Impact and (the Journal of) Trust Research

Given its relevance across domains of social life, there are numerous facets to how trust research can have an impact. One of them is the scholarly impact measured by citations. The conventional calculation of a journal’s average citations per paper in one year across the previous two-year publication period—the so-called Impact Factor (IF) undertaken and published by Clarviate—remains an indicator that many authors, readers and other stakeholders pay attention to. Whilst other types of impact and different measurements are becoming more important–and despite considerable critique of citation-based evaluations—IF does matter (for a brief discussion contextualised against other measures of impact, see Roldan-Valadez et al., 2019).

Against this background, we are very happy to report that Journal of Trust Research (JTR) has received its first official Impact Factor, based on citations during 2022 to papers we published in 2020 and 2021. Our 2022 IF stands at 1.4 (with a five-year IF of 3.1). We are grateful to all our supporters who made our impact possible: authors, reviewers, editors, readers, recommenders and citers.

JTR is still listed as an Emerging Source and, as of this year, impact factors are being computed for the Emerging Source Citation Index (ESCI), too. It is a pity that our first IF relates to the COVID years of 2020 and 2021, when our editorial engine stuttered: Relatively few papers were published and relatively few citations were received compared to the articles from 2019, many of which were more highly cited. This motivates a positive outlook for the 2023 IF and beyond as our output has come back to normal, citations are coming in, download figures are rising, open access is becoming more common, and the transition to a new Editorial Team that we are currently undertaking is reinvigorating our journal community.

The energy available for ensuring the impact of trust research can be truly amazing when like-minded scholars get together. This was evident at the recent ‘Workshop on Trust Within and Between Organizations’ in Helsinki organised by the First International Network on Trust (FINT) and co-chaired by JTR Area Editor, Kirsimarja Blomqvist and Mirjami Ikonen. With more than 110 participants from 19 countries, including a doctoral/early career day, the workshop showcased the cutting edge of this field and its many new topics. The programme and abstract collection from this FINT conference are publicly available here: https://erepo.uef.fi/handle/123456789/29893.

FINT has been the pioneering community supporting JTR from the early days on. Since 2016, one seat on the FINT Board has been reserved for the JTR Editor-in-Chief (EiC) to signal and tighten the connection. As part of our transition in roles, Guido Möllering has handed over the FINT Board Membership to Joe Hamm. This was marked at the FINT 2023 Workshop in Helsinki when we were able to express our thanks to each other and to the community, and where Joe participated in his first FINT Board Meeting. FINT certainly remains a key asset in enabling JTR’s impact in terms of IF and beyond.

Furthermore, as announced at FINT 2023 in Helsinki, there is a new JTR Call for Papers for a Special Issue on ‘Trust and Vulnerability’, co-guest edited by Simon Schafheitle, Antoinette Weibel and Guido Möllering (see the Announcement included at the back of this issue and online here: https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/special_issues/trust-and-vulnerability/). The special topic of vulnerability was very much present during the FINT Workshop as a ‘hot’ issue both conceptually and in terms of current societal relevance.

The current issue

The second issue of our thirteenth volume reflects our journal’s commitment to capturing the conversation of trust research from across disciplinary and contextual boundaries. Schilke and colleagues (2023) open the issue with a review of one of the more central pockets of trust research. In it, they survey the experimental portion of the organisational trust literature and argue that while the impact of benevolence has been relatively well-studied, ability and integrity have largely been ignored.

Next, Delhey and colleagues (2023) contribute to trust research by exploring the intersection of government, health, and society during the COVID-19 pandemic. They demonstrate that, depending on its specific nature, insecurity can serve to increase or to decrease trust.

Campagna and Griffith’s (2023) piece returns the organisational context but focuses on ‘gig work’ as an important subarea with particular utility for helping to elucidate the implications of low trust, a concept of contemporary interest to trust research, especially as distinguished from distrust. Their work reiterates the importance of trust in organisational relationships but provides evidence that low trust can also serve a protective function.

Ma (2023) provides a fourth piece deeply embedded in sociological traditions of trust. Through an analysis of the experiences of residents in gecekondu dwellings in Turkey, they synthesise perspectives on social capital, habitus, and social reproduction to contribute to our understanding of how we evaluate and decide among competing vulnerabilities.

Finally, Sonsino and colleagues (2023) integrate thinking from the game theoretic approach to trust research in and exploration of gender differences in the acceptance of lottery risk. They find that while male-identifying individuals’ trust is more calculated and more volatile, it is more stable for female-identifying participants.

Thus, through its five articles, the current issue of JTR nicely demonstrates the fruits of our efforts to collect the current state of the cross-boundary science of trust. Serendipitously, the issue brings together three very distinct perspectives on vulnerability—a quickly developing area of trust research—offering very different insights into how individuals cope with the reality that they may be harmed by the actions of relationship partners (Delhey et al., 2023; Ma, 2023; Sonsino et al., 2023). The remaining two pieces also share a focus, here on the organisational context, and offer insight into what is known and what has been neglected in previous work (Schilke et al., 2023) and challenge assumptions about the universally negative outcomes of low trust (Campagna & Griffith, 2023).

As always, we thank the authors, anonymous reviewers and Dora Lau who served as Action Editor for this issue for their constructive and patient efforts in working together to maximise these papers’ place in ensuring the impact of the Journal of Trust Research.