Psychology, Public Policy, and Law

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.

Submission

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law^® uses a software system to screen submitted content for similarity with other published content. The system compares each submitted manuscript against a database of 25+ million scholarly publications, as well as content appearing on the open web.

This allows APA to check submissions for potential overlap with material previously published in scholarly journals (e.g., lifted or republished material). A similarity report will be generated by the system and provided to the Psychology, Public Policy, and Law Editorial office for review immediately upon submission.

To submit to the Editorial Office of Michael E. Lamb, please submit manuscripts electronically through the Manuscript Submission Portal in Microsoft Word or Open Office format.

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).

Submit Manuscript

Michael E. Lamb
Department of Psychology
University of Cambridge
Free School Lane
Cambridge CB2 3RQ
United Kingdom

General correspondence should be directed to the editor.

The journal encourages authors to write comprehensive pieces, rather than submitting smaller pieces to multiple journals.

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law encourages the submission by scholars of empirical studies, as well as theoretical, conceptual, and critical reviews dealing with psychology and with relevant information derived from related disciplines, law, and policy studies.

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law publishes replications. Submissions should include “A Replication of XX Study” in the subtitle of the manuscript as well as in the abstract.

Editor’s Choice

Each issue of PPPL will honor one manuscript as the Editor’s Choice.

Selection criteria

The Editor’s Choice article will be selected based on an assessment of the following criteria. In addition to the editor’s own assessment of these criteria, information provided in the peer reviews (numerical ratings and comments) and the associate editors’ decision letters will be used as data for selection.

• Diversity: Does the study advance our understanding of how legal institutions and policy makers should work with and treat diverse groups of people? Does the study contribute to improving services for underserved populations?
• Innovation: Does the study lead to significantly new knowledge, ask unexamined questions, and/or use highly novel methods to inform policy and legal practice?
• Methodological rigor: Do the methods meet the highest level of methodological rigor for the particular field of study?
• Policy significance/impact: Does the study have significant and direct implications that can change/improve/increase practices in the legal or policy areas?

Selection process

When the editor prepares the table of contents each quarter, the editor will identify the article that they believe best meets the criteria in consultation with the associate editors.    
AEs will be invited to nominate articles for Editor’s Choice. The editor will consider these nominations in their selection review process.

Masked review policy

This journal has adopted a policy of masked review for all submissions.

Each copy of the manuscript must include a separate title page with the authors' names and affiliations, and these should not appear anywhere else in the manuscript. Footnotes that identify the authors must be typed on a separate page.

Make sure that the manuscript itself contains no clues to the authors’ identity, including grant numbers, names of institutions providing IRB approval, self-citations, and links to online repositories for data, materials, code, or preregistrations (e.g., Create a View-only Link for a Project).

Please ensure that the final version for production includes a byline and full author note for typesetting.

Manuscript preparation

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).

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

There is no page restriction and all copies should be double-spaced. 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.

Below are additional instructions regarding the preparation of display equations, computer code, and tables.

Display equations

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.

Computer code

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 your article in our production process. To that end, we request separate files for computer code.

In online supplemental material

We request that runnable source code 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 you would like to include code in the text of your published manuscript, please submit a separate file with your code exactly as you want it to appear, using Courier New font with a type size of 8 points. We will make an image 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.

Tables

Use Word's insert table function when you create tables. Using spaces or tabs in your table will create problems when the table is typeset and may result in errors.

Author contributions statements using CRediT

The APA Publication Manual (7th ed.) 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, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law has adopted the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (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 asked to identify the contributions of all authors at initial submission according to this taxonomy. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the CRediT designations will be published as an Author Contributions Statement in the author note of the final article. All authors should have reviewed and agreed to their individual contribution(s) before 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.

Journal Article Reporting Standards and the 21-Word Statement

Authors must adhere to the APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. The standards offer ways to improve transparency in reporting to ensure that readers have the information necessary to evaluate the quality of the research and to facilitate collaboration and replication.

