Submission guidelines

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.

Law and Human Behavior^® uses a software system to screen submissions for similarity with other published content. The system compares each submission against a database of 25+ million scholarly publications and generates a similarity report for the editorial team.

Please submit manuscripts electronically through the Manuscript Submission Portal in Microsoft Word (.docx) 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.

Submit Manuscriptopens in new window

David DeMatteo, JD, PhD, ABPP (Forensic)
Drexel University, United States
Email

The corresponding author must provide a complete email address because the editorial office handles all correspondence electronically.

Law and Human Behavior uses masked review for all submissions. The cover letter should include all authors’ names and institutional affiliations.

Authors should not include any personal information (name, affiliation, etc.) anywhere in the manuscript. They should mask any clues to their 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).

This journal’s peer review process as defined by the NISO Peer Review Taxonomy is: 

• Identity transparency: Double anonymized
• Reviewer interacts with: Editor
• Review information published: None

Prepare manuscripts according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association using the 7th 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.

Double-space all copy. Other formatting instructions, as well as instructions on preparing tables, figures, references, metrics, and abstracts, appear in the Manual. Instructions regarding the preparation of display equations, computer code, and tables appear at the end of these submission instructions.

Additional guidance on APA Style is available on the APA Style websiteopens in new window.

Authors who think that their submission may benefit from additional academic writing or language editing should 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 required for publication in an APA journal and does not guarantee selection for peer review, manuscript acceptance, or preference for publication.

Articles are eligible for open science badges recognizing publicly available data, materials, and/or preregistered plans and analyses. These badges are awarded on a self-disclosure basis.

At submission, authors must confirm that criteria have been fulfilled in a signed badge disclosure form (PDF, 33KB)opens in new window that must be submitted as supplemental material. If the editorial team confirms that all criteria have been met, the form will then be published with the article as supplemental material.

Authors should also note their eligibility for the badge(s) in the cover letter.

For all badges, items must be made available on an open-access repository with a persistent identifier in a format that is time-stamped, immutable, and permanent. For the preregistered badge, this is an institutional registration system.

Data and materials must be made available under an open license allowing others to copy, share, and use the data, with attribution and copyright as applicable.

Open Data:
All data necessary to reproduce the reported results that are digitally shareable are made publicly available. Information necessary for replication (e.g., codebooks or metadata) must be included.

Open Data; Protected Access:
A Protected Access (PA) notation may be added to open data badges if sensitive, personal data are available only from an approved third-party repository that manages access to data to qualified researchers through a documented process. To be eligible for an open data badge with such a notation, the repository must publicly describe the steps necessary to obtain the data and detailed data documentation (e.g. variable names and allowed values) must be made available publicly. Manuscripts with data deposited in ICPSR's database are eligible for this badge.

Open Materials:
All materials necessary to reproduce the reported results that are digitally shareable, along with descriptions of non-digital materials necessary for replication, are made publicly available.

Preregistered:
At least one study's design has been preregistered with descriptions of (a) the research design and study materials, including the planned sample size; (b) the motivating research question or hypothesis; (c) the outcome variable(s); and (d) the predictor variables, including controls, covariates, and independent variables. Results must be fully disclosed. As long as they are distinguished from other results in the article, results from analyses that were not preregistered may be reported in the article.

Preregistered+Analysis Plan:
At least one study's design has been preregistered along with an analysis plan for the research — and results are recorded according to that plan.

Note that it may not be possible to preregister a study or to share data and materials. Applying for open science badges is optional.

On page two, all manuscripts must include a structured abstract (300 words maximum) that has each of the following sections:

• Objective(s): A concise statement of the issue, problem, or research question(s) under examination.
• Hypotheses: Main predictions or expected outcomes.
• Method: A description of participants (number and pertinent characteristics such as age, sex, ethnic or racial group) and essential features of method including research design, materials, outcome measures, and procedures.
• Results: Key findings including effect size estimates and confidence intervals.
• Conclusions: Inferences based on results and implications for theory, research, and practice.

Please supply three to five keywords after the abstract. Carefully consider keywords that will help a reader to find and retrieve your article.

Authors must provide 2–3 brief sentences regarding the public significance of their study, review, or other type of manuscript. This statement will appear at the end of the Abstract both online and in print, and augments the Abstract content. There is no need for authors to restate what they did and found. Instead they should describe the theoretical and practical implications of their work in language a lay audience will understand. These statements are intended to increase dissemination and use by larger, more diverse audiences. Additional guidance on Public Significance Statements can be found online.

Examples of Public Significance Statements include

• “This study links police officers’ concerns with appearing racist when interacting with community members to diminished confidence in their legitimate authority and greater support for coercive policing. In this respect, negative stereotypes of police officers can potentially undermine officer morale and public safety.”
• “Risk assessment instruments and algorithms are playing an increasing role in decision making about people involved in the justice system. In this experiment, providing judges with risk assessment information about a defendant increased the severity of their sentences for relatively poor—but not affluent—defendants. It may be necessary to provide guidelines and training to help judges understand their intuitive biases and more effectively and fairly incorporate risk assessment into decision making about defendants.”
• “Child forensic interviewers often want, find helpful, and have access to pre-interview information about the child, alleged abuse, and disclosure. This information might help interviewers facilitate conversations with reluctant children and generate alternative hypotheses, but it also has the potential to compromise the accuracy of children’s reports. Future research should systematically examine the effects of pre-interview information on child forensic interviews to ensure accurate, legally-defensible reports from alleged child victims.”

To be maximally useful, these statements of public significance should not simply be sentences lifted directly from the manuscript. They should provide a bottom-line, take-home message that is accurate and easily understood. In addition, they should be able to be translated into media-appropriate statements for use in press releases and on social media. The editorial team will carefully review all Public Significance Statements to make sure they meet these standards prior to final acceptance and publication.

