Submission guidelines

Prior to submission, please carefully read and follow the submission guidelines detailed below. Manuscripts that do not conform to the submission guidelines may be returned without review.

Submissions are handled only through our Editorial Manager platform, and the only official journal website is through APA. If you believe you interacted with a fraudulent website for this journal, please email APA Journalsopens in new window. Review our resource for authors for more information on identifying predatory journals.

To submit to the editorial office of Etzel Cardeña, please submit manuscripts electronically through the Manuscript Submission Portal in Microsoft Word format (.doc) or LaTex (.tex) as a zip file with an accompanied Portable Document Format (.pdf) of the manuscript file.

Prepare manuscripts according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association using the 7^th edition. Manuscripts may be copyedited for bias-free language (see Chapter 5 of the Publication Manual). APA Style and Grammar Guidelines for the 7^th edition are available.

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Etzel Cardeña
Lund University, Sweden
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All authors must read carefully, fill out, and sign the Certification of Compliance with APA Ethical Principles (PDF, 26KB)opens in new window.

Any paper presenting new data or reanalyzing previous data should include either: a) documentation such as the name of an institutional review board (IRB)/ethics panel (independent from the research group) with a decision number approving the conduct of the study and/or the reanalysis of previous data, or b) information such as the name of a document of a relevant IRB/ethics panel clearly stating that the study in question would be exempt from IRB/panel oversight.

In addition, authors must provide in the paper detailed descriptions of consent/assent of participants, their relation to the people conducting the study (e.g., students, supervisees, or no such relation) and any other specific procedures that would be relevant such as debriefing, certificate of confidentiality, and so on in the paper.

Review APA’s Journal Manuscript Preparation Guidelines before submitting your article.

Regular papers should not exceed a 10,000 word limit. This includes all paper items, including the title page, but not supplemental materials. Authors may contact the editor-in-chief to justify why their paper would need to be longer than 10,000 words and specify how much longer. It will be up to the editor to decide on a possible exemption.

In addition to regular articles, brief reports are accepted. Brief reports have a 5,000-word limit, including the title page. This word limit excludes supplemental materials.

Double-space all copy. Other formatting instructions, as well as instructions on preparing tables, figures, references, metrics, and abstracts, appear in the Manual. Additional guidance on APA Style is available on the APA Style website.

Once a paper is published, APA ethical principles state that authors should share their data with qualified researchers, if requested, for the purpose of verifying published findings through reanalysis using identical or alternate statistical analyses. To facilitate transparent and open science, Psychology of Consciousness encourages every author to deposit his or her data in a repository where any other researcher can electronically access both a file containing the author’s data and a file containing the author’s analyses and results. For this purpose, APA has established a partnership with the Center for Open Science, which supports the data repositoryopens in new window.

Authors must indicate whether the data and code for each previously unpublished study in the manuscript will be made available, or they must provide a reason for not sharing the data. The link to the permanent repository for the dataset and codebook (or the brief statement explaining why data are not being shared) must be included in the author note.

Because the publication of null findings is important for the validity of meta-analyses, evidence that replicates or fails to replicate past results on a consciousness-related issue will be considered for publication if it is part of a study with additional new conditions yielding statistically significant findings on the issue or if it is part of a manuscript with at least one additional new study yielding statistically significant findings on the issue.

Original studies that have potentially important null findings will also be considered if they are part of a manuscript with at least one additional study yielding statistically significant and conceptually important results. The only null findings that will be considered for publication in a one-study paper without an additional new condition are findings for which Bayesian analyses are conducted with respect to acceptance or not of the null finding(s).

There is considerable evidence that demographic, behavioral, and other characteristics of the experimenters, and how the study is presented, can affect the response of human and non-human participants. It is thus required for all research studies to provide substantial information on how the study was presented to participants, what the milieu was, who interacted with the participants, what was the relation between experimenters and participants, and so on. Statements about positionality (e.g., the experimenters being of the same or different ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on than most participants) may also be relevant.

Systematic surveys of the literature should also consider, inasmuch as information is available, the characteristics of the experimenters (e.g., the often found slightly higher hypnotizability of females than males typically or always has occurred when the hypnotist was male).

