Journal of Research in Personality

About Journal of Research in Personality

About

Journal of Research in Personality (ISO 4 abbreviation: J. Res. Pers.) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal devoted to the scientific study of personality. Published by Elsevier on a bimonthly schedule, it is widely regarded as one of the leading specialty outlets in personality psychology — when Iowa State University announced the appointment of its editor-in-chief in 2020, the university's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences described it as one of the top journals in the field.

The journal emphasizes experimental and descriptive research on important issues in personality and in the neighboring fields basic to understanding personality. Its pages cover genetic, physiological, motivational, learning, perceptual, cognitive, and social processes of both normal and abnormal kinds, in human and in animal subjects. Few journals cast such a wide net within the personality domain while maintaining such a consistent reputation for methodological care: over the decades it has published measurement advances that researchers still use daily, theoretical integrations that reshaped debates, and brief reports — including replication and null-result studies — that keep the field honest.

The journal carries the print ISSN 0092-6566 and the electronic ISSN 1095-7251, and it publishes in English. With more than 3,400 works registered in Crossref and coverage stretching from 1973 to the present, it offers authors a durable, highly visible home for personality research and offers readers one of the most reliable windows onto where personality science is heading.

History and Development

The Journal of Research in Personality was established in 1973, published originally by Academic Press, Inc. — then a subsidiary of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich — which gives the journal one of the longest continuous publication histories of any personality specialty journal. Early volumes carried the imprint "Academic Press, New York and London," and the journal quickly became a venue for rigorous experimental work on traits, motives, and individual differences at a time when personality psychology was fighting to re-establish itself as an empirical science.

The editorial lineage visible in archived front matter traces the journal's evolution. The 1979 contents pages (Volume 13) list Russell G. Geen as editor, with associate editors including Edward Donnerstein, William Griffitt, and John M. Levine. By the early 1990s, William Griffitt had taken the helm — archived volumes from 1990 through 1993 name him as editor, working with associate editors such as Edward Donnerstein, Neil M. Malamuth, and Frederick Rhodewalt, and an editorial board that included figures like Charles S. Carver and Randy J. Larsen. These names mark the journal's long connection to the experimental and social-psychological traditions of personality research.

Academic Press was absorbed into the Elsevier publishing group, and the journal is today published by Elsevier. In November 2020, Zlatan Krizan, professor of psychology at Iowa State University, was appointed editor-in-chief. At the time of the announcement, the journal was described as carrying a five-year impact factor of 3.61 with a rising trajectory, receiving more than 500 submissions each year and maintaining a high rejection rate. Krizan continues to serve as editor, as confirmed by recent editorial listings that describe him as the serving editor of the Journal of Research in Personality.

Across more than five decades, the journal has grown alongside the field it serves — from the trait debates of the 1970s and 1980s, through the Big Five consolidation of the 1990s, to today's emphasis on open science, intensive longitudinal designs, and the integration of personality with health, sleep, genetics, and social behavior.

Aims and Scope

The journal's stated aims center on experimental and descriptive research that examines important issues in personality and in related fields basic to understanding personality. The subject matter explicitly includes treatments of genetic, physiological, motivational, learning, perceptual, cognitive, and social processes — of both normal and abnormal kinds — in human and animal subjects. In practice this means the journal welcomes everything from laboratory experiments on trait-relevant processes to large-scale descriptive studies of personality structure and development.

The journal publishes several article types, each with a distinct role:

• Integrated sets of studies that address significant theoretical issues relating to personality — the multi-study package that has become the journal's signature format.
• Theoretical papers and critical reviews of current experimental and methodological interest, which synthesize or challenge the field's understanding.
• Single, well-designed studies of an innovative nature — the journal explicitly values quality and novelty over quantity of studies.
• Brief reports, including replication or null-result studies of previously reported findings, as well as well-designed studies addressing questions of limited scope.

Notably, the journal's openness to replications and null results sets it apart from many specialty journals and reflects a commitment to cumulative science. Studies of animal personality have also appeared in its pages, underlining that the journal's conception of personality is not restricted to human self-report.

Editorial Leadership

The current editor-in-chief is Zlatan Krizan, professor of psychology at Iowa State University, where he directs the Sleep, Self, and Personality laboratory. Krizan earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Iowa in 2007 and has served on the Iowa State faculty since then. His research focuses on the interplay of personality differences with sleep and on behavioral dynamics across time, particularly social-emotional functioning, the genetic bases of personality, and applications to human intelligence contexts.

Krizan has authored more than 60 publications, including a book on sleep, personality, and social behavior. He is an elected fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and his work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In addition to leading the Journal of Research in Personality, he serves as an associate editor for SLEEP Advances.

