Duane Wegener served as the editor of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (PSPB), from January 1, 2013 through December 31, 2016. SPSP spoke with Duane about how a sense of duty shaped his decision to take on the editorship, the rewards of seeing papers develop through the review process, what it was like to anticipate future trends as a result of having an insider perspective, and more.

SPSP: What attracted you to the position of Editor for PSPB, and why do you think it is important to be involved in professional organizations?

Duane: I was willing to take on the position in part because of a sense of responsibility, or even duty. I’ve spent my whole career using the peer review system, and so I’ve always felt that it’s only right for me to then be an active part of that system. When I’m not editing, I do a lot of reviewing. I try to do a thorough job, so over the years, editors keep asking me to review.

So serving as an editor, then, is just a natural extension of that same sense of responsibility to contribute to a system that has been crucial over my career. I think that if people are going to use and benefit from the system, it only seems right for them to contribute to that system, and that’s how I’ve approached it throughout my career.

Another part of what drew me to the position was that I also wanted to shift the staffing model at the journal. In my own past editing, some of which had been at PSPB and some of which had not, I’d been both in situations where I handled a large number of manuscripts per year – 50 or more new manuscripts each year – and others that were more manageable, like 25 or so per year. And that makes a big difference.

It’s so easy to feel bogged down, get behind, and have a hard time of things when you’re dealing with a new manuscript each week, on average. And of course, on average means that some weeks there are 2 or 3 or 4. And so it gets very easy for people to get behind and to ultimately burn out on editing.

I wanted to try a model that would have more people involved, each doing less, to make that more manageable for most of the people involved. And to make editing something that people would not only agree to do now, but then feel like they could come back and do again in the future.

It remains to be seen how that will play out long-term, but a number of our editors have either continued to edit at PSPB beyond our term, or have moved on to other positions at other journals. So I think, in general, that’s been a good shift. The new editorial term is taking a similar approach, and I am hopeful that in the long term it may allow people to be involved more often over the course of their career without being burned out.

A side benefit of having more editors involved, each handling fewer papers, was that it actually made it a lot easier to identify, for any new paper that came in, an editor that had expertise that was pretty closely related to the content of that manuscript. So that meant we also had fewer editors having to handle manuscripts that were far from their own experience. I think that was also a generally positive consequence, both for the editors and hopefully also for the authors.

SPSP: What was the best part of serving? What was your most memorable experience while you were in this role?

Duane: In a lot of ways, the best part was serving with a really great team of editors. And among that team, I should single out my co-editor, Lee Fabrigar, who was fantastic. We worked very closely together throughout the term, and he really deserves a lot of the credit for how well our editing term went. And also, I suppose, for my overall mental health throughout the process. We also had a really terrific team of Associate Editors – it had to be somewhere between 30-40 people over the four years. We had a total team of around 20 people at any one time, and we did have some people that stuck with us the entire 4 years. We had other people who were there for a couple of the years, and so there were definitely transitions. But it was really a great team overall. I got to at least virtually meet a number of really terrific people that I didn’t know beforehand, and that was really a great part of serving in this position.

More personally, in terms of handling papers and such, to me the most rewarding part was having a paper that maybe initially had a really good core to it that needed some work and seeing that develop through the review process into a really strong published article. For that to happen, it requires quality input from reviewers and hopefully from the editor, as well, but it really also requires openness to that feedback from the authors and willingness on their part to put in additional work conducting additional research, developing a deeper theoretical approach, and all of those things. When all of those elements come together in a paper, that’s really the fun part for me as an editor – to see a paper really improve throughout the process and become a really strong piece of work, I think, is the most rewarding part of editing.

Also, various people over the years have expressed appreciation for the process being a good process and it being useful to the work. Even if that paper doesn’t end up at PSPB, it might end up at another really fantastic journal, and if the process at PSPB was a part of that, in a lot ways, it did the job. Of course, we were working on behalf of PSPB and SPSP, but SPSP is about the entire field. And so if that work ends up being published elsewhere, even if it’s not in SPPS or any journal where SPSP is directly involved, it’s still a benefit to the field as a whole when the process at our journals ends up benefiting the work, regardless of where it ends up being published.

