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Editor: Annette M. La Greca
ISSN: 0022-006X
Published Bimonthly, beginning in February
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Please consult APA's Instructions for All Authors for information regarding
Prior to submission, please review the submission guidelines detailed below. Manuscripts that do not conform to the submission guidelines may be returned without review.
All submissions, whether new, first-submission manuscript, or a revision of a previously submitted manuscript, must use the electronic submissions portal, and must be in either Word (.doc) or Rich Text File (.rtf) format. No PDF files, please.
General correspondence may be directed to the Editorial Office via
e-mail.
The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (JCCP) publishes original contributions on the following topics:
- the development, validity, and use of techniques of diagnosis and treatment of disordered behavior
- studies of a variety of populations that have clinical interest, including but not limited to medical patients, ethnic minorities, persons with serious mental illness, and community samples
- studies that have a cross-cultural or demographic focus and are of interest for treating behavior disorders
- studies of personality and of its assessment and development where these have a clear bearing on problems of clinical dysfunction and treatment
- studies of gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation that have a clear bearing on diagnosis, assessment, and treatment
- studies of psychosocial aspects of health behaviors
- methodologically sound case studies pertinent to the preceding topics. Studies that focus on populations that fall anywhere within the lifespan are considered
JCCP welcomes submissions on treatment and prevention in all areas of clinical and clinical-health psychology and especially on topics that appeal to a broad clinical-scientist and practitioner audience. JCCP encourages the submission of theory-based interventions, studies that investigate mechanisms of change, and studies of the effectiveness of treatments in real-world settings.
Studies on the following topics will be considered if they have clear implications for clinical research and practice: epidemiology; use of psychological services; health care economics for behavioral disorders; theoretical papers; and critical analyses and meta-analyses of treatment approaches on topics of broad theoretical, methodological, or practical interest to the field of clinical psychology.
JCCP does not consider manuscripts dealing with the etiology or descriptive pathology of abnormal behavior (which are more appropriate for the Journal of Abnormal Psychology). Similarly, the journal does not consider articles focusing primarily on assessment, measurement, and diagnostic procedures and concepts (which are more appropriate for Psychological Assessment). Editors reserve the right to determine the most appropriate location of a manuscript.
This journal uses a masked reviewing system for all submissions. The first page of the manuscript should omit the authors' names and affiliations but should include the title of the manuscript and the date it is submitted.
Footnotes containing information pertaining to the authors' identities or affiliations should not be included in the manuscript, but may be provided after a manuscript is accepted.
Make every effort to see that the manuscript itself contains no clues to the authors' identities.
Keep a copy of the manuscript to guard against loss.
The cover letter accompanying the manuscript submission must include all authors' names and affiliations to avoid potential conflicts of interest in the review process. Addresses and phone numbers, as well as electronic mail addresses and fax numbers, if available, should be provided for all authors for possible use by the editorial office and later by the production office.
Full-length manuscripts should not exceed 35 pages total (including cover page, abstract, text, references, tables, and figures), with margins of at least 1 inch on all sides and a standard font (e.g., Times New Roman) of 12 points (no smaller). The entire paper (text, references, tables, etc.) must be double spaced.
Instructions on preparing tables, figures, references, metrics, and abstracts appear in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (5th edition).
For papers that exceed 35 pages, authors must justify the extended length in their cover letter (e.g., reporting of multiple studies), and in no case should the paper exceed 45 pages total. Papers that do not conform to these guidelines may be returned without review.
The References section should immediately follow a page break.
In addition to full-length manuscripts, the JCCP will consider Brief Reports of research studies in clinical psychology. The Brief Report format may be appropriate for empirically sound studies that are limited in scope, contain novel or provocative findings that need further replication, or represent replications and extensions of prior published work.
Brief Reports are intended to permit the publication of soundly designed studies of specialized interest that cannot be accepted as regular articles because of lack of space.
Brief Reports must be prepared according to the following specifications: Use 12-point Times New Roman type and 1-inch (2.54-cm) margins, and do not exceed 265 lines of text including references. These limits do not include the title page, abstract, author note, footnotes, tables, or figures.