The journal is supported by a board of associate editors and an international editorial board drawn from the personality research community — a structure visible throughout its history, from the small boards of the Academic Press era to today's larger, globally distributed team. Editorial appointments are made by the publisher in consultation with the field, and the board's composition reflects the journal's standing at the center of personality science.

Journal Metrics

The Journal of Research in Personality sits in the upper tier of psychology journals by most citation-based measures, though — as with any journal — the figures vary by source and year, and readers should always check the most recent edition of the source in question.

• H-index: 154, as shown in the journal's site profile data; OpenAlex records a higher H-index of 206 computed from its own broader corpus of works and citations. The two figures are not directly comparable because they are computed from different databases.
• Impact factor: The Journal Citation Reports listed an impact factor of 3.068 for 2020. Iowa State University reported a five-year impact factor of 3.61 at the time of the 2020 editorship announcement, noting that the figure had been rising over the preceding five years. The independent aggregator CiteFactor reports an impact factor of 3.1 for 2024–25. A current official Journal Citation Reports impact factor could not be verified from an official source at the time of writing.
• SCImago indicators: The journal is ranked Q1 in both Psychology (miscellaneous) and Social Psychology, with an SJR of approximately 1.374 reported by third-party aggregators citing SCImago.
• Scale: Crossref records 3,402 works for the journal's print ISSN, and OpenAlex records 3,410 works with more than 238,000 citations across the journal's history. Around 2020 the journal was receiving more than 500 submissions per year.

Metrics should be interpreted in context: a high H-index reflects decades of influential measurement and theory papers, while the rising impact factor trend reported in 2020 signaled the journal's growing visibility. Authors weighing where to submit should balance prestige against the journal's high rejection rate and the time that review at a top-tier outlet typically requires.

Open Access and APCs

The Journal of Research in Personality is a hybrid journal: it operates primarily on a subscription model while offering authors the option to make individual articles openly available. OpenAlex does not mark it as a fully open-access journal, noting that hybrid options may exist — consistent with Elsevier's standard hybrid offering across its subscription titles.

OpenAlex reports article processing charge (APC) list prices for the journal, obtained from the Directory of Open Access Journals, of approximately USD 3,330, EUR 3,120, GBP 2,670, and JPY 413,020. These are list prices, not a fee quotation: authors should confirm current charges, applicable taxes, waiver eligibility, and institutional-agreement discounts directly with the publisher before budgeting, since fees change and many institutions hold transformative or read-and-publish agreements with Elsevier.

Authors who do not choose paid open access should review Elsevier's article-sharing policy for the version of the manuscript they may deposit in institutional repositories or share privately, and should check any funder mandates that apply to their work.

Abstracting and Indexing

The journal is indexed in the major bibliographic databases that matter for psychology researchers. Its Wikipedia entry lists indexing in Scopus, JSTOR, MIAR, and other services, and its long coverage history (1973 to the present) in Scopus and Web of Science underpins the citation metrics above. Researchers and institutions typically find the journal covered wherever core psychology literature is indexed, including PsycINFO and the Social Science Citation Index, though authors with specific funder or institutional requirements should confirm coverage in the database that matters to them.

Because the journal has published continuously for more than five decades under a stable title and ISSN, its archive is unusually complete in the major indexes — a practical advantage for meta-analysts and anyone conducting systematic reviews of the personality literature, since the full run of volumes can usually be retrieved from a single database search.

Landmark Papers

Some of the most cited — and most used — papers in personality psychology first appeared in this journal. The selection below is drawn from Crossref's citation counts for the journal's ISSN; each DOI was verified as resolving through the Crossref API. Citation counts are snapshots and will have grown since retrieval.

