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 platformopens in new window, 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.

Please use the Manuscript Submission Checklist (PDF, 40KB)opens in new window as a guide for submission. Authors must review all items on this checklist before submitting to the journal.

All manuscripts are considered on the understanding that they have not been published previously in print or electronic form and that they are not under consideration by another publication or medium. All manuscripts should respect patient confidentiality; research involving human subjects must include ethical approval.

Submit manuscripts electronically (.rtf, .doc, or .pdf) via the Manuscript Submission Portal.

Submit Manuscriptopens in new window

Rodger Kessler, PhD
C.R. Macchi, PhD
Co-editors, Families, Systems, & Health

General correspondence and inquiries may be directed to Peer Review Coordinator Sheena Moutonopens in new window.

Authors may obtain a user ID and password on the first visit. Instructions and support for the submission process are available on the site.

All parts of the manuscript must be available in an electronic format; generic rich text format (.rtf), PDF, or Microsoft Word.

All manuscripts should be concise, well organized, and clearly written using active voice to present ideas relevant to the journal's scope of integrated care, and should address health and at least one of the two other domains of family functioning and/or systems thinking.

We welcome contributions from authors whose first language is not English and recommend that authors obtain professional assistance in written scholarly language prior to submission to ensure clarity, grammar, syntax, and organization.

Prepare manuscripts according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association using the 7th edition. Authors should ensure bias-free language (see Chapter 5 of the Publication Manual). APA Style and Grammar Guidelines for the 7^th edition are available. Review APA's Journal Manuscript Preparation Guidelines before submitting your article.

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.

When required, structured abstracts should follow the Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion (IMRAD) format.

Reporting standards: Adhere to relevant Equator Network reporting guidelines, such as consort for randomized trials, strobe for observational studies, squire for quality improvement studies, or prisma for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Submit a completed reporting guideline checklist as a Document for Reviewers and include a participant flow diagram in the manuscript. Adhere to the APA Journal Article Reporting Standards (jars) for items that are not addressed in the Equator Network guidelines.

In an effort to address the FSH strategic plan around equity, diversity, and inclusion, please ensure your manuscript addresses the following:

• Use person-first language (see APA Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Inclusive Language Guidelines (PDF, 600KB)opens in new window).
• Use system-centered language to acknowledge systems that uphold oppression and health inequities while preserving the humanity of affected persons (see Buchanan, Perez, Prinstein, & Thurston, 2021, p. 1102opens in new window). 
• In the abstract and in the manuscript methods section, report the year(s) of data collection to help contextualize the study.
• Consistent with APA’s Journal Article Reporting Standardsopens in new window (JARS) for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods studiesopens in new window, describe the sample characteristics. The abstract should include at least some sociodemographic characteristics of the sample (recognizing space constraints). The manuscript methods section should include more details. While all of the following are not required, please carefully consider: age, sex, gender identity, racial identity, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, disability status, and the intersection of these attributes. Describe groups as specifically as possible.
• Studies sampling White/Western, education, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations should justify their use of such samples and discuss limits to generalizability.
• Consider whether the design of the study, framing of the results, and/or other aspects of the study or manuscript may inadvertently reinforce negative stereotypes about historically excluded and oppressed groups or could be misused or misinterpreted to cause harm to these groups.

Manuscripts should be organized using the Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRAD) structure with references using APA Style. All research articles and brief reports must state in the Methods section which institutional review board (IRB) provided ethical review and oversight of the study or exemption from IRB review.

See Table below for word limit by manuscript category. Word count does not include the content of the title page, abstract, appendices, tables, figures, or reference list following the manuscript. Reference terms in the text are included in word count.

Tables or figures should be used to display demographic data and results and to organize the presentation of other information (e.g., themes, concepts, implications) in a way that makes it easily digestible for the reader.

Articles submitted to Families, Systems, & Health under the "Policy and Management" section may contain up to 1,500 words and should use APA Style for references.

The policy brief should review the relevant literature, have a clear rationale for the methodology, integrate findings with current thinking and practice, and examine a suggestion and implications for policy change.

