Submission guidelines

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

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

Beginning April 2012, the completion of the Author Checklist (PDF, 36KB)opens in new window that signifies that authors have read this material and agree to adhere to the guidelines is now required. The checklist should follow the cover letter as part of the submission, or it can also be inserted into the manuscript file itself. Submissions lacking the checklist will be returned to the author as incomplete.

For masked review, 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).

Submit manuscripts electronically through the Manuscript Submission Portal (.doc/.docx or .rtf 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). APA Style and Grammar Guidelines for the 7^th edition are available.

Submit Manuscriptopens in new window

Submissions mailed to the editorial office will not be processed.

General correspondence may be directed to Kelly E. Dunn, editor.

In addition to complete addresses and phone numbers, please supply email addresses and fax numbers for all authors for potential use by the editorial office and, later, by the production office.

Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology^® publishes six types of manuscripts:

• original research reports (up to 4,500 words, excluding references)
• brief communications (up to 3,000 words, excluding references; no more than 2 total figures or tables)
• perspectives (up to 2,000 words, excluding references; no more than 2 total figures or tables)
• case reports (no more than 2,000 words, excluding references; only 1 figure or table)
• systematic reviews or meta-analyses (up to 5,000 words, excluding references)
• narrative or scoping reviews (up to 5,000 words, excluding references)

Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology does not accept comments, commentaries, or letters to the editor.

In recognition of the reality that institutional spam filters may capture files from APA and the Editorial Manager, please take the following steps to facilitate communication with our editorial office:

• Provide an alternative email address which we can use to contact you in the event of technical difficulties with email communication using your primary address
• Add "apa.org" to your list of "safe" addresses and consider asking your IT administrators to add it to their "white list"
• Contact Peer Review Coordinator Lorie Van Olstopens in new window if you do not receive confirmation of your submission within three business days or an editorial decision letter within three months

Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology is now using a software system to screen submitted content for similarity with other published content. The system compares the initial version of each submitted manuscript against a database of 40+ million scholarly documents, 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).

Each issue of Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology will honor one manuscript as the Editor’s Choice.

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 AEs’ decision letters will be used as data for selection.

• Diversity: Does the study contribute to understanding/shedding new light on clinical understanding/approaches for 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?
• Methodological rigor: Do the methods meet the highest level of methodological rigor considered gold standard for the particular field of study?
• Clinical significance/impact: Does the study have significant and direct clinical implications that can change/improve/increase services and/or client outcomes?

When the editor prepares the table of contents each month, the editor will identify the article that they believe best meets the criteria. The editor will then ask for the AEs’ approval to move forward with the selected article. Approval must come from the majority (over 50%) of the AEs.

AEs who wish to nominate an article for Editor’s Choice are free to do so. The editor will consider this nomination in their selection review process.

To help with the review process, authors should provide up to five scientists who are qualified to review their manuscript without bias or conflict of interest. Please provide prospective reviewers' names, affiliations, academic rank, email address, complete mailing address, and phone number in the cover letter. Submissions lacking reviewer recommendations will be returned to the author as incomplete.

Include the corresponding author's email and mailing addresses; phone and fax numbers; and the names, degrees, and affiliations of all authors, as well as the number of figures and tables in the manuscript.

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.

Authors submitting manuscripts to the journal Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology are now required to provide 2–3 brief sentences regarding the relevance or public health significance of their study or review described in their manuscript. This description should be included within the manuscript on the abstract/keywords page.

The public significance statement (similar to the Relevance section of NIH grant submissions) summarizes the significance of the study's findings for a public audience in one to three sentences (approximately 30-70 words long). It should be written in language that is easily understood by both professionals and members of the lay public. This statement supports efforts to increase dissemination and usage of research findings by larger and more diverse audiences.

When an accepted paper is published, these sentences will be boxed beneath the abstract for easy accessibility. All such descriptions will also be published as part of the table of contents, as well as on the journal's web page. This new policy is in keeping with efforts to increase dissemination and usage by larger and diverse audiences.

