The editors of Politics and the Life Sciences are pleased to release the first issue of volume 42. It includes a wide range of topics from genetics, political behavior, and personality (Weinschenk et al., Reference Weinschenk, Dawes, Klemmensen and Rasmussen2023) and military adoption of brain-computer interfaces (Kosal & Putney, Reference Kosal and Putney2023) to racial and ethnic differences in trust in health care providers (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Hampton, Tripp and Brandon2023) and state-sponsored espionage in U.S. life sciences research (Vogel & Ouagraham-Gormley, Reference Vogel and Ben Ouagrham-Gormley2023). It also includes the 2022 Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) Conference Keynote Address on “Expanding our thinking about discrete emotions and politics” by David Redlawsk (Reference Redlawsk2023). And sadly, it memorializes Dr. Joseph Lasco, a valued APLS colleague and energetic proponent of biopolitics, in the final pages (Johnson, Reference Johnson2023).
In 2022, PLS celebrated its forty-first year of publication. The editorial team thanks the scholars who accepted invitations to review last year. The journal could not function without the efforts of these volunteers. Fifty-two scholars contributed to the journal, its authors, and, more broadly, the scientific endeavor in this capacity last year:
The journal received original submissions in 2022 from 12 different countries, including Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Sixty percent of original submissions came from contributors in the United States and 15 percent from Europe. While the acceptance rate varied by article type, of the final decisions issued in 2022 on Research Articles and Research Notes, a bit less than 50 percent were “accept.”
Ongoing research suggests that open access (OA) articles receive greater attention from the research community (e.g., Langham-Putrow et al., Reference Langham-Putrow, Bakker and Riegelman2021). So, the editorial team began actively encouraging authors from institutions with a “transformative” Read and Publish agreement with Cambridge University Press to publish their articles OA. These agreements permit authors to publish their articles open access at no cost to themselves. As a result, PLS now boasts a collection of 25 OA articles, 14 of which were published in volume 41 in 2022.
In 2022, PLS also began awarding open science badges for open data, open materials, and preregistered studies. The goal of this new practice is to increase the credibility of PLS articles by making independent verification of results easier. The fall issue included five articles that were awarded all three badges (for an overview of these articles, see Friesen et al., Reference Friesen, Ksiazkiewicz and McDermott2022). Though PLS is still new at open science badging, the editorial team is convinced of its value (e.g., Schneider et al., Reference Schneider, Rosman, Kelava and Merk2022) and will continue to encourage its authors to pursue this recognition.
Speaking of promoting good science, the fall issue, which included the five previously mentioned open science articles, was a special issue with a theme of “Life Science in Politics: Methodological Innovations and Political Issues.” This special issue was the third in a series of issues featuring competitively selected registered reports funded by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences, the scientific society that founded and continues to oversee PLS. It is worth noting that APLS’s commitment to the journal and particularly the open science program is substantial, as it has funded more than $35,000 of studies in the last few years.
Overall, the journal has experienced notable improvement in recent years. Article downloads from Cambridge Core, JSTOR, and ProQuest exceeded 100,000 in 2021 and 2022, up from around 61,000 in 2018 and 63,000 in 2019. And that does not include downloads from EBSCO or BioOne. Further, Table 1 shows its CiteScore, a citation-based journal performance metric derived from the Scopus database, has increased resulting in an improvement in its ranking among peer journals.
Table 1. PLS CiteScore and CiteScore Category Rank Percentile, 2016-2021.
* most recent full-year data available
In terms of editorial matters, the APLS Council renewed the editor-in-chief’s term for a second three-year term, which will end in 2025. Further, the editorial team offers its sincerest thanks to Carl Senior, who leaves his role as an Associate Editor of PLS after three years. Carl was instrumental in helping the new editorial team hit the ground running through thoughtful discussion with the team and insightful guidance to contributors.
Last but certainly not least, the editorial team thanks the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences for its ongoing and substantial support of PLS and the scientific endeavor. The editors also thank Cambridge University Press, the journal’s publisher, for supporting and promoting PLS around the world.