In a subsection of the discussion titled “Constraints on generality,” authors are encouraged to include a detailed discussion of the limits on generality (see Simons et al., 2017). In this section, authors should detail grounds for concluding why the results are, may, or may not be specific to the characteristics of the participants. They should address limits on generality not only for participants but for materials, procedures, and context. Authors should also specify which methods they think could be varied without affecting the result and which should remain constant. Researchers using qualitative methodologies should specify if/how/why they are not extrapolating and generalizing from their data.  

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. 

Authors should state all sources of financial support for the conduct of the research (e.g., This research was supported by Award XX from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver Institute of Child Health and Human Development) in the author note. If the funding source was involved in any other aspects of the research (e.g., study design, analysis, interpretation, writing), then clearly state the role. If the funding source had no other involvement other than financial support, then simply state that the funding source had no other role other than financial support.

Authors should also provide a conflict of interest statement in the author note disclosing any real or potentially perceived conflict(s) of interest, including financial, personal, or other relationships with other organizations or companies that may inappropriately impact or influence the research and interpretation of the findings. If there are no conflicts of interest, this should be clearly stated.

Authors should provide a data availability statement indicating whether the data, methods used in the analysis, code, and materials used to conduct the research will be made available to any researcher for purposes of reproducing the results or replicating the procedure. In both the author note and at the end of the method section, either specify where that material will be available or note the ethical or legal reasons for not doing so.

Preregistration of studies and analysis plans can be useful for distinguishing confirmatory and exploratory analyses. We encourage researchers to preregister their studies and analysis plans prior to conducting the research (e.g., Open Science Frameworkopens in new window, ClinicalTrials.govopens in new window). If any aspect of the study is preregistered, include the registry link in the author note.

Authors who have posted their manuscripts to preprint archives, such as PsyArXiv, prior to submission should include a link to the preprint in the author note.

Law and Human Behavior offers a reviewer mentorship program where graduate students and early career professionals are paired with a mentor from the editorial board and are given the opportunity to learn more about the peer review process and the structure of a quality article review. For more information, please refer to:

McAuliff, B. D., Hunt, J. S., Levett, L. M., Zelechoski, A. D., Scherr, K. C., & DeMatteo, D. (2019). Taking the next steps: Promoting open science and expanding diversity in Law and Human Behavior [Editorial]. Law and Human Behavior, 43(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000322

The method section of each manuscript must contain a detailed description of the study participants, including (but not limited to) the following:

• age
• sex
• gender
• ethnicity
• nativity or immigration history (as appropriate)
• SES (as appropriate)
• clinical diagnoses and comorbidities (as appropriate)
• any other relevant demographics (e.g., sexual orientation)

The method section also must include a statement describing how informed consent was obtained from the participants (or their parents/guardians), including for secondary use of data if applicable, and indicate that the study was conducted in compliance with an appropriate Institutional Review Board (masked for peer-review).

In the method section or supplemental materials, authors should report:

• all levels of all independent variables for all predictors or manipulations relevant to the target research question, whether successful or failed;
• all dependent variables or measures collected for the target research question;
• the total number of excluded observations and the reasons for making those exclusions; and
• the exact p values, effect sizes, and 95% confidence intervals, or an explanation of why this was not possible.

Authors may use StatCheckopens in new window to detect inconsistencies in the reporting of inferential statistics.

Consistent with APA’s Journal Article Reporting Standards, Law and Human Behavior requires authors to report estimates related to the reliability of measurement, including interrater reliability for subjectively scored measures and ratings. Ideally, coders are masked to hypotheses, experimental condition, or any other information that could result in systematic bias. In addition, authors are expected to compute and report reliability statistics that take into account chance agreement (e.g., Cohen’s kappa, intraclass correlation coefficient). A brief description of how coders were trained and how discrepancies in coding were resolved should be included. The journal expects double coding, but understands that it is not necessary or appropriate with all qualitative methodologies or coding schemes.

In addition to full-length research papers reporting novel findings, the journal publishes registered reports, negative findings, and replications, regardless of result. Preregistration of replication studies is strongly recommended, but not required.

Registered reports require a two-step review process. The first step is the submission of the registration manuscript. This is a partial manuscript that includes:

• description of key research questions and background literature;
• method section including experimental design, independent and dependent variables, materials, and procedure;
• a priori statistical power analysis using an effect size based on the literature (preferably a meta-analysis)
• data analysis plan including a full description of all planned comparisons; and
• pilot data (if applicable).

The partial manuscript will be reviewed for rigor and methodological approach. If accepted, this amounts to provisional acceptance of the full report regardless of the study’s outcomes. The second step of the process will consist of reviewing the full manuscript for adherence to the registered design (authors must report any deviations in the full manuscript).

Registered report instructions (PDF, 103KB)opens in new window

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.

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

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; and
• 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. 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

Authors of manuscripts rejected without review may appeal the decision to the editor-in-chief, requesting a reconsideration of the decision. If that appeal is rejected but the author believes the decision is inappropriate, the author may appeal to the Executive Committeeopens in new window of the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS), APA Division 41.

An author wishing to appeal a manuscript should direct the editorial appeal first to the associate editor who made the rejection. If the associate editor declines to further consider the manuscript, or the associate editor does a second review of the manuscript and still rejects it, the author may appeal next to the editor-in-chief. If the editor-in-chief believes the appeal has merit, the manuscript may be reassigned to a new associate editor for independent re-review. If the editor-in-chief rejects the appeal, the author may request that the appeal and the manuscript be sent to the Executive Committeeopens in new window of the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS), APA Division 41.

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.