SPSP: What was the hardest part of serving?

Duane: I think the hardest part is trying to balance the relentless nature of the position with everything else that one does as an academic, and as a person in general. Editing in this capacity really is relentless, because as soon as something is off your desk, something else is on it. And of course the other things that one does don’t stop. Most of us are continuing to teach, to mentor our students, to try when we can to do some writing of our own. And of course, family and personal life away from academics don’t stop, either.

So it’s often very difficult to balance because it’s very difficult and often impossible to remove enough of the things that you want to remove to make room for editing. One cannot review as much for other journals and that helps, but it doesn’t really compensate for the time that one puts into a position like this. So it ends up meaning that one is always juggling and prioritizing and trying to figure out what doesn’t have to happen today, so I can get this decision letter out to this author, or whatever it is that you’re working on at the time.

It can be really difficult trying to help your own students to develop as they need to and pay enough attention to them, but also pay enough attention and try to work with the papers one’s handling, with whatever comes up with other questions that editors on the team might have, with getting new manuscripts assigned, etc. It just ends up being a lot of juggling. Hopefully I was able to juggle those kinds of things better than I can physically juggle, because I can’t juggle at all.

But there is this relentless nature to editing, and that’s the hardest part. I think largely authors are generally understanding of that, and I think in general people I’ve found to be very reasonable about and appreciative of the work that goes into it. But I think that before I took this position, even with a lot of experience editing and reviewing beforehand, I could not anticipate exactly how relentless it would be. It was just very difficult to simulate that and try to figure out what it would be like.

Looking back, it made the time go very quickly, because you’re just always working, but that had to be the hardest part. I was very fortunate – things like having a great co-editor definitely help, and I have an incredibly supportive wife, Laura. She has always been very understanding of my taking time to work when I need to work, and especially when I take on things like editing and have to spend what might otherwise have been family time working. I really couldn’t have done this or to have accomplished a lot of other things in my career if I didn’t have her support in doing that. And that’s just been crucial. But there’s just something about that balancing or juggling that often makes it difficult.

SPSP: What did you learn from serving in this role? What was something that surprised you about the role?

Duane: In some ways, I think the learning and surprise go together. Certainly when one is editing, and more so in a position like this than in some others, one always ends up learning about work in domains that go beyond one’s typical research area. Even though we had a broad coverage of research areas with our team, I or Lee would often handle papers that extended beyond our (or our team’s) direct expertise (or sometimes an editor with that expertise was already pretty overloaded). That ends up stretching one and you learn about things that are new. There’s a certain reward to that. I wouldn’t have been asked to review those papers, and when the papers came out, I may or may not have ended up reading in some of those areas.

And so there’s something that’s always interesting about that. You always get to learn about something. There were times that maybe I would read a paper for the journal and my most recent direct connection was something I studied for my generals in graduate school. And now I get to find out, oh, what’s happened in this area since that time? It’s been a while. So that’s always interesting.

Also, you see papers from the inside that maybe aren’t ready and don’t end up in the journal, but you see them, and I couldn’t have necessarily anticipated some of the places in the world that are producing research and writing papers in personality and social psychology. There are definitely countries that were represented in the authors submitting papers that were from parts of the world that I didn’t anticipate. And I think that that’s a terrific development, and something that I wouldn’t have known just by looking at the published papers.

When people are producing work in an area of the world where maybe the available training is not quite there yet, it’s very difficult. But you can see that it’s getting better. And there are parts of the world where personality and social psychology probably more or less didn’t exist 10 years ago, that are now starting to really be interested in research and maybe sending students to parts of the world that are farther along in training (and will go back and then improve the training in those areas of the world).

I got a bit of a sense of what, in 20 years, the landscape might look like in terms of where authors are from in our top journals. That has certainly changed from 20 years ago until now, and I expect from my experience at PSPB over the last 4 years that, in the next 20 years, it will be a much wider variety yet of places that people are doing this work. That will be exciting to see.

Being able to see things from the inside, you do see things like that: trends that are maybe not there yet, but are coming. And it’s very interesting to see that develop.

SPSP: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today, and thank you for your service.