The JARS:

• recommend the division of hypotheses, analyses, and conclusions into primary, secondary, and exploratory groupings to allow for a full understanding of quantitative analyses presented in a manuscript and to enhance reproducibility;
• offer modules for authors reporting on replications, clinical trials, longitudinal studies, and observational studies, as well as the analytic methods of structural equation modeling and Bayesian analysis; and
• include guidelines on reporting of study preregistration (including making protocols public); participant characteristics (including demographic characteristics); inclusion and exclusion criteria; psychometric characteristics of outcome measures and other variables; and planned data diagnostics and analytic strategy.

JARS-Qual offers guidance to researchers using qualitative methods such as narrative data, grounded theory, phenomenological, critical, discursive, performative, ethnographic, consensual qualitative, case study, psychobiography, and thematic analysis approaches.

The guidelines focus on transparency in methods reporting, recommending descriptions of how the researcher's own perspective affected the study, as well as the contexts in which the research and analysis took place.

Manuscripts must also report (1) how the sample size was determined, (2) all data exclusions, (3) all manipulations, and (4) all study measures. See Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn (2012) for details; include the following statement in the method section:

• We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions (if any), all manipulations, and all measures in the study.

Transparency and openness

Data, materials, and code

Authors must state whether data, code, and study materials are posted to a trusted repository and, if so, how to access them, including their location and any limitations on use. Recommended repositories include APA’s repository on the Open Science Framework (OSF), or authors can access a full list of other recommended repositories. Trusted repositories adhere to policies that make data discoverable, accessible, usable, and preserved for the long term. Trusted repositories also assign unique and persistent identifiers.

In a subsection titled "Transparency and Openness" at the end of the method section, specify whether and where the data and material are available or note the legal or ethical reasons for not doing so. For submissions with quantitative or simulation analytic methods, state whether the study analysis code is posted to a trusted repository, and, if so, how to access it (or the legal or ethical reason why it is not available).

For example:

• All data have been made publicly available at the [trusted repository name] and can be accessed at [persistent URL or DOI].
• Materials and analysis code for this study are not available.
• The code behind this analysis/simulation has been made publicly available at the [trusted repository name] and can be accessed at [persistent URL or DOI].

If the study is one of many conducted using a larger data set, authors might want to make available only the data relevant to this report and, if the data set includes sensitive personal information about the participants, authors should exclude information that might make it possible to identify them.

Preregistration of studies and analysis plans

Preregistration of studies and specific hypotheses can be a useful tool for making strong theoretical claims. Likewise, preregistration of analysis plans can be useful for distinguishing confirmatory and exploratory analyses. Investigators are encouraged to preregister their studies and/or analysis plans prior to conducting the research via a publicly accessible registry system (e.g., OSF, ClinicalTrials.gov, or other trial registries in the WHO Registry Network).

There are many available templates; for example, APA, the British Psychological Society, and the German Psychological Society partnered with the Leibniz Institute for Psychology and Center for Open Science to create Preregistration Standards for Quantitative Research in Psychology (Bosnjak et al., 2022).

Articles must state whether or not any work was preregistered and, if so, where to access the preregistration. Preregistrations must be available to reviewers; authors may submit a masked copy via stable link or supplemental material. Links in the method section should be replaced with an identifiable copy on acceptance.

For example:

• This study’s design was preregistered prospectively, before data were collected; see [STABLE LINK OR DOI].
• This study’s design and hypotheses were preregistered after data had been collected but before analyses were undertaken; see [STABLE LINK OR DOI].
• This study’s analysis plan was preregistered; see [STABLE LINK OR DOI].
• This study was not preregistered.

Academic writing and English language editing services

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.

Submitting supplemental materials

APA can place supplemental materials online, available via the published article in the APA PsycArticles^® database. Please see Supplementing Your Article With Online Material for more details.

Abstract and keywords

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.

