Welcome to Volume 36 of The Irish Journal of Psychology (IJP). The production of this volume has been a significant challenge and so its completion comes with mixed feelings. This volume marks the completion of our relationship with Taylor & Francis, who have made a significant contribution to the production of the journal. However this is also the final volume before the Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI) conducts a review of the production of the journal in the wider context of the Society’s activities.
Many readers of the IJP will know that sadly, Professor Martin McHugh passed away earlier this year. Professor McHugh was not only the first President of PSI, but also the first editor of the IJP. It was unlikely when the journal started in the 1970s that anyone could have foreseen the developments in academic writing and publication that have taken place since then. Many authors and readers will be familiar with debates around journal citation and impact (Moed, Citation2002), alternative metrics (Bollen, Van de Sompel, Smith, & Luce, Citation2005; Bornmann, Marx, Gasparyan, & Kitas, Citation2012) and open access (Antelman, Citation2004), while within psychology specifically the replication crisis (Maxwell, Lau, & Howard, Citation2015) has, among other issues, raised further questions about publishing practices. I sometimes wonder what previous editors would make of publishing the journal in this context!
Despite these mixed emotions, I am delighted to present the articles contained within this this volume of the journal to the readership. Issues 1–4 capture a wide range of topics of research and practice in psychology, including sports psychology, media psychology, developmental psychology and clinical psychology. The papers represent some of the fascinating work that is being completed by researchers and practitioners in psychology on the island of Ireland. I am grateful to all the authors whose work is included in this volume.
Information on the journal will continue to be available via the PSI website (www.psihq.ie), the journal’s website with Taylor & Francis (www.tandfonline.com/riri) and through the Society’s monthly magazine, The Irish Psychologist.
I want to finish by thanking all those who have supported the production of the journal in recent times. My thanks go to the authors who have submitted papers for consideration, the reviewers who have provided feedback on submissions, the members of the Editorial Board for their guidance, and my assistant editors Dr Suzanne Egan and Dr Mimi Tatlow-Golden.
References
- Antelman, K. (2004). Do open-access articles have a greater research impact? College & Research Libraries, 65, 372–382. doi: 10.5860/crl.65.5.372
- Bollen, J., Van de Sompel, H., Smith, J. A., & Luce, R. (2005). Toward alternative metrics of journal impact: A comparison of download and citation data. Information Processing and Management, 41, 1419–1440. doi: 10.1016/j.ipm.2005.03.024
- Bornmann, L., Marx, W., Gasparyan, A. Y., & Kitas, G. D. (2012). Diversity, value and limitations of the journal impact factor and alternative metrics. Rheumatology International, 32, 1861–1867. doi: 10.1007/s00296-011-2276-1
- Maxwell, S. E., Lau, M. Y., & Howard, G. S. (2015). Is psychology suffering from a replication crisis? What does “failure to replicate” really mean? America Psychologist, 70(6), 478–498.
- Moed, H. F. (2002). The impact-factors debate:The ISI’s uses and limits. Towards a critical, informative, accurate and policy-relevant bibliometrics. Nature, 415, 731–732. doi: 10.1038/415731a