Psychology of Consciousness is pleased to be a member of the Peer Community in Registered Reportsopens in new window (PCI RR), which performs Stage 1 (proposal) and Stage 2 (completed study) review of Registered Report preprints.

As a “PCI RR-friendly” journal, Psychology of Consciousness will automatically offer Stage 1 in-principle acceptance (IPA) to any quantitative Stage 1 RR within the journal’s disciplinary scope that receives IPA at PCI RR, and will accept without further peer review any Stage 2 RR that has been recommended by PCI RR, subject to the manuscript meeting applicable journal requirementsopens in new window.

Authors intending to publish in this journal via PCI RR should submit their manuscript to the journal only after a final positive Stage 2 recommendation from PCI RR.

On submission, the manuscript will be checked by the editor to confirm that the submission is identical to the Stage 2 manuscript that is approved by PCI RR. Acceptance will be subject to the editor’s satisfaction that the manuscript is the same as the preprint approved by PCI RR.

Authors taking advantage of the PCI RR track should submit their Stage 2 Registered Report using the regular journal submission portalopens in new window; select "Registered Report (temp article name)" as the article type for your submission to ensure that it is processed correctly. The manuscript must include the URL to the reviews and recommendation at PCI RR. The submission must also be accompanied by a cover letter stating that the authors are submitting via the PCI RR track, including a URL to the recommended preprint, and confirming that the manuscript is identical to the recommended preprint.

You can find additional details regarding PCI RR on their websiteopens in new window.

In addition to abiding by the submission requirements listed in the PCI RR submission portal, PCI RR submissions intended for publication in Psychology of Consciousness must propose original or replicative research that tests old or new theories of sensory consciousness, subconsciousness, or self-consciousness. Research proposals should ideally include empirical predictions derived from these theories that point to either the potential discovery of previously unpredicted results or the potential confirmation of previously unexpected results (although this is not a requirement for all proposals).

For Stage 1 submissions that propose frequentist testing of a primary hypothesis (H1) against a null hypothesis (H0), APA requires that the alpha level—the likelihood of accepting H1 when H0 is true—be .05 or less. For Bayesian hypothesis testing of H1 against H0, Psychology of Consciousness requires that the Bayes factor—the indicator of a noteworthy finding—be 3.0 or greater. The journal has no power requirement for such tests of H1 against H0, but a non-significant difference between H1 and H0 is not in itself sufficient for concluding that there is support for H0. In order to infer support for H0, high power, or use of an equivalence region (interval H0/ROPE) or a Bayes Factor, is necessary. In these cases, the effect size chosen (for power analysis, an equivalence region, or the scale factor of a Bayes factor) should be justified by the scientific context and should not be based on default values (cf. Dienes, 2021opens in new window).

Finally, the proposed Registered Report submitted to PCI for Stage 1 review should ascertain that the proposed sample size is large enough to find evidence against the tested hypothesis—based on the statistical power underlying a minimally interesting effect size, or the probability of the confidence interval falling in an equivalence region where the effect is zero, or the emergence of a Bayes factor of 1/3 if the population effect were zero, for example. In other words, the proposed sample size must be justified by a method fitting the scientific context and the available resources, but no particular method of justification is required.

Authors who feel that their manuscript may benefit from additional academic writing or language editing support prior to submission are encouraged to seek out such services at their host institutions, engage with colleagues and subject matter experts, and/or consider several vendors that offer discounts to APA authors.

Please note that APA does not endorse or take responsibility for the service providers listed. It is strictly a referral service. Use of such service is not mandatory for publication in an APA journal. Use of one or more of these services does not guarantee selection for peer review, manuscript acceptance, or preference for publication in any APA journal.

APA can place supplemental materials online, available via the published article in the APA PsycArticles^® database.

All manuscripts must include an abstract containing a maximum of 250 words typed on a separate page. After the abstract, please supply up to five keywords or brief phrases.

List references in alphabetical order. Each listed reference should be cited in text, and each text citation should be listed in the references section.

