At the Journal of Trust Research’s (JTR) Editorial Board Meeting in Atlanta on 6 August 2017, we had a thoughtful discussion, once again, on whom we see as our main audience and community. It is a blessing that trust is relevant across so many areas of social life and so many academic disciplines, yet it can also become a burden to try and cover everything. Similar to JTR’s earlier debate on the institutionalisation of trust research (see Ferrin, 2013; Perrone, 2013) there seems to be a trade-off between drawing the lines more tightly versus reaching out widely. Moreover, many trust researchers have become disillusioned about interdisciplinarity: very desirable, but very difficult, too. Effectively, after at least three decades of fast growth in dedicated research efforts on trust, we have a transdisciplinary topic with many interdisciplinary opportunities but mostly multidisciplinary outputs that do not yield a coherent overall understanding yet. If trust researchers individually tend to stick to their disciplines, for very legitimate reasons, would it not be better for JTR to also be highly focused in its domain and audience? As I will argue and show in the following sections, it is desirable and possible for JTR to cultivate an extensive and diverse field of cutting-edge trust research. When Peter Ping Li initiated the journal almost ten years ago and discussed ideas for the journal’s name with various supporters, I urged him to go for Journal of Trust Research instead of a longer or more specific title. A very pragmatic reason, still valid today, is that the amount of trust research outputs every year, though impressive and growing, would not be large enough for highly specialised journals on trust, for example, only in business, politics, or health. The more idealistic reason for having a general Journal of Trust Research is that it can promote the cross-fertilization of different areas of trust research. Even if the articles published alongside each other may appear somewhat incoherent, there is the chance that readers and authors will at least take note of findings from other disciplines and domains. Moreover, JTR as the journal on trust-at-large has the vision of interand transdisciplinary work and purposefully adopts the assumption that all research on ‘trust’ may inform and be connected in one way or another. As a journal, we do not have to reconcile or unify all the work we publish. Our mission, not least in the review process, is to make every contribution as strong as possible in its own terms and to encourage fruitful cross-fertilization, too.

中文翻译：

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培养信任研究领域

在2017年8月6日于亚特兰大举行的信托研究期刊（JTR）编辑委员会会议上，我们再次进行了深思熟虑的讨论，我们将其视为我们的主要受众和社区。幸好信任在社会生活的许多领域和众多学科领域中都具有重要意义，但它也可能成为试图涵盖所有内容的负担。类似于JTR之前关于信任研究的制度化的辩论（参见Ferrin，2013； Perrone，2013），似乎在更严格地划分界限与广泛推广之间存在一个权衡。而且，许多信任研究人员对跨学科性已经幻灭了：非常可取，但也非常困难。实际上，经过专门研究信任的努力至少持续了三十年之后，我们有一个跨学科的主题，有很多跨学科的机会，但是大多数是跨学科的成果，但尚未产生连贯的整体理解。如果信任研究人员出于非常正当的理由而倾向于坚持自己的学科，那么JTR还要高度专注于其领域和受众会更好吗？正如我将在以下各节中论述和说明的那样，JTR希望有可能并且有可能培育广泛而多样的前沿信任研究领域。当李平（Peter Ping Li）大约十年前创办该期刊并与各种支持者讨论该期刊名称的想法时，我敦促他选择《信任研究期刊》（Journal of Trust Research），而不是更长或更具体的标题。一个非常务实的原因（今天仍然有效）是每年信托研究的产出数量，虽然令人印象深刻且不断发展，但对于仅靠商业，政治或卫生方面的高度信任的专业期刊而言，其规模还不够大。拥有一般的《信托研究杂志》的更为理想的原因是，它可以促进不同领域的信托研究的交叉应用。即使彼此并发发表的文章可能看起来不一致，读者和作者仍有机会至少注意其他学科和领域的发现。此外，作为广泛信任期刊的JTR具有跨学科工作的愿景，并有目的地采用这样一种假设，即所有关于“信任”的研究都可以以一种或另一种方式提供信息并建立联系。作为期刊，我们不必调和或统一我们发布的所有作品。我们的使命，尤其是在审核过程中，