Editorial‐Current State and the Future of International Journal of Selection & Assessment

Employee recruitment, selection, and assessment has been and remains one of the most important areas of research in work and organizational psychology and an important human resource management practise. Research and practice in the field has developed substantially in the past century (Ryan & Ployhart, 2014), and the International Journal of Selection and Assessment (IJSA) has been one of the leading journals of the field, since its establishment 26 years ago. IJSA began its journey in 1993 with the founding editor Neil Anderson playing an instrumental role for almost a decade in the initial development and establishment of the journal, as a pioneering journal in the field of work/organizational/personnel psychology and human resource management. His work with the journal was successfully followed by subsequent Editors, and especially Denis Z. Ones, Jesus F. Salgado, and Chockalingam (Vish) Viswesvaran. Their contribution in making IJSA a well-established journal in our field has been tremendous and our community of scholars owes them a lot. I took over as new Editor-In-Chief late last year succeeding Stephan Dilchert. Stephan had been Editor for a brief period of time, but his contribution to the journal was remarkable, leading IJSA into the digital era by transitioning from the traditional e-mail submission system to the Scholar One platform. I would like to thank him for his contribution. It is remarkable, that contrary to other major journals, all past Editors remain close to the journal, as Editorial Board members and active ad hoc reviewers. One of my first decisions after taking over as Editor, was that the journal needed a group of loyal scholars to support its future development. I am privileged to have the support of a number of esteemed colleagues, as Associate Editors. They are all great researchers with extensive practical experience and I have to thank them for their support: Jeffrey M. Cucina, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, USA; Cornelius J. König, Saarland University, Germany; Richard N. Landers, University of Minnesota, USA; Janneke K. Oostrom, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Kristina Potočnik, University of Edinburgh, UK; Nicolas Roulin, Saint Maryʼs University, Canada are the new Associate Editors of IJSA. Moreover, with their support, we renewed the list of the IJSA Editorial Board members. Editorial Board members are crucial for the development of a journal, since they act as ad hoc reviewers, but also participate in the journal’s strategy formulation, along with the editorial team. Their role is not decorative, as, like Associate Editors, they must demonstrate sincere interest in the development of a journal, providing timely and developmental feedback to author(s), and help the action editor in their decision-making process. We doubled the number of Editorial Board members with more than 80% of them being new in this role and incorporating a healthy mix of experienced and young academics and practitioners from across the globe. Our plan is that we will have regular Editorial Board meetings during SIOP or EAWOP congresses; we already had our first two meetings earlier this year to welcome the new members and talk about the future of IJSA. Our ambition is that the Editorial Board list will remain dynamic and will be further enhanced from the list of IJSA ad hoc reviewers. Therefore, if you are an active researcher/practitioner in our field, interested in acting as ad hoc reviewer for our journal and joining our Editorial Board in the future, please send me an e-mail (inikol@aueb.gr). The aims and objectives of our journal have largely remained the same during the last few years, although we have recently updated it in order to include a number of new topics. As outlined at our homepage (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/page/journal/14682389/homepage/forauthors.html) IJSA publishes research related to all aspects of hiring and staffing (including, but not limited to, employee recruitment and selection), and assessment in organizations ‘that contribute new knowledge (both theoretical and practical) and understanding in assessment of individual differences, test validation, psychometric measurement, and personnel decision making. Articles can also deal with other aspects of personnel selection/staffing, such as job analysis, recruitment, technology and new developments in recruitment/selection/assessment, and performance management and measurement. Other topics appropriate for IJSA include validation; validity generalization; group differences; fairness; bias; adverse impact; employer branding; predictors and new selection methods; criteria; job performance; counterproductive work behaviors; organizational citizenship behaviors; adjustment; absenteeism; turnover; utility analysis; ability, knowledge, skill and personality measurement; classification; placement; and applicant reactions.’ One of the new topics we are interested to publish in IJSA is how technology has affected the whole cycle of the recruitment, selection, and assessment process. IJSA has already published a special issue on this topic (Viswesvaran, 2003) but the continuous technological developments in our field and especially the impact of the Internet, Social Media, Artificial Intelligence, and Big Data is worth exploring further. We need more and better designed studies to respond successfully to the increased demand for more research on this topic. We are also heavily interested in publishing more research in the “assessment” (e.g., psychometrics, test and scale development) and the criterion field, which has not attracted the appropriate interest from both researchers and practitioners. Obviously, we will continue publishing traditional selection and assessment research across different themes and topics, as outlined in our aims and objectives, but we need to make sure that the journal does not lag behind major developments, especially among practitioners. Moreover, in our effort to attract, review, and publish high quality research with important theoretical and practical implications we also have to make a number of difficult decisions. Similar to other major journals we will no longer accept cross-sectional research and single studies, which use exclusively self-report measures, unless there is strong justification and/or practical/theoretical contribution. This kind of research suffers from a series of important limitations, such as common-method variance (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Lee & Podsakoff, 2003), which are difficult if not impossible to remedy successfully, and will normally get desk-rejected. IJSA has published this type of research in the past, but, as we seek to develop the journal further, we will place strong emphasis on publishing better designed studies. Examples of material we wish to publish more of in IJSA would include research using multiple studies, longitudinal, or multilevel designs, simple or more complex experimental designs, with the use of alternative sources apart from self-report measures, especially among the criterion variables (e.g., objective performance, supervisory ratings, etc.). Currently, there are two major types of manuscripts published in IJSA. Feature articles and Information Exchange articles. Feature Articles compose the main body of each issue, and in the vast majority they are empirical studies. Whereas Information Exchange articles are short empirical papers with a more specialized focus (please read the revised Author Guidelines). As far as the former is concerned, we would like to attract and publish more theory-driven and conceptual papers, but also empirical studies presenting nonsignificant results; as far as the latter is concerned, we wish to publish more replication studies and practice-oriented papers written by practitioners (avoiding advertorials though!). We have also decided as a new Editorial Board team to embrace the Open Science movement. IJSA was one of the first journals to join the Center for Open Science (https://cos.io) a few years ago, but has not fully implemented the necessary policies and guidelines, although we have already published preregistered reports (e.g., Langer, König & Papathanasiou, 2019). We will soon update the online submission system to allow author(s) to submit both registered reports and hybrid registered reports (i.e., results-masked manuscripts), if they wish to do so, and will also revise the submission guidelines accordingly. Finally, we soon plan to advertise a number of special issues relevant to IJSA aims and objectives. Submission to these special issues will be open for everyone, although occasionally they might be linked with specific events and/or conferences, such as the European Network of Selection Researchers (ENESER) biennial meeting or SIOP and EAWOP congresses. Scholars interested in serving as a Guest Editor for a Special Issue for IJSA are encouraged to contact the Editor-In-Chief (inikol@aueb.gr). Each proposal will be evaluated by the Editorial Team. The new Editorial Team of IJSA has set very ambitious goals regarding the future of our journal. We aim to serve IJSA authors and readers more effectively. We have already reduced substantially the average time of the reviewing process to less than two months, with desk rejections usually decided in less than two weeks. We also aim to focus on increasing our ISI Impact Factor and raising our position in ABS Academic Journal Guide into a Grade 3 journal in the following years. We strongly believe that our journal can play a leading role in publishing high-quality research, benefiting both science and practice in the field of selection and assessment and we aim to do our best toward this objective.

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