An author who submits a Brief Report must agree not to submit the full report to another journal of general circulation. The Brief Report should give a clear, condensed summary of the procedure of the study and as full an account of the results as space permits.
This journal no longer requires an extended report. However, if one is available, it should be submitted to the Editorial Office, and the Brief Report must be accompanied by the following footnote:
Correspondence concerning this article (and requests for an extended report of this study) should be addressed to [give the author's full name and address].
JCCP considers primarily empirical work and occasionally reviews. Letters to the Editor are no longer published.
The title of a manuscript should be accurate, fully explanatory, and preferably no longer then 12 words. The title should reflect the content and population studied (e.g., "treatment of generalized anxiety disorders in adults").
If the paper reports a randomized clinical trial (RCT), this should be indicated in the title, and the CONSORT criteria must be used for reporting purposes.
Manuscripts must be accompanied by an abstract containing 125–180 words. All abstracts must be typed on a separate page (p. 2 of the manuscript). Abstracts must contain a brief statement about each of the following:
- the purpose/objective;
- the research methods, including the number and type of participants;
- a summary of the key findings;
- a statement that reflects the overall conclusions/implications
After the abstract, please supply up to five keywords or short phrases.
The Method section of each empirical report must contain a detailed description of the study participants, including (but not limited to) the following: age, gender, ethnicity, SES, clinical diagnoses and comorbidities (as appropriate), and any other relevant demographics.
In the Discussion section of the manuscript, authors should discuss the diversity of their study samples and the generalizability of their findings.
The Method section also must include a statement describing how informed consent was obtained from the participants (or their parents/guardians) and indicate that the study was conducted in compliance with an appropriate Internal Review Board.
The Method section of empirical reports must contain a sufficiently detailed description of the measures used so that the reader understands the item content, scoring procedures, and total scores or subscales. Evidence of reliability and validity with similar populations should be provided.
JCCP requires the statistical reporting of measures that convey clinical significance. Authors should report means and standard deviations for all continuous study variables and the effect sizes for the primary study findings. (If effect sizes are not available for a particular test, authors should convey this in their cover letter at the time of submission.) JCCP also requires authors to report confidence intervals for any effect sizes involving principal outcomes.
In addition, when reporting the results of interventions, authors should include indicators of clinically significant change. Authors may use one of several approaches that have been recommended for capturing clinical significance, including (but not limited to) the reliable change index (i.e., whether the amount of change displayed by a treated individual is large enough to be meaningful; see Jacobson et al., Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1999), the extent to which dysfunctional individuals show movement into the functional distribution (see Jacobson & Truax, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1991), or other normative comparisons (see Kendall et al., Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1999). The special section of JCCP on "Clinical Significance" (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1999, pp. 283-339) contains detailed discussions of clinical significance and its measurement and should be a useful resource.
Articles must include a discussion of the clinical implications of the study findings or analytic review. The Discussion section should contain a clear statement of the extent of clinical application of the current assessment, prevention, or treatment methods. The extent of application to clinical practice may range from suggestions that the data are too preliminary to support widespread dissemination to descriptions of existing manuals available from the authors or archived materials that would allow full implementation at present.
JCCP requires the use of the CONSORT reporting standards (i.e., a checklist and flow diagram) for randomized clinical trials, consistent with the policy established by the Publications and Communications Board of the American Psychological Association. CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) offers a standard way to improve the quality of such reports, and to ensure that readers have the information necessary to evaluate the quality of a clinical trial.
Manuscripts that report randomized clinical trials are required to include a flow diagram of the progress through the phases of the trial and a checklist that identifies where in the manuscript the various criteria are addressed. (The checklist should be placed in an Appendix of the manuscript for review purposes.) When a study is not fully consistent with the CONSORT statement, the limitations should be acknowledged and discussed in the text of the manuscript.
For follow-up studies of previously published clinical trials, authors should submit a flow diagram of the progress through the phases of the trial and follow-up. The above checklist information should be completed to the extent possible, especially for the Results and Discussion sections of the manuscript.
Visit the CONSORT Statement Web site for more details and resources.
For nonrandomized designs that often are used in public health and mental-health interventions, JCCP encourages the use of the most recent version of the TREND criteria (Transparent Reporting of Evaluations with Non-randomized Designs.
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