References

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/rev0000126

Authored book

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

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/10.1037/0000119-012

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.v8

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

Court decisions

SCOTUS

Lafler v. Cooper, 132 U.S. 1376 (2012). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/10-209.pdf

Federal

Boykin v. Alabama, 395 U.S. 238 (1969)

Hanson v. Phillips, 442 F.3d 789 (2d Cir. 2006)

Charlesworth v. Mack, 727 F. Supp. 1407, 1412 (D. Mass. 1990)

State

People v. Aleman, 43 A.D.3d 756 (1st Dept. 2007) (Intermediary court)

People v. Burwell, 53 N.Y.2d 849 (1981) (NY Court of Appeals)

Policy Document

Protection of Human Subjects, 45 C.F.R. § 46.101 (2009). https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/sites/default/files/ohrp/policy/ohrpregulations.pdf

Figures

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.

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

Permissions

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)

Publication policies

For full details on publication policies, including use of Artificial Intelligence tools, please see APA Publishing Policies.

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

See also APA Journals^® Internet Posting Guidelines.

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).

• Download Full Disclosure of Interests Form (PDF, 41KB)

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.

Ethical Principles

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

In addition, APA Ethical Principles specify 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 adhere to these standards. Specifically, APA expects authors to have their data available throughout the editorial review process and for at least 5 years after the date of publication.

Authors are required to state in writing that they have complied with APA ethical standards in the treatment of their sample, human or animal, or to describe the details of treatment.

• Download Certification of Compliance With APA Ethical Principles Form (PDF, 26KB)

The APA Ethics Office provides the full Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct electronically on its website in HTML, PDF, and Word format. You may also request a copy by emailing or calling the APA Ethics Office (202-336-5930). You may also read "Ethical Principles," December 1992, American Psychologist, Vol. 47, pp. 1597–1611.

Other information

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.

Incoming editor

Tess M.S. Neal, PhD
Iowa State University, United States

Incoming associate editors

Kat Albrecht, JD, PhD
Georgia State University, United States

Jason M. Chin, JD, PhD
College of Law, Australian National University, Australia

Kara N. Moore, PhD
The University of Utah, United States

Tina M. Zottoli, PhD
Montclair State University, United States

Outgoing editor

Michael E. Lamb, PhD
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Associate editors

Nancy K. Steblay, PhD
Augsburg University, United States

Editorial fellows

Andrea Avila, JD, PhD
Oregon State Hospital, United States

Mikaela Spruill, PhD
Stanford University, United States

Editorial board reviewers

Keisha April, PhD
Rutgers University

Neil Brewer, PhD
Flinders University, Australia

Sonja P. Brubacher, PhD
Griffith University, Australia

Deirdre A. Brown, PhD
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Elizabeth Cauffman, PhD
University of California, Irvine, United States

Preeti Chauhan, PhD
John Jay College, City University of New York, and Urban Institute, United States

Kimberley A. Clow, PhD
Ontario Tech University, Canada

Deborah A. Connolly, PhD, LLB
Simon Fraser University, Canada

Graham M. Davies, DSc
University of Leicester, United Kingdom

David DeMatteo, JD, PhD
Drexel University, United States

Shari S. Diamond, JD, PhD
Northwestern University; American Bar Foundation, United States

Mitchell Eisen, PhD
California State University, Los Angeles, United States

Ira M. Ellman, JD
University of California, Berkeley, United States

Phoebe C. Ellsworth, PhD
University of Michigan, United States

Ryan J. Fitzgerald, PhD
Simon Fraser University, Canada

Heather D. Flowe, PhD
University of Birmingham, United Kingdom

Juliet Foster, PhD
King's College London, United Kingdom

Meghann Galloway, JD, PhD
US Senate, United States

Loraine Gelsthorpe, PhD
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Thomas Grisso, PhD
University of Massachusetts Medical School, United States

Bethany Growns, PhD
University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Joseph A. Hamm, PhD, MLS
Michigan State University, United States

Emily Haney-Caron, JD, PhD
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, United States

Wendy P. Heath, PhD
Rider University, United States

Kirk Heilbrun, PhD
Drexel University, United States

Irit Hershkowitz, PhD
University of Haifa, Israel

Eric S. Janus, JD
Mitchell Hamline School of Law, United States

Elizabeth L. Jeglic, PhD
John Jay College, City University of New York, United States