Examples of basic reference formats:

Journal article

McCauley, S. M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Language learning as language use: A cross-linguistic model of child language development. Psychological Review, 126(1), 1–51. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000126opens in new window

Authored book

Brown, L. S. (2018). Feminist therapy (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000092-000opens in new window

Chapter in an edited book

Balsam, K. F., Martell, C. R., Jones. K. P., Safren, S. A. (2019). Affirmative cognitive behavior therapy with sexual and gender minority people. In G. Y. Iwamasa & P. A. Hays (Eds.), Culturally responsive cognitive behavior therapy: Practice and supervision (2nd ed., pp. 287–314). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000119-012opens in new window

Data set citation

Alegria, M., Jackson, J. S., Kessler, R. C., & Takeuchi, D. (2016). Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES), 2001–2003 [Data set]. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR20240.v8opens in new window

Software/Code citation

Viechtbauer, W. (2010). Conducting meta-analyses in R with the metafor package.  Journal of Statistical Software, 36(3), 1–48. https://www.jstatsoft.org/v36/i03/opens in new window

Wickham, H. et al., (2019). Welcome to the tidyverse. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1686, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686opens in new window

All data, program code, and other methods must be appropriately cited in the text and listed in the references section.

Tables should adhere to APA Styleopens in new window. Use Word’s Insert Table function to create tables, and do not insert tabs or extra spaces to align columns as this will create problems when the table is typeset.

Preferred formats for graphics files are TIFF and JPG, and preferred format for vector-based files is EPS. Graphics downloaded or saved from web pages are not acceptable for publication. Multipanel figures (i.e., figures with parts labeled a, b, c, d, etc.) should be assembled into one file. When possible, please place symbol legends below the figure instead of to the side.

Resolution 

• All color line art and halftones: 300 DPI 
• Black and white line tone and gray halftone images: 600 DPI 

Line weights 

• Adobe Photoshop images 
• Color (RGB, CMYK) images: 2 pixels 
• Grayscale images: 4 pixels 
• Adobe Illustrator Images 
• Stroke weight: 0.5 points 

APA offers authors the option to publish their figures online in color without the costs associated with print publication of color figures.

The same caption will appear on both the online (color) and print (black and white) versions. To ensure that the figure can be understood in both formats, authors should add alternative wording (e.g., “the red (dark gray) bars represent”) as needed.

Color figure fees

For authors who prefer their figures to be published in color both in print and online, original color figures can be printed in color at the editor's and publisher's discretion provided the author agrees to pay: 

• $900 for one figure 
• An additional $600 for the second figure 
• An additional $450 for each subsequent figure

We strongly encourage you to use MathType (third-party software) or Equation Editor 3.0 (built into pre-2007 versions of Word) to construct your equations, rather than the equation support that is built into Word 2007 and Word 2010. Equations composed with the built-in Word 2007/Word 2010 equation support are converted to low-resolution graphics when they enter the production process and must be rekeyed by the typesetter, which may introduce errors.

To construct your equations with MathType or Equation Editor 3.0:

• Go to the Text section of the Insert tab and select Object.
• Select MathType or Equation Editor 3.0 in the drop-down menu.

If you have an equation that has already been produced using Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 and you have access to the full version of MathType 6.5 or later, you can convert this equation to MathType by clicking on MathType Insert Equation. Copy the equation from Microsoft Word and paste it into the MathType box. Verify that your equation is correct, click File, and then click Update. Your equation has now been inserted into your Word file as a MathType Equation.

Use Equation Editor 3.0 or MathType only for equations or for formulas that cannot be produced as Word text using the Times or Symbol font.

Because altering computer code in any way (e.g., indents, line spacing, line breaks, page breaks) during the typesetting process could alter its meaning, we treat computer code differently from the rest of the article in the production process. Supply separate files for computer code.

In online supplemental material

Runnable source code should be included as supplemental material to the article. For more information, visit supplementing your article with online material.

In the text of the article

If authors would like to include code in the text of the published article, submit a separate file with your code exactly as it should appear, using Courier New font with a type size of 8 points. An image will be made of each segment of code in your article that exceeds 40 characters in length. (Shorter snippets of code that appear in text will be typeset in Courier New and run in with the rest of the text.) If an appendix contains a mix of code and explanatory text, please submit a file that contains the entire appendix, with the code keyed in 8-point Courier New.

