LAUSR

This is my fourth and last editorial as Editor of the EJP, and I believe my departure will leave me with mixed feelings. At the most superficial level, I expect to feel relief (‘All the time I will have when this is over’). But beneath that, I anticipate a profound sense of melancholia (‘All the things I will miss when this is over’). As was certainly also the case for previous editors, EJP was more than just a task or a job for me. Letting go will not be easy. But first of all, on the deepest level, I have a relaxing feeling of gratitude (‘All the things I will always keep in mind when this is over’)—gratitude for being given the chance to experience this journey and to actively shape and contribute to our field from such a position; gratitude for all the stimulating and reassuring experiences I have had with my editorial team, authors, and reviewers; and gratitude for being able to observe an increasingly lively and healthy field of research. Many individuals have helped to make editing EJP such a pleasant experience. First of all, I want to thank EJP’s associate editors Erika Carlson, Malgorzata Fajkowska, Christian Kandler, Odilia Laceulle, Jan-Erik Lönnqvist, René Mõttus, and Cornelia Wrzus. It has been a pleasure to work with such an improbable congregation of bright, motivated, and reliable individuals. I also want to thank Joanne Chung and Lisanne de Moor for their excellent work with the EJP blog (https://www.ejp-blog.com/). It has been an invaluable source for learning more about EJP’s authors and the background stories of the work published in EJP. I want to express my thanks to the European Association of Personality Psychology (EAPP) for their continued trust in and support of my work. This is much appreciated. My thanks go to all authors not only for their stellar contributions to EJP but also for their willingness to really invest their intellectual resources as well as their time. We at EJP strongly believe in ‘doing it right’, in accepting the challenge instead of choosing a short cut, in investing in one sustainable contribution instead of many replaceable pieces. Thus, more often than not, we expect a lot from our authors. Last but not least, I want to thank the many voluntary reviewers without whom it would be impossible to realize the kind of quality we publish. As I said in my last editorial, we at EJP are in the fortunate position that our reviewers typically take their jobs very seriously and provide fair, detailed, insightful, and constructive reviews. In fact, these reviews are often stimulating small pieces of science themselves. In this editorial, I will report on the current state of EJP and some of last and this year’s highlights. I will then offer a brief personal wish list for personality research. One interesting observation I have made during my years as editor is that an increasing number of the papers published in EJP are authored by young scholars and rising stars in our field. In 2019, no less than 17 of 35 published papers (49%) were based on a PhD dissertation or Master/Diploma thesis (13% in 2016; 18% in 2017; and 38% in 2018). The 2019 Wiley Award for the best student-based publication was given to Gabriel Olaru for his co-authored article titled ‘“Grandpa, Do You Like Roller Coasters?”: Identifying Age-Appropriate Personality Indicators’ (Olaru, Schroeders, Wilhelm, & Ostendorf, 2019). With a 2-year impact factor (IF) of 3.3 and a 5-year IF of 4.6 (going up for the fifth time in a row), EJP secured its position as the second highest empirical journal in the socialpersonality field (after JPSP) and as the journal with the highest impact factor among all journals that are exclusively devoted to the science of personality. We have a stable rejection rate of about 85%, a stable desk-rejection rate of 55%, and we continue to have a fast turnaround for papers. One of the key tasks of my term was to implement the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines and to position EJP at the forefront of a more open and reliable personality science. I am very happy that this transition has been very promising so far. EJP is now among the journals with the most advanced implementation of transparent reporting. At the same time, it is important to note that EJP values and considers in detail all aspects of scientific quality (including transparency, power, representativeness, and conceptual logic; Back, 2017, 2019). We have also managed to ensure that transparency does not impede inclusiveness, that is, we have ensured that our guidelines are appropriate across diverse research contexts and allow for the publication of the whole breadth of conceptual and methodological approaches. When perusing last year’s publications, this breadth immediately becomes apparent. The contributions contained an impressively large set of aspects of personality including not only the overarching Big Five and HEXACO frameworks but also more specific and theoretically circumscribed cognitive aspects (intelligence, knowledge, creativity, cognitive flexibility, and time perspective), motivational aspects (self-control, power motives, life goals, and perfectionism), (anti-)socially anchored aspects (loneliness, prosociality, gratitude, narcissism, and psychopathy), and evaluative aspects (world views and values). They even included individual differences in post-apocalyptic and doomsday prepping beliefs (Fetterman, Rutjens, Landkammer, & Wilkowski, 2019) and in the susceptibility to pseudo-profound bullshit (Bainbridge, Quinlan, Mar, & Smillie, 2019). Papers also targeted a wide set of important contexts for personality expressions and personality outcomes including, for example, sleep (Krizan & Hissler, 2019), pro-environmental behaviour (Lange & Dewitte, 2019), and political variables (Vitriol, Larsen, & Ludeke, 2019). Other papers focused on the Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/per.2236