Welcome to the 2022 volume of the Group Decision & Negotiation journal. Like 2020, 2021 turned out to be an eventful year for many of us. Several surges in Covid-19 created unpredictability and tested organizations’ and individuals’ flexibility and resilience. Virtuality became an organizational staple as teams and communities firmly embraced new ways of meeting and working together. This was also the case for the GDN community. The postponed GDN 2020 Conference in Toronto finally took place during 2021 and was a resounding success, showing the vitality and creativity of GDN research. We look forward to hosting further iterations of some of the best papers of the conference in the journal.

The GDN 2021 volume produced a strong collection of submissions and published papers. We received a total of 208 submissions. The 6 issues of the journal published a total of 57 papers. The acceptance rate for 2021 turned out to be 21%, which represents nearly the lowest it has ever been. The journal’s other metrics are also strong: The average time to a first decision dropped further from 92 days in 2019 to 52 days in 2020 and finally to 33 days in 2021. This truly is an amazing turnaround time and a testament to the responsiveness of the journals review team. The journal’s h-index further improved from 55 in 2021 to 60, while the journal’s impact factor jumped from 1.612 in 2019 to 2.648 in 2020. Finally, we registered a record number of full-text article downloads in 2021: nearly 125,000, a 29% increase compared to 2020.

These numbers show that the journal is thriving and we aim to continue our focus on soliciting strong submissions that receive a swift turn around so as to keep strengthening the journal’s metrics as we move into the 2022 volume. For 2022, we are especially welcoming proposals for special issues on current topics. We are also inviting review papers and research agenda papers that can serve as focal publications in specific areas of GDN research.

While the average time to a first decision has become acceptable and better than that of most journals, we will continue to monitor this metric as well as the overall time it takes to reach a decision. It is an important service to our community that authors will learn about the decision on their manuscript in a timely fashion, regardless of whether it is the initial decision or a decision on a revision of a manuscript.

1 The Editorial Board and Reviewers

The Group Decision & Negotiation journal is fortunate to have a committed editorial board and group of reviewers. They work tirelessly to assess the contributions and quality of each submission that is entered into the review process. They assist the authors through constructive criticism to ensure that each published paper makes a significant contribution to the Group Decision & Negotiation body of knowledge.

We are extremely grateful to our current editorial board members, several of whom have carried a heavy load. We truly appreciate their hard work and dedication during the past year. For 2022, there are a few changes to the composition of the board. Several board members have indicated their desire to retire. We thank the following colleagues for their many years of service to our community:

  • Mara Olekalns, Melbourne Business School, Australia

  • Steven Brahms, New York University

  • William F. Samuelson, Boston University

  • Christof Weinhardt, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany

We are also grateful to welcome a group of new board members who will strengthen the board in terms of coverage of the journal’s various research areas as well as the board’s diversity in terms of global regions, gender, career stage, and ethnicity. Our newest board members are:

  • Zhaleh S. Azad, California State University – Northridge, USA

  • Debby Damen, Tilburg University, the Netherlands

  • Luis C. Dias, University of Coimbra, Portugal

  • Sondoss El Sawah, University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia

  • Jacqueline Konaté, University of Sciences, Techniques and Technologies of Bamako, Mali

  • Agnieszka Rusinowska, University Paris 1 & Paris School of Economics, France

  • Anne-Françoise Rutkowski, Tilburg University, the Netherlands

  • Haiyan Xu, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China

We wish to acknowledge the many reviewers for their efforts that made last year’s volume possible. In particular, on behalf of the Editorial Board we are happy to recognize the following individuals as the “Best GDN Reviewers of 2021” for going above and beyond in their efforts to strengthen the quality of the papers considered for the journal:

  • Ray Fells, University of Western Australia, Australia

  • Eduarda Asfora Frej, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil

  • Barbara Göbl, University of Vienna, Austria

  • Florian Kauffeldt, Heilbronn University, Germany

  • Marc Mertes, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany

  • Hannu Nurmi, University of Turku, Finland

  • Sudeep Sharma, University of Illinois Springfield, USA

We would be amiss not to recognize the fantastic support from the editorial team at Springer: Jolanda Voogd, Chitra Vijayaraghavan, Ambiga Selvaraj, and Cameron de Kreij. We are grateful for their high efficiency and responsiveness.

