Judgment and Decision Making (JDM) was established in 2006 by the founding editor Jonathan Baron. It is the official journal of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) and the European Association for Decision Making (EADM). The general aim of the journal is to foster the development of knowledge and theory in the field of judgment and decision making (broadly defined) and to document this progress by publishing the best and most innovative research in this field. The journal aims to make research openly accessible to all potential readers around the world. Articles should be clear, complete, and reproducible. Therefore, data and a sufficiently detailed description of the materials have to be provided by the authors. JDM has required the publication of data since 2009, even before the respective standards were established as a result of the ‘replication crisis’ in psychology (Open Science Framework, 2015; Pashler and Wagenmakers, Reference Pashler and Wagenmakers2012).
Until the end of 2022, the journal was produced entirely by Jonathan Baron and hosted independently of any established publisher. To assure a long-term perspective of the journal and to further strengthen it, the editors and the supervisory committee of the journal (representing the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, SDJM, and the European Association for Decision Making, EADM) decided to move to a professional publisher. Since January 2023, the journal has been published by Cambridge University Press (CUP). In the transition, we sought to maintain the strengths of the journal and to benefit from new possibilities that result from having a strong publishing partner. We believe these aims have so far been achieved. In the following, we report recent developments that may be interesting for authors contributing to JDM, readers of the journal, and the two societies that are represented by the journal.
1. Worldwide open access to scientific literature in the JDM field
The journal is still entirely open-access, appears on the web (only), and has no publication charges for the vast majority of authors. Publication charges are only payable if (a) authors are not from institutions that have a publishing agreement with CUP, and (b) if authors have at their disposal earmarked funds for publishing costs. If only (a) applied but not (b), authors can apply for a waiver of publication costs during the submission process, which should by default be granted by CUP. Further details including the link to the waiver request form and a list of all institutions currently with a publication agreement can be found under the following link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making/information/journal-policies/open-access-options.
Cambridge is strongly committed to open access with minimal reliance on author fees. A sign of this is the length of its list of read-and-publish agreements, an order of magnitude greater than any other publisher. These agreements are the main source of funding. They are negotiated, and support from readers within institutions may help increase their number.
The professional production and copy-editing provided by CUP have reduced the workload of the co-editors (particularly Jonathan Baron) and the experience of the publisher has even led to an increase in type-setting quality for complex articles. With the move to CUP, articles are published on a rolling basis and the traditional notion of journal ‘issues’ has been abandoned in favor of more rapid availability of individual articles. All articles in a year are now published as one ‘annual’ issue.
2. Sustainability and increasing findability
In the transition process, all articles and materials that were published in the journal since 2006 were transferred to the journal’s new website: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making. This assures the long-term sustainability of all articles published in the journal. Additionally, the findability of articles has been increased by adding Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to all old as well as newly published articles.
3. Attention and monitoring
The transition to CUP permits more extensive tracking of articles. In 2023 alone, there were about 500,000 full-text views of the articles published in the journal (not including views of articles copied to other sites). This is far beyond the expectations of the publisher. We assume, this substantial increase in attention is caused by the better embedding of the journals webpage in the web presentation of CUP, the improved resulting page ranks in search engines, and the improved indexing.
Note, that the full-text view statistics are also accessible to all authors and readers by clicking on the ‘Metrics’ tab that is available for each article. This tab also contains an Altmetric attention score, which together can be used by authors to track and potentially document the outreach of their scientific work.
The top-viewed article received more than 32,000 full-text views within 2023 and even the 50th ranked most viewed article had more than 1,500 views. From the topics of the articles, it can be inferred that these views are driven by scientific contribution and also—and more so than standard citation counts—by public interest in the respective topics. Table 1 shows a list of the top 10 articles.
The article pages now also show the citation count for each article. Note, however, that the count for articles published before 2023 is often low. It is based on cross-ref which automatically matches meta-data and DOIs, which were not provided in earlier publications in this journal.
4. Status monitoring and journal statistics
The new manuscript submission system (manuscript central) allows authors to inform themselves about the current status of their manuscript. For us editors, it allows monitoring and evaluation of the editorial process in more detail. The data for 2023 are provided in Table 2. The total number of submissions decreased compared to the years 2019 to 2021, in which the journal received 300–400 (original) submissions. We could keep up the generally quick turn-around time until first decision, which is mainly due to a high desk rejection rate. The acceptance rate was relatively low and the number of published articles was lower than in previous years (usually around 50 articles were published per year). Note, however, that the true acceptance rate (and partially also the time to first decision) is underestimated since a substantial share of papers that passed the high threshold for initial screening are still with action editors or under revision, and most of them are likely to be accepted. The journal’s impact factor remains within the range from the previous years, but the number of full-text reads has substantially increased. We hope that, over time, this will result in a further increase in citations and impact.
