SCAN heads to kindergarten

Abstract

It is hard to believe, but SCAN turns five in 2011 and things are going well. We received our first impact factor of 4.203, which places us #9 on the list of psychology journals and in the top 25% of all neuroscience journals. We have also become the official journal of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society that hosts the SAN meeting each year. And we are growing. We have been running four issues a year with 11–12 articles per issue. In 2011 we are expanding to five issues at 15 articles per issue and in 2012 we will go to six issues. This growth in pages should help us deal with the growth in submissions. In the past 2 years, the number of submissions to SCAN has doubled. We had a wonderful special issue on Cultural Neuroscience in 2010 (thanks to Joan Chiao for editing this). In the next 2 years, we will have special issues on Aging (edited by Lisbeth Nielsen and Mara Mather), Adolescence (edited by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Jennifer Pfeifer) and Mindfulness (edited by Yi-Yuan Tang and Michael Posner). We have comings and goings as well. After 5 years of service to SCAN, Ralph Adolphs will be stepping down as an Associate Editor. As many of you know, Ralph has become the Deputy Editor at Psychological Science, which is a huge obligation, but great for social and affective neuroscience. Ralph has played an enormous role in making SCAN a success since even before the first issue went to press and I am extremely grateful for all he has done. Luckily, we have two new Associate Editors joining SCAN and I could not be more pleased. Paul Whalen (Dartmouth University) and Shihui Han (Peking University) are new Associate Editors and fantastic additions to our team. Welcome to you both. Finally, a substantive change at SCAN. Apart from the ‘In this Issue’ and ‘Tools of the Trade’ specialty pieces, all articles published at SCAN have been empirical papers that use neuroscience methods. This will continue to be our bread and butter. However, the accumulation of quality studies in various areas of social and affective neuroscience suggests that it is time to start publishing review articles as well. We are particularly interested in meta-analyses, but will also consider non-empirical TICS-type reviews (the 5000 word limit still applies to reviews). We will likely only publish one review piece per issue and we will be highly selective. Reviews, even more than empirical submissions, must be viewed as a making a significant contribution to the literature. This is a very exciting change for SCAN. When SCAN was being formulated as a journal in 2005, we discussed whether to accept review papers. At the time, our assessment was that there were only a handful of topics that had been studied enough in the areas that SCAN covers to warrant reviews (and those had already been reviewed). Today, there are literally dozens of areas that have developed to the point where serious reviews are necessary and appropriate. We look forward to publishing the best of them here in the pages of SCAN.