Klaus Kubinger, editor-in-chief
This journal has been founded as Psychologische Beiträge - a journal for a quarterly review of psychological science research. The scope was broad as in other journals from the 1950s. Therefore, being internationalized in 2003, it became renamed as Psychology Science. After the realization that some papers had been cited in the abbreviated manner of PsycholSci - so the paper scored on the ISI-indexed well-known journal Psychological Science, but not on Psychology Science -, such mistakes were tried to prevent renaming the journal again to Psychology Science Quarterly, in 2008. However, in the last two years the journal has altered its scope due to the topics of submitted papers and due to (invited) special issues. As a matter of fact, the scope has changed towards the primary subjects of psychology-specific statistical methods and problems, general psychometrics, and psychological assessment in theory and practice.
Hence, we decided to change the title of the journal again, to: Psychological Test and Assessment Modeling. There is the possibility that this specialisation leads to a much higher receptiveness and acceptance of the journal - as a matter of fact, we self-evaluated the impact factor of Psychology Science Quarterly 2009 according to Kubinger, Heuberger, and Poinstingl (2010, in press), which will be published ongoing. And, of course, some new board members have been acquired, while a few board members have left the board for content reasons.
Nevertheless, the scope of Psychological Test and Assessment Modeling is wide; it publishes important research results on the given topics, including personality psychology. Empirical contributions are welcome, as well as theoretical papers concerning special content models and psychometric or statistic developments. Furthermore, simulation studies to psychometric or statistical models are within the focus of the journal as long as they serve for the solution of basical psychological research questions.
We will continue with the tradition of publishing special topics. These, however, will no longer constitute a special issue on their own, but will rather be accompanied by a few varia papers. Hence, every issue offers varia papers; this is because we can publish a paper very quickly, though there might be a pool of special topics for the forthcoming papers. In the first issue 2010/1 we are glad to publish Part I of the special topic: "Gelotophobia", edited by the guest editors Proyer and Ruch (2010); Part II will be published in issue 2010/2. There are two special topics in preparation for 2011, "Advances in psychological and educational testing" and "Methods of cluster- and type analyses". And for 2012 there is a special topic in preparation: "World-wide diversity of intelligence testing". Of course, any suggestions to the editorial board for other special topics are welcome.