5. Regular information about publications
Before 2023, the table of contents of each issue was circulated to the mailing lists of SJDM and EADM. We initially did not continue this service since issues were abandoned and the CUP system provides automatic alerts, which readers can sign up to. However, we decided that we will revert back to the tradition of sending published articles regularly to these lists. Several readers have asked for this information and we want to inform society members about current debates, as well as maintain close ties with the research community. Details concerning how this will be implemented will be sent to the lists directly. Additionally, persons interested in the content of the journal can sign up for their individual alerts at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/judgment-and-decision-making.
In the upper right, register, then log in, or log in if you are already registered. Then, just below that, between the 2 balls on top of the balance, are 4 symbols. The second one, the bell, allows you to set your preferences for how often you want to be notified. For example, under ‘Journal Alerts’ you can ‘Add alert’ for Judgment and Decision Making, and choose ‘Monthly’.
6. Looking ahead
Overall, the transition to CUP has been a success story for Judgment and Decision Making so far. We believe the journal is stronger and more sustainable and has become more professional while retaining its authenticity and tradition—core assets. After the various complications and extra work that went along with the transition process, we are keen to refocus on the content work with authors, fostering debates and the cumulative development of knowledge in our field in a constructive but critical discussion process. We are looking forward to working with the editorial team to achieve these goals.
7. Editorial board and reviewers
We are grateful to our action editors, consulting editors, members of the supervisory committee, and reviewers for their continued, valuable service to our journal. We particularly appreciate the efforts of our action editors, who had to rapidly familiarize themselves with the new journal management system so as to ensure a seamless transition, as far as possible, to CUP. We apologize for occasional frustrations with using the system as well as any initial delays caused by suboptimal automated reminders and other processes. We hope that most of the issues with the system have now been resolved.
In parallel to the transition of the journal to CUP, and with the agreement of the supervisory committee, we increased the number of associate editors. This allows us to distribute the workload better across action editors. Furthermore, it allows us to better represent the broad range of topics in the growing field of JDM. Finally, it affords an opportunity to better represent diverse subgroups of scholars (e.g., in terms of gender, career stage, and country).
Below, we list the editorial board as of 31/12/2023 and the reviewers who provided assessments of manuscripts in 2023.
7.1. Editors
Jonathan Baron, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Mandeep Dhami, Middlesex University London, UK.
Andreas Glöckner, University of Cologne, Germany.
7.2. Associate editors
Shahar Ayal, Reichman University, Israel.
Maya Bar-Hillel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Arndt Bröder, Universität Mannheim, Germany.
Junyi Dai, Zhejiang University, China.
Adele Diederich, Jacobs University, Germany.
Kimmo Eriksson, Stockholm University, Sweden.
Arvid Erlandsson, Linköping University, Sweden.
Enrique Fatas, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Joseph G. Johnson, Miami University of Ohio, USA.
Yaniv Hanoch, Southampton Business School, UK.
Adam Harris, University College London, UK.
Bettina von Helversen, University of Bremen, Germany.
Ben Hilbig, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.
Richard John, University Southern California, USA.
Konstantinos Katsikopoulos, University of Southampton, UK.
Erin Krupka, University of Michigan, USA.
Michael Lee, University of California, Irvine, USA.
Nina Mazar, Boston University, USA.
Barbara Mellers, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Carey Morewedge, Boston University, USA.
Ganna Pogrebna, University of Sydney Business School, Australia.
David R. Mandel, Defence Research and Development Canada, Canada.
Ilana Ritov, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Ulrich Schmidt, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Germany.
Sandra Schneider, University of South Florida, USA.
Shaul Shalvi, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Joseph Simmons, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Barbara Summers, University of Leeds, UK.
Isabel Thielmann, Max Planck Institute Freiburg, Germany.
7.3. Consulting editors
Hal Arkes, Ohio State University, USA.
Netta Barak-Corren, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Tilmann Betsch, University of Erfurt, Germany.
Nicolao Bonini, University of Trento, Italy.
Valerio Capraro, University of Middlesex, UK.
Clintin Davis-Stober, University of Missouri, USA.
Catherine Eckel, Texas A&M University, USA.
Ido Erev, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Israel.