Rationale for the proposed policy recommendation can be based on existing data in the literature or extend from data that authors analyze. The work must address at least two of the three domains of this journal. Interested authors are referred to this article on writing health policy briefs (PDF, 25KB)opens in new window.

High-quality media reviews should be 1,000 words or less and should contain the following components: reasons the media item is important, the intended audience, potential broader audiences it could interest or apply to; its strengths and benefits, shortcomings and limitations; how it fits into the larger body of literature and media within the field, and the implications of the resource.

Writing should be balanced, concise and professional. Reviews are helpful when they deliver insight beyond what a viewer could ascertain if glancing over the media resource, its website and description. Beyond previewing it or reading other reviews about it, the reviewer must "consume" the entire resource. Authors must attend to their biases and are expected to disclose these at the time of submission (e.g., an author reviewing her close colleague's website or training series). Similarly, reviews that are overly positive or negative are undesirable as they are less useful to the reader (Guetterman, 2016; Lee et al., 2010).

As with all peer-reviewed publications, submission does not guarantee acceptance for publication.

Sharing Our Stories: Narratives, Poetry, and 55 Word Stories curates medical humanities pieces that utilize creative writing-narratives, poetry, haiku, or 55-word stories to capture key experiences of wellness, illness, healing the health care system, and/or standout moments in healthcare.

Submissions should not exceed 1000 words and may take the form of a personal narrative, a poem utilizing any format including free verse, haiku, or a 55-word story.

Pieces will be peer-reviewed based on fit with the journal mission, use of well-crafted language, and the impact of the narrative. Contact our department co-editors Jo Marie Reillyopens in new window or Hugh Silkopens in new window if you have questions or if you are interested in becoming a reviewer for this section of the journal.

Both the cover letter and the title page of the manuscript should include the title, authors' names in order of contribution, and affiliations.

Designate a corresponding author and include address, e-mail, phone, and fax. A word count should also be included on the title page (excluding title page, abstract, appendices, tables, figures, and reference list following the manuscript).

An author note on the title page should also indicate:

• full names of authors, in the order of their institutional affiliations, with lead author listed first;
• affiliation and location during the study plus current affiliation and location if they have changed since the study;
• grant support and role of funder if any in role of preparation;
• any acknowledgment the authors wish to convey regarding collaborators whose contributions did not merit authorship; and
• any real or perceived conflict of interest that the author may have, considering the ICMJE criteria for authorship.

Please see the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th edition) for further guidance on the format of an author note.

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.

The APA Publication Manual (7th ed.opens in new window) stipulates that "authorship encompasses…not only persons who do the writing but also those who have made substantial scientific contributions to a study." In the spirit of transparency and openness, this journal has adopted the Contributor Roles Taxonomyopens in new window (CRediT) to describe each author's individual contributions to the work. CRediT offers authors the opportunity to share an accurate and detailed description of their diverse contributions to a manuscript.

Submitting authors will be prompted to select one or more contributor roles for each author at initial submission. All authors should have reviewed and agreed to their individual contribution(s) before submission. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, an Author Contributions Statement will be generated during the typesetting process and published in the author note of the final article. It is not necessary for authors to provide a written Author Contributions Statement upon submission.

CRediT includes 14 contributor roles, as described below:

• Conceptualization: Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
• Data curation: Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse.
• Formal analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
• Funding acquisition: Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
• Investigation: Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
• Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
• Project administration: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
• Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
• Software: Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
• Supervision: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
• Validation: Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
• Visualization: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
• Writing—original draft: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
• Writing—review and editing: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision—including pre- or post-publication stages.

Authors can claim credit for more than one contributor role, and the same role can be attributed to more than one author. Not all roles will be applicable to any particular scholarly work.

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 submitting manuscripts to Families, Systems, & Health are required to provide a short statement of one to two sentences to summarize the article's findings and significance to the educated public. This description should be included within the manuscript on the abstract/keywords page.

• View Guidance for Translational Abstracts and Public Significance Statements

After an article has been accepted for publication, it is edited for conformity of style to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.), clarity of presentation, coherence, punctuation, standard usage of terms, spelling, and so on.

The first author will receive the copyedited manuscript for review and must return it within two business days of receipt.

Authors may order reprints of their articles from the printer when they receive their copyedited manuscript for review.

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.

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.