Editorial: Four Score (Plus) Years Ago

Abstract

Among their many achievements, Joseph Banks Rhine and collaborators launched The Journal of Parapsychology (JP) in 1937, the foremost venue for parapsychology experimental research and surpassed in longevity only by the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. There had been important controlled studies in parapsychology earlier on, but J. B. Rhine and his collaborators placed experimental parapsychology on a more secure footing. The eighty-plus years of JP issues would constitute an extraordinary achievement in any field, but is even more remarkable in such a contentious area as parapsychology. To avoid repeating mistakes one should be cognizant of the field’s previous history (Cardeña, 2018a) and even a cursory look at the JP indexes shows how the field has developed throughout the years. My intention for this Supplementary E-issue was to give a bird’s eye view of the coverage in the JP. My selection of articles will not make everyone completely happy but I trust that it will not make everybody surly either. My criteria to select articles for this issue were to: a) have an article per decade, 2) cover most of its main areas, 3) avoid having more than one article by the same author, and 4) include papers by important women and men, giving their right due to the former (Cardeña, 2018b).