Christopher E. Kelly, PhD
Saint Joseph’s University, United States

Lauren E. Kois, PhD
University of Virginia, United States

Margaret Bull Kovera, PhD
John Jay College, City University of New York, United States

Daniel A. Krauss, JD, PhD
Claremont McKenna College, United States

Kamala London, PhD
University of Toledo, United States

Kirk Luther, PhD
Carleton University, Canada

Thomas D. Lyon, PhD
University of Southern California, United States

Evelyn Maeder, PhD, MLS
Carleton University, Canada

Lindsay C. Malloy, PhD
Ontario Tech University, Canada

Andrew W. Meisler, PhD
VA Connecticut Healthcare System, Yale University School of Medicine, & University of Connecticut School of Medicine, United States

Christian A. Meissner, PhD
Iowa State University, United States

Kristin A. Moore, PhD
Child Trends, Washington DC, United States

Daniel C. Murrie, PhD
University of Virginia, United States

Anthony D. Perillo, PhD
University of New Mexico, United States

Debra A. Poole, PhD
Central Michigan University, United States

Jed S. Rakoff, JD
Senior U.S. District Judge, Southern District of New York, United States

Allison D. Redlich, PhD
George Mason University, United States

Corine de Ruiter, PhD
Maastricht University, The Netherlands

Karen L. Salekin, PhD
The University of Alabama, United States

Christopher Slobogin, JD, LLM
Vanderbilt University Law School, United States

Laura Smalarz, PhD
Arizona State University, United States

Cheryl A. Thomas, PhD
University College London, United Kingdom

Melanie A. Thornton, PhD
Arvada Police Department, United States

Colin G. Tredoux, PhD
University of Cape Town, South Africa

Sander van der Linden, PhD
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

Taeko Wachi, PhD
National Research Institute of Police Science, Japan

Gary L. Wells, PhD
Iowa State University, United States

Miko M. Wilford, PhD
Iowa State University, United States

Jennifer L. Woolard, PhD
Georgetown University, United States

Susan Yamamoto, PhD
University of Regina

Abstracting and indexing services providing coverage of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law^®

• Cabell's Directory of Publishing Opportunities in Psychology
• Current Abstracts
• Current Contents: Social & Behavioral Sciences
• Journal Citations Report: Social Sciences Edition
• LexisNexis
• OCLC
• APA PsycInfo
• PsycLine
• SafetyLit
• SCOPUS
• Social Sciences Citation Index
• TOC Premier
• Westlaw

• Psycho-Legal Researchers' Impact on Policies and Legal Practices

  Special issue of the APA journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 23, No. 4, November 2017. The articles focus on topics about which psychology has made substantial contributions to policy and/or law, as well as on topics where psychological scientists and legal scholars have so far failed to shape policy and practice, despite solid relevant research.

• Mental Health Courts

  Special issue of the APA journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 2005. The articles discuss issues in mental health courts, defining the concept, describing the reasons for its inception, and noting the controversies it has provoked.

Transparency and Openness Promotion

APA endorses the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines by a community working group in conjunction with the Center for Open Science (Nosek et al. 2015). The TOP Guidelines cover eight fundamental aspects of research planning and reporting that can be followed by journals and authors at three levels of compliance.

For example:

• Level 1: Disclosure—The article must disclose whether or not the materials are posted to a trusted repository.
• Level 2: Requirement—The article must share materials via a trusted repository when legally and ethically permitted (or disclose the legal and/or ethical restriction when not permitted).
• Level 3: Verification—A third party must verify that the standard is met.

Empirical research, including meta-analyses, submitted to Psychology, Public Policy, and Law must, at a minimum, meet Level 2 (Requirement) for all eight aspects of research planning and reporting, except for replication. Authors should include a subsection in their methods description titled “Transparency and Openness.” This subsection should detail the efforts the authors have made to comply with the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines.

The list below summarizes the minimal TOP requirements of the journal. Please refer to the Center for Open Science TOP guidelines for details, and contact the editor (Michael E. Lamb, PhD) with any further questions. APA recommends sharing data, materials, and code via trusted repositories (e.g., APA’s repository on the Open Science Framework (OSF)). Trusted repositories adhere to policies that make data discoverable, accessible, usable, and preserved for the long term. Trusted repositories also assign unique and persistent identifiers.