Authors of accepted papers must obtain and provide to the editor on final acceptance all necessary permissions to reproduce in print and electronic form any copyrighted work, including test materials (or portions thereof), photographs, and other graphic images (including those used as stimuli in experiments).

On advice of counsel, APA may decline to publish any image whose copyright status is unknown.

• Download Permissions Alert Form (PDF, 13KB)opens in new window

APA holds policies that apply to all journals published. These include policies on author contributorship and responsibilities of authors; author name changes after publication; the use of generative artificial intelligence; funder information and conflict-of-interest disclosures; duplicate publication; data publication and reuse; and preprints. Please also refer to individual journal submission guidance for specific practices and requirements for manuscript submission.

A key convention in the publication of research is the peer review process, in which the quality and potential contribution of each manuscript is evaluated by one's peers in the scientific community. Like other scientific journals, APA journals utilize a peer review process to guide manuscript selection and publication decisions.

In light of changing patterns of scientific knowledge dissemination, APA requires authors to provide information on prior dissemination of the data and narrative interpretations of the data/research appearing in the manuscript (e.g., if some or all were presented at a conference or meeting, posted on a listserv, shared on a website, including academic social networks like ResearchGate, etc.). This information (2–4 sentences) must be provided as part of the author note.

APA policy prohibits an author from submitting the same manuscript for concurrent consideration by two or more publications.

APA requires authors to reveal any possible conflict of interest in the conduct and reporting of research (e.g., financial interests in a test or procedure, funding by pharmaceutical companies for drug research).

APA Journals aims to address systemic inequities and bias, promote equitable opportunities for researchers, and foster an inclusive environment within the psychological research and scholarly publishing communities, representative of the wide array of people that psychology consists of and serves. Please refer to individual journal submission guidance for specific EDI practices and requirements for manuscript submission.

The APA Journals™ Program is committed to publishing transparent, rigorous research; improving reproducibility in science; and aiding research discovery. Open science practices vary across subfields and per editor discretion, and APA Publishing supports all efforts to improve openness and transparency, especially as they improve diversity, equity, and inclusion. Please refer to individual journal submission guidance for specific OS practices and requirements for manuscript submission.

The APA Journals Office supports authors’ choices on how to publish their work. We are committed to offering options that we believe comply with most funder and institutional requirements and support both self-archiving (“green”) and APC (paid for via an article processing charge and also known as “gold”) Open Access options. Submitting a manuscript for peer review is free of charge.

APA’s current policies on generative AI include:

• When a generative AI model is used in the drafting of a manuscript for an APA publication, the use of AI must be disclosed in the methods section and cited.
• AI cannot be named as an author on an APA scholarly publication.

APA policy prohibits an author from submitting the same manuscript for concurrent consideration by two or more publications. Preprints are allowed.

Authors of accepted papers must obtain and provide on final acceptance all necessary permissions to reproduce in print and electronic form any copyrighted work, including test materials (or portions thereof), photographs, and other graphic images (including those used as stimuli in experiments).

On advice of counsel, APA may decline to publish any image whose copyright status is unknown.

It is a violation of APA Ethical Principles to publish “as original data, data that have been previously published” (Standard 8.13).

APA Ethical Principles also state that “after research results are published, psychologists do not withhold the data on which their conclusions are based from other competent professionals who seek to verify the substantive claims through reanalysis and who intend to use such data only for that purpose, provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and unless legal rights concerning proprietary data preclude their release” (Standard 8.14).

APA expects authors to make their data available if asked during the editorial process and for at least five years after the date of publication.

If the manuscript is accepted, the corresponding author is required to sign and submit a Certification of Compliance with APA Ethical Principles (PDF, 26KB).opens in new window

See APA’s Publishing Policies page for more information on publication policies, including information on author contributorship and responsibilities of authors, author name changes after publication, the use of generative artificial intelligence, funder information and conflict-of-interest disclosures, duplicate publication, data publication and reuse, and preprints.

Visit the Journals Publishing Resource Center for more resources for writing, reviewing, and editing articles for publishing in APA journals.

Brief reports have a word limit of 5,000 words that includes all paper items, including the title page. Only supplemental material is excluded from the overall word count.