Susann Fiedler, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria.
Gregory Fischer, Duke University, USA.
Craig Fox, University of California, USA.
Andrew Gelman, Columbia University, USA.
Thomas Gilovich, Cornell University, USA.
Daniel Goldstein, Microsoft Research, USA.
Ulrich Hoffrage, University of Lausanne, Switzerland.
Julie Irwin, University of Oregon, USA.
Esther Kaufmann, Universität Konstanz, Germany.
Simon Kemp, University of Canterbury, New Zealand.
Gideon Keren, Tilburg University, The Netherlands.
Kris Kirby, Williams College, USA.
Derek Koehler, University of Waterloo, Canada.
Michal Król, University of Agder, Norway.
Shu Li, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China.
Rui Mata, University of Basel, Switzerland.
Don Moore, University of California, USA.
Jeryl Mumpower, Texas A & M University, USA.
Ben Newell, University of New South Wales, Australia.
Gordon Pennycook, University of Regina, Canada.
Ellen Peters, University of Oregon, USA.
Antonio Rangel, California Institute of Technology, USA.
Adil Saribay, Kadir Has University, Turkey.
Alan Schwartz, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.
Miroslav Sirota, University of Essex, UK.
Cass Sunstein, Harvard Law School, USA.
Eldad Yechiam, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Israel.
Liane Young, Boston College, USA.
Onurcan Yılmaz, Kadir Has University, Turkey.
Our dear colleague David Krantz, sadly passed away and so is no longer listed as a Consulting Editor.
7.4. Supervisory committee
Ido Erev, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology (EADM), Israel.
Christopher Hsee, University of Chicago (SJDM), USA.
Derek Koehler, University of Waterloo (SJDM), Canada.
Gaëlle Vallée-Tourangeau, Kingston University (EADM), UK.
7.5. Reviewers
Ackerman, Rakefet; Alper, Sinan; André, Quentin; Arkes, Hal; Ayal, Shahar; Bar-Eli, Michael; Barak-Corren, Netta; Baron, Jonathan; Baumann, Lukas; Bialek, Michal; Bilgin, Baler; Birnbaum, Michael; Boulu-Reshef, Beatrice; Bramley, Neil; Burro, Giovanni; Butler, David; Castelo, Noah; Chapman, Gretchen; Cockburn, Jeffrey; Cokely, Edward; Dawson, Ian; Erlandsson, Arvid; Feltovich, Nick; Figner, Bernd; Frey, Renato; Fuhrer, Joffrey; Goldstein, Daniel; Goodie, Adam; Hahn, Lindsay; Harpviken, Lau Lilliholt; Harvey, Nigel; Hasan, Eeshan; Heard, Claire; Herzog, Stephan; Hirschfield, Hal; Horn, Sebastian; Hulley, Hardy; Hyndman, Kyle; Jekel, Marc; Johnson, Branden; Johnson, Joseph; Jones, Bryan; Kaufmann, Esther; Kirby, Kris; Koehler, Derek; Koop, Greg; Krause, Jan; Kuroda, Kiri; Lagnado, David; Lee, Michael; Leib, Margarita; Lejarraga, Tomás; Lelkes, Yphtach; Li, Shu; Luan, Shenghua; Ludvig, Elliot; Lv, Linxiang; Mata, André; Mata, Rui; Mazar, Nina; McDowell, Michelle; Miller, Joshua; Minson, Julia; Morewedge, Carey; Newell, Ben; Newton, Christie; Niessen, Susan; Nilsson, Artur; Olivola, Christopher; Olschewski, Sebastian; Otto, Ross; Pennycook, Gordon; Pettibone, Jonathan C.; Pickup, Mark; Polman, Evan; Price, Paul; Raab, Markus; Rajagopal, Priyali; Rebholz, Tobias R.; Reimers, Stian; Renerte, Baiba; Rettinger, David; Rode, Jacob B.; Roth, Yefim; Royzman, Edward; Satopää, Ville; Schauer, Jacop; Schnuerch, Martin; Schultze, Thomas; Schulze, Christin; Shaw, Alex; Simmons, Joseph; Sirota, Miroslav; Spektor, Mikhail; Spitzer, Bernhard; Traunmueller, Richard; Turner, Brandon; Unkelbach, Christian; Urminsky, Oleg; Uscinski, Joseph E.; Weber, Elke; Werner, Peter; Witt, Jesica; Wulff, Dirk; Yechiam, Eldad; Yilmaz, Onurcan; Yoon, Haewon.