We encourage investigators to preregister their studies and analysis plans prior to conducting their research. There are many available preregistration forms (e.g., the APA Preregistration for Quantitative Research in Psychology template, ClininalTrials.gov, or other preregistration templates available via OSF). Completed preregistration forms should be posted on a publicly accessible registry system (e.g., OSF, ClinicalTrials.gov, or other trial registries in the WHO Registry Network).

A list of participating journals is also available from APA.

The following list presents the eight fundamental aspects of research planning and reporting, the TOP level required by Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, and a brief description of the journal's policy.

• Citation: Level 2, Requirement—All data, program code, and other methods developed by others must be cited in the text and listed in the References section.
• Data Transparency: Level 2, Requirement—Article states whether the raw and/or processed data on which study conclusions are based are posted to a trusted repository and either how to access them or the legal or ethical reasons why they are not available.
• Analytic Methods (Code) Transparency: Level 2, Requirement—Article states whether computer code or syntax needed to reproduce analyses in an article is posted to a trusted repository and either how to access it or the legal or ethical reasons why it is not available.
• Research Materials Transparency: Level 2, Requirement—Article states whether materials described in the method section are posted to a trusted repository and either how to access them or the legal or ethical reasons why they are not available.
• Design and Analysis Transparency (Reporting Standards): Level 2, Requirement—Article must comply with APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS-Quant, JARS-Qual, and/or MARS). Manuscripts must also report 1) how the sample size was determined, 2) all data exclusions, 3) all manipulations, and 4) all study measures. See Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn (2012) for details.
• Study Preregistration: Level 2, Requirement—Article states whether the study design and (if applicable) hypotheses of any of the work reported was preregistered and, if so, how to access it. Access to the preregistration should be available at submission. Authors must submit a masked copy via stable link or supplemental material.
• Analysis Plan Preregistration: Level 2, Requirement—Article states whether any of the work reported preregistered an analysis plan and, if so, how to access it. Access to the preregistration must be available at submission. Authors should submit a masked copy via stable link or supplemental material.
• Replication: Level 1, Disclosure—The journal publishes replications.

Other open science initiatives

• Open Science badges: Not offered
• Public significance statements: Not offered
• Author contribution statements using CRediT: Required
• Registered Reports: Not published
• Replications: Published

Explore open science at APA .

Inclusive study designs

• Collaborative research models
• Diverse samples

Definitions and further details on inclusive study designs are available on the Journals EDI homepage.

Inclusive reporting standards

• Bias-free language and community-driven language guidelines (recommended)
• Author contribution roles using CRediT (required)
• Data sharing and data availability statements (required)
• Participant sample descriptions (required)

More information on this journal’s reporting standards is listed under the submission guidelines tab.

Pathways to authorship and editorship

Editorial fellowships

Editorial fellowships help early-career psychologists gain firsthand experience in scholarly publishing and editorial leadership roles. This journal offers an editorial fellowship program for early-career psychologists from historically excluded communities.

Other EDI offerings

ORCID reviewer recognition

Open Research and Contributor ID (ORCID) Reviewer Recognition provides a visible and verifiable way for journals to publicly credit reviewers without compromising the confidentiality of the peer-review process. This journal has implemented the ORCID Reviewer Recognition feature in Editorial Manager, meaning that reviewers can be recognized for their contributions to the peer-review process.

Masked peer review

This journal offers masked peer review (where both the authors’ and reviewers’ identities are not known to the other). Research has shown that masked peer review can help reduce implicit bias against traditionally female names or early-career scientists with smaller publication records (Budden et al., 2008; Darling, 2015).

Announcements

• Call for editor nominations
• Call for editorial fellowship nominations
• New editor appointed

Editorial

• Psychology, Public Policy, and Law Adopts Further Open Science Practices and Refreshes Its Commitment to Generalizable Empirical Research (PDF, 69KB)
  Michael E. Lamb, Nancy K. Steblay, and Tess M. S. Neal, August 2021

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