Creativity Research Journal

Background and History

The CRJ was founded in 1988. Only one issue was published that year, and it was published privately by the Creativity Research Center of Southern California, which is now defunct. Two years later Ablex Publishing (New Jersey) took over publishing the CRJ, and 10 years after that it was taken over by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (also New Jersey). Erlbaum was sold to Taylor and Francis in 2006. The journal is truly international, with dozens of countries represented in its pages.

The CRJ was started to fill a gap in the scientific literature. This is implied by its title, and in particular “research.” The gap was obvious to individuals working in the field in the 1980s, and most of these highly productive and influential scholars have served on the Editorial Board in the past 20 years. This includes Robert Albert, Teresa Amabile, Ravenna Helson, Howard Gruber, Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg, David Henry Feldman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ruth Richards, Albert Rothenberg, Robert Weisberg, and a number of other respected scholars. The quality of the Editorial Board ensures quality peer review and guarantees that the CRJ maintains its scientific standards.

The objectives of the CRJ can be explicitly stated. Quoting editor Mark Runco in the inaugural issue: “The primary objective is to publish high-quality, scholarly articles which will help researchers, educators, artists, organizational specialists, and other interested parties to better understand creativity. A related objective is to facilitate communication among those studying creativity” (p. 1). The criteria used to select articles to be published were also provided: “Originality is vital but must be balanced with fit and appropriateness” (p. 2). The unique stance of the journal is that the CRJ displays creativity but is also explicitly about creativity. The scientific grounding of the CRJ requires that much of the appropriateness in the definition above is a reflection of the fit with the existing literature on creativity. Speculation is not published.

The CRJ has always published diverse kinds of articles. This is necessary, if one wishes to understand creativity. After all, creativity is useful in many different disciplines and domains, including the arts, mathematics, invention, design, politics, sports, and more, and these vary in some ways in terms of the feasibility of empirical research and the operationalization of creativity.

There is also depth in the archives of the CRJ. That may be most obvious by looking specifically at the special issues that have been published. Special issues have been devoted to creativity and health, play, the arts, biomedical research, morality, schizophrenia, divergent thinking, qualitative research, and recently, malevolent creativity. There was a Festschrift for Howard Gruber, and an issue commemorating J. P. Guilford's 1950 seminal paper on creativity.

...