Welcome Message From the New Editors-In-Chief

What’s New for 2022?

In December 2021 José-Luis Padilla (University of Granada) and Jost Reinecke (University of Bielefeld) stepped down from the editorial team. Marcelino Cuesta and Katrijn Van Deun took up their editorial responsibilities as Co-Editors in chief with the support of Álvaro Postigo as assistant editor, striving to maintain the high standards. We as current editors want to thank José-Luis Padilla and Jost Reinecke for their excellent work in advancing Methodology as a journal for discussing and solving methodological problems in empirical social and behavioral science research. Furthermore, the editorial team was extended with the following associate editors: Shahab Jolani (Maastricht University, The Netherlands), Jost Reinecke (Bielefeld University, Germany), Isabel Benítez (University of Granada. Spain), Francisco Abad (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain). Lastly, an excellent team of researchers accepted to become advisory board members: Dimitrios Stamovlasis, Philipp Doeble, Johan Braeken, Róbert Balázsi, Mark Stemmler, Peter Verboon, Andrew Bell, Ana Hernández, Salvador Chacón, Inés Tomás, Urbano Lorenzo, Juan Botella, Dolores Frías, Julio Sánchez-Meca, Georgina Guilera, Mª Teresa Anguera, Juana Gómez Benito. We wish to thank both the associate editors and the advisory board members for taking up their respective tasks and the amazing team at PsychOpen GOLD for all the technical support.

According to journal citation reports, the 2020 impact factor of Methodology is 1.865. We intend to use this Editorial to lay out future plans for both the content of the journal and how we want to streamline the editorial process for authors. Recently, the journal has started to accept LaTeX submissions.

We intend to continue the journal’s editorial policy outlined in the formal editorial by Padilla and Lugtig (2016). Methodology will keep welcoming articles addressing current methodological challenges, including those that stem from new types of data that are used more and more in studying individuals, organizations, and society: advances in social and behavioral computing, social networks, new data collection technologies, and new methods of data analysis. The journal will publish articles that bring forward qualitative and quantitative methods for applied and basic research in social sciences, including tutorials that offer users a clear grip on the bewildering field of (new) methods, including those developed in disciplines like artificial intelligence and machine learning. The methodological core and the quality of the articles are the only criteria we use in the editorial process. Methodology aims to advance substantive knowledge in the social sciences improving methods and practice.

We also rely on the past and future support of the European Association of Methodology (EAM) board and its members to improve access and dissemination of the published papers. Together with the EAM board, we are working on future developments for Methodology, all of them aimed at increasing the impact of the journal in the social science fields, and to offer non-specialist readers content that will enable them, in an accessible way, to improve their research practices in the different substantive fields. Finally, there cannot be a high-quality journal without authors, readers, and reviewers. We will do our best to improve communication with them to maintain the standards of quality reached by Methodology since its inception 17 years ago.

Acknowledgment of Reviewers

To end our first editorial, we wish to thank last year’s reviewers whose work is so important in keeping the high standards of the journal and research in methodology in general. These are: