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.

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 and generates a similarity report for editorial review upon submission.

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).

Upon submission, author(s) will be asked to affirm that they have complied with APA policy regarding the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in scholarly materials. Please review the policy and ensure that you have complied prior to submission.

To submit to the editorial office of Tess M.S. Neal, please submit manuscripts electronically through the Manuscript Submission Portal in Microsoft Word or Open Office format.

Submit Manuscriptopens in new window

Tess M.S. Neal
Iowa State University
Department of Psychology
1347 Lagomarcino Hall
901 Stange Road
Ames, IA 50011

General correspondence should be directed to the editoropens in new window.

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.

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.

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 Projectopens in new window).

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.

Prior to submission, please carefully read and follow the open science guidelines as detailed below. Manuscripts that do not respond to the open science submission guidelines and policies of the journal will be returned without review.

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law now requires compliance with the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines. As such, we are working hard to make as much of (ideally all) the data and materials that are part of articles published in this journal available.

At the beginning of the method section, papers should include a section called “Transparency and Openness,” where author(s) specify whether and where the data, material, codebook, and analytic code are available or note the legal or ethical reasons for not doing so. Even if data cannot be made publicly available, analytic code, codebook, and materials can be made accessible, or the legal or ethical reasons it cannot be can be made clear. There should be a clear statement about whether or not any work was preregistered and, if so, where to access the preregistration. For peer review purposes, the link(s) to data, materials, code, and preregistration should be made “blind”—this pageopens in new window explains how to do so for each link. If the paper is published, the view-only link can be easily replaced with a public link. Note that once an article is accepted, all supplemental material is considered part of the journal's archival record and cannot be removed or altered (alteration with transparent description and both original and corrected files made available is permissible). Further details are provided below.

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 repositoryopens in new window on the Open Science Framework (OSF), or authors can access a full list of other recommended repositoriesopens in new window. 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 beginning 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.

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 21-word statement in the Transparency and Openness section of the paper:

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

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., OSFopens in new window, 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 Psychologyopens in new window (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.

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.

Authors should review 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 on 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. 

Authors should also review the new Journal Article Reporting Standards for Race, Ethnicity, and Culture (JARS–REC). Meant for all authors, regardless of research topic, JARS–REC include standards for all stages of research and manuscript writing, on, for example: 

• Using the title, abstract, and keywords to identify race and ethnicity of participants without signaling Whiteness as default; 
• Discussing the applicability of the theoretical approach to populations for which it was not developed; 
• Addressing limits on generality, recognizing that generalizability is always constrained and is not the primary purpose of every study; and 
• Considering whether findings could be used or misused to cause harm. 

For more, see the Guidance for Authors sections of the table (PDF, 184KB)opens in new window. 

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

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.

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

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.

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 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. We also request that the runnable source code be included on the Open Science Frameworkopens in new window project page associated with your paper. Supplemental files will be linked to the article, but there is no metadata associated with them in our system (which is why we encourage authors to share on an Open Science Framework page linked to their project). 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.

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

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