• Gosling, S. D., Rentfrow, P. J., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (2003). A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(6), 504–528. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(03)00046-1 — The paper introducing the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI), one of the most widely used ultra-brief Big Five measures in the world. With over 6,000 citations recorded in Crossref, it is the most cited article in the journal's history and a staple of studies where questionnaire length is constrained.
• Paulhus, D. L., & Williams, K. M. (2002). The Dark Triad of personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. Journal of Research in Personality, 36(6), 556–563. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-6566(02)00505-6 — The foundational paper on the Dark Triad construct, which launched an enormous literature on socially aversive personality traits in subclinical populations. It remains one of the most cited personality papers of its decade.
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). The general causality orientations scale: Self-determination in personality. Journal of Research in Personality, 19(2), 109–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/0092-6566(85)90023-6 — An early measurement cornerstone of self-determination theory, introducing the General Causality Orientations Scale that distinguishes autonomy, control, and impersonal motivational orientations.
• Rammstedt, B., & John, O. P. (2007). Measuring personality in one minute or less: A 10-item short version of the Big Five Inventory in English and German. Journal of Research in Personality, 41(1), 203–212. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2006.02.001 — The BFI-10, a psychometrically careful short form of the Big Five Inventory that enabled brief personality assessment in large surveys, including in German-language research.
• Goldberg, L. R., Johnson, J. A., Eber, H. W., Hogan, R., Ashton, M. C., Cloninger, C. R., & Gough, H. G. (2006). The international personality item pool and the future of public-domain personality measures. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(1), 84–96. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.08.007 — A landmark statement of the open-science ethos in personality assessment: a collective argument by leading researchers for freely available, public-domain personality items, embodied in the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP).
• Schönbrodt, F. D., & Perugini, M. (2013). At what sample size do correlations stabilize? Journal of Research in Personality, 47(5), 609–612. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2013.05.009 — A hugely influential methodological brief report showing that correlations in typical personality research stabilize only at surprisingly large sample sizes — a finding that reshaped thinking about statistical power and replicability in the field.

Honorable mentions from the journal's most-cited lists include Martin and colleagues' development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire (2003), Neff and colleagues' work on self-compassion (2007), and Ames, Rose, and Anderson's NPI-16 short narcissism measure (2006) — each verified in Crossref with hundreds to thousands of citations.

Publishing in the Journal

The Journal of Research in Personality is a demanding but fair venue, and fit matters more than anywhere. The editorial office looks for work that advances personality science in a recognizable way: experimental tests of personality-relevant processes, careful descriptive and structural work, methodological advances in measurement, and theoretical integrations that move debates forward.

What the editors value. Multi-study papers that converge on a significant theoretical question are the journal's bread and butter, but the guide for authors explicitly welcomes single innovative studies and brief reports — including replications and null results — provided they are well designed. Purely applied or clinical papers without a clear personality-science contribution are a harder fit; the journal's core is basic personality research.

Before submitting. Read the current Guide for Authors on the journal's official Elsevier page, which governs manuscript preparation, reference style, figure requirements, and the declarations Elsevier requires (competing interests, data availability, and generative-AI use where applicable). Submissions go through Elsevier's online editorial system, linked from the journal's ScienceDirect page. With more than 500 submissions a year and a high rejection rate, manuscripts are typically screened first for scope and contribution — a clear, jargon-free cover letter explaining the theoretical advance helps at this stage.

Realistic expectations. Review at a top-tier specialty journal takes time, and the bar for theoretical significance is high. Authors should consider whether their finding replicates, whether the effect sizes are estimated with adequate precision (the journal's own pages famously hosted the sample-size-stabilization debate), and whether the work speaks to personality psychologists specifically rather than to a general audience. For work with broader ambitions, the journal's sibling outlets may be a better fit; for the core personality audience, few venues carry more weight.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes the Journal of Research in Personality?
Elsevier. The journal was founded in 1973 and originally published by Academic Press, Inc., which later became part of Elsevier.

What is the journal's ISSN?
0092-6566 for the print edition and 1095-7251 for the electronic edition (ISSN-L 0092-6566).

Who is the editor-in-chief?
Zlatan Krizan, professor of psychology at Iowa State University, appointed in 2020. He directs the Sleep, Self, and Personality laboratory and is also an associate editor of SLEEP Advances.

Is the journal open access?
It is a hybrid journal: subscription-based, with a paid open-access option. OpenAlex-reported APC list prices are approximately USD 3,330 / EUR 3,120 / GBP 2,670 — confirm current fees with the publisher.

What is its impact factor?
The Journal Citation Reports listed 3.068 for 2020, and a five-year figure of 3.61 was reported in 2020; independent aggregators report around 3.1 for 2024–25. A current official JCR impact factor could not be verified from an official source at the time of writing, so treat figures as indicative.

How often is it published?
Bimonthly — six issues per year.

What kinds of papers does it publish?
Experimental and descriptive personality research; multi-study theoretical papers; theoretical papers and critical reviews; single innovative studies; and brief reports, explicitly including replication and null-result studies.

How do I submit a manuscript?
Through Elsevier's online editorial system, reached from the journal's official ScienceDirect page. Consult the current Guide for Authors first, and note the journal's high selectivity — scope fit and theoretical contribution are screened before peer review.

Does the journal consider animal research?
Yes. The stated scope explicitly covers personality-relevant processes in human and animal subjects, and studies of animal personality have appeared in its pages — reflecting the journal's view that personality science extends beyond human self-report.