Finally, on behalf of the Editorial Board we would like recognize all reviewers for the 2021 Volume. Without their commitment to our journal it would not have been possible to produce timely, high quality issues:

Mark Aakhus

Juan Aguarón

Muhammad Akram

Naif Alawi

Miren Josune Albizuri

Francisco Antunes

Oğuzhan Ahmet Arık

Ryuta Arisaka

Salih Berkan Aydemir

Reyhan Aydogan

William Baber

Aram Bahrini

Shan Bai

Ying Bao

Femke Bekius

Emilia Bellucci

Sarah BenAmor

Gustavo Bergantinos

Ivo Blohm

Surajit Borkotokey

Smaranda Boros

Matteo Brunelli

James Bryant

Ricardo Buettner

Christoph Bühren

William Caballero

Francisco Javier Cabrerizo

Lucas Calache

Christopher Califf

Guy Camilleri

K. Chatterjee

Zhen-Song Chen

Dong Cheng

Zhor Chergui

Cristian Ciurea

J.N. Climaco

Matt Cronin

L. Crump

László Csató

Georgios Dafoulas

Metin Dagdeviren

Andreas Darmann

Adiel de Almeida

Vincent de Gooyert

Enes Demiralay

Xiaopeng Deng

Luis Dias

Rebekah Dibble

William Donohue

Viktor Dörfler

Florian Dost

Tom Eich

Aysegül Engin

Emre Ergin

Shiva Faeghinezhad

Pedro Falcão

Reza Farzipoor Saen

Ray Fells

Zhongwei Feng

Marc Fernandes

Michael Filzmoser

Marco Formentini

Vito Fragnelli

Manuela Freire

Eduarda Frej

Jinwu Gao

Rita Girão-Silva

Barbara Göbl

Laura Gomez-Ruiz

Zaiwu Gong

Dorota Gorecka

Xunjie Gou

Jonathan Gratch

Martin Gregor

Elisabeth Guenther

Serdar Güner

Rafik Hadfi

Yu Han

Shawei He

Ying He

Markku Heikkilä

Stijn Hoppenbrouwers

Fujun Hou

Xun-Feng Hu

Wencheng Huang

Mihail Iskakov

Daisung Jang

Wu Jian

Andrés Jiménez-Losada

Richard John

Catholijn Jonker

Bogumil Kaminski

Daniel Karabekyan

Emin Karagozoglu

Florian Kauffeldt

Muhammed Fatih Kaya

Mary Kern

Eugene Khmelnitsky

Jacqueline Konaté

Aleksei Kondratev

Ville Korpela

Matthew Kovach

Venkataraghavan Krishnaswamy

Hanbin Kuang

Álvaro Labella

Tuomas Lahtinen

Jonathan Leland

Frieder Lempp

Ernesto Leon Castro

Alexandre Leoneti

Ilkka Leppanen

Roy Lewicki

Juan Leyva Lopez

Xuemei Li

Huchang Liao

Baoding Liu

Bingsheng Liu

Hongbin Liu

Hu-Chen Liu

Wenqi Liu

Xia Liu

Yushan Liu

Peide Liu

Giovanna Lo Nigro

Pasi Luukka

Conrado Manuel

Rahul Marathe

Felix Mauersberger

Alexander Mayer

Jens Mazei

Marleen McCardle-Keurentjes

Stephen McCarthy

Michael D. McDonald

Fanyong Meng

Marc Mertes

Mjozska Mezei

Jerzy Michnik

Lukas Neville

Thomas O'Neill

Iván Palomares

Georgios Papasotiropoulos

Hans Peters

Małgorzata Przybyła-Kasperek

Manuel Puerto

Angela Pusillo

Leandro Rêgo

Johannes Rodrigues

Rosa M. Rodríguez

Maiko Sakamoto

Joaquin Sanchez Soriano

Jorge Santos

Mary Sass

Andreas Schmid

Vanessa Schramm

Mohsen Shahbaznezhadford

Sudeep Sharma

Hsu-Shih Shih

Maisa Silva

Togar Simatupang

Piotr Skowron

Francesco Squintani

Pamela Strickland

Harborne Stuart

Zhengwei Sun

Rangaraja Sundarraj

Wendelien van Eerde

Rudolf Vetschera

Lena Waizenegger

Feng Wang

Justin Wareham

Guiwu Wei

Arnold Wibmer

Frederik Wiedmann

Robert Wilken

Colin Williams

Nannan Wu

ShiKui Wu

Zhibin Wu

Yi Xiao

Haiyan Xu

Bo Yu

Jiahang Yuan

Alexei Zakharov

Bowen Zhang

Hengjie Zhang

Zhen Zhang

Ziming Zhu

We wish everyone a healthy and successful 2022!