content we seek impactful papers that summarize and advance the debate on the big topics in psychological research. Which ideas and proposals were most interesting to our readers?
“The credibility revolution has been an impetus to several substantive changes which will have a positive, long-term impact on our research environment”
In one of our very first Perspectives, Max Korbmacher and colleagues from the FORTT consortium highlighted the positive developments in psychological research that arose from the replication crisis4. This piece has been accessed more than 24,000 times at the time of writing and we are confident that the optimistic outlook and pragmatic guidance will continue to aid and inspire researchers.
Our review section is complemented by our opinion content. This serves as a space for discussions about issues that matter to psychologists and covers a wide array of topics from how psychology can inform challenges for humanity, to what challenges in psychology must be addressed and how.
In a Comment that received significant attention, Malte Elson and coauthors5 call upon the field to stop treating psychological measures like items of personal hygiene; instead of employing their individual version of scales and measures, researchers should rely on standardized psychological tools to improve credibility and generalizability of research. As is the hallmark of an engaging opinion piece (in contrast to a work of canonical truth) this piece and a published counter position6 triggered both, passionate agreement and discerning criticism.
Yet, it’s not always wide appeal and spirited debate that mark a piece that editors consider important to publish. A final example from our opinion pages is a Comment by Amy Burrell and colleagues7. This piece offers a set of principles to aid researchers who contemplate emotionally demanding research. While the target group for such a paper is comparatively smaller, seeing how much the work struck a chord and received sincere appreciation by members of this research community was heartening.
In May 2024, we celebrated the publication of the journal’s first two Stage 2 Registered Reports8. In addition to these 2 completed Registered Reports, the journal has so far issued in-principle acceptance to nine further Stage 1 Registered Reports, many of which are publicly available in the journal’s dedicated figshare space (https://springernature.figshare.com/registered-reports_CommsPsychol).
A fair number of Registered Reports and standard Research Articles that the journal received since launch are replication or generalization studies. We remain committed to supporting important work of this type and recent publications are showcased in a cross-journal Collection on the topic (https://www.nature.com/collections/ebeibhiihc) that also includes Nature Communications.
Communications Psychology regularly launches Collections, often in collaboration with other Nature portfolio journals. We believe that these curated Collections, which frequently involve calls for submissions, serve authors and readers. Bringing work together on a shared platform facilitates exchange and increases visibility of individual Articles beyond discipline boundaries.
Another point in case is our Collection on sociopolitical Polarization (https://www.nature.com/collections/dgcejgihcc). Close ties with the other journals in the Nature portfolio that make it easy for authors to find the right journal for their paper are important to us and our cross-journal Collections are a direct result of this approach.
Communications Psychology works with a collaborative editorial model, where manuscripts are handled jointly by editorial board members (https://www.nature.com/commspsychol/editorial-board) and in-house editors (https://www.nature.com/commspsychol/editors). While the in-house team are professional editors with a PhD in a relevant discipline, our external editors are active researchers, who bring a wealth of technical expertise, insight into the current trends in the field, and the perspective of scientists who also authors, referees and open-science advocates. The in-house editors benefit immensely from their feedback, which we hope reflects in the way the journal develops as it grows.
A final shout-out goes to our community of authors, reviewers, and readers, whose trust, feedback, and patience are never taken for granted. It’s this support that has allowed us to take our first steps as a journal committed to serving the community.
Racek et al. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-023-00045-6.
Oldemburgo de Mello. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00062-z.
Aknin et al. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00075-8.
Korbmacher et al. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-023-00003-2.
Elson et al. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-023-00026-9.
Iliescu et al. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00065-w.
Burrell et al. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-023-00008-x.
Communications Psychology https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-024-00101-9.
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A year of growth. Commun Psychol 2, 76 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00126-0
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Communications Psychology (Commun Psychol)
ISSN 2731-9121 (online)
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