When writing the public significance statement, consider the following recommendations:

• Answer the following questions: What did the study find? Why are these findings important to the audience you are trying to reach (e.g., practitioners, policy makers, news media, or other parties)?
• Write the statement in language that is easily understood by people outside of your field. Avoid jargon or overly technical language. Avoid using acronyms in the statement, and if you do use them, define them.
• Ensure that the statement adequately represents the study's implications if read separately, without the abstract. For example, specifically refer to "patients with depression" rather than "these patients" or "behavioral interventions for bullying" rather than "these interventions."

Below are several public significance statements that appeared in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, the first APA journal to require public significance statements as a complement to the abstract. These examples are meant to aid you, the author, in writing your own statements; however, keep in mind that you may make different choices depending on factors such as the topic of the study, specific secondary audiences of the journal, and personal preferences and writing style.

Example 1: "This study strongly suggests that (description of a given psychosocial treatment) is an effective treatment for anxiety, but only if it is of mild to moderate severity. For persons with severe anxiety, additional treatments may be necessary."

Example 2: "Defining and Characterizing Differences in College Alcohol Intervention Efficacy: A Growth Mixture Modeling Application," by Henson, Pearson, and Carey (2015) https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038897

This study suggests that there are distinct subgroups of college students defined by how they respond to alcohol intervention and that interventions need to target freshmen men and those who play drinking games. Although most students initially respond to interventions, most also show decay over the next 12 months, which suggests that we need to determine ways of improving the long-term effects of alcohol interventions.

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. 

Alternatively, or in addition to JARS, authors may use the “21-word statement,” for which manuscripts must 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.

Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology requires the use of the CONSORT reporting standards (i.e., a checklist and flow diagram) for any study identified as a randomized clinical trial, consistent with the policy established by the Publications and Communications Board of the American Psychological Association. CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) offers a standard way to improve the quality of such reports and to ensure that readers have the information necessary to evaluate the quality of a clinical trial.

Manuscripts that are identified/classified as randomized clinical trials are required to include a flow diagram of the progress through the phases of the trial and a checklist that identifies where in the manuscript the various criteria are addressed. (The checklist should be placed in an Appendix of the manuscript for review purposes.) When a study is not fully consistent with the CONSORT statement, the limitations should be acknowledged and discussed in the text of the manuscript.

For follow-up studies of previously published clinical trials, authors should submit a flow diagram of the progress through the phases of the trial and follow-up. The above checklist information should be completed to the extent possible, especially for the results and discussion sections of the manuscript.

Visit the CONSORT Statement Web siteopens in new window for more details and resources.

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.

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. 2015opens in new window). Empirical research, including meta-analyses, submitted to Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology must at least meet the “disclosure” level for all eight aspects of research planning and reporting and the "requirement" level for data citation and design and analysis transparency. Authors should include a subsection in the method section titled “Transparency and Openness.” This subsection should detail the efforts the authors have made to comply with the TOP guidelines. For example:

• We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions (if any), all manipulations, and all measures in the study, and we follow JARS (Applebaum, et al., 2018). All data, analysis code, and research materials are available at [stable link to permanent repository]. Data were analyzed using R, version 4.0.0 (R Core Team, 2020) and the package ggplot, version 3.2.1 (Wickham, 2016). This study’s design and its analysis were not pre-registered.

Authors must state whether data and study materials are posted to a trusted repository and, if so, how to access them. 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 end of the method section, specify whether and where the data and material will be available or include a statement noting that they are not available. 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.

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 available by emailing the corresponding author.
• 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].

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 analysis plans prior to conducting their 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 Psychology (Bosnjak et al., 2022).

Articles must state whether or not any work was preregistered and, if so, where to access the preregistration. If any aspect of the study is preregistered, include the registry link in the method section.

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.

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.

We recognize that there may be good reasons to change a study or analysis plan after it has been preregistered, and thus encourage authors to do so when appropriate so long as all changes are clearly and transparently disclosed in the manuscript.

Authors are now required to provide a Disclosures and Acknowledgements section. This section should be included on a separate page after the Abstract, as separate paragraphs for each of the points (do not number or provide headers). This section will be automatically incorporated into the online submission system and if the paper is accepted, will appear in the published journal article.

First, authors should state all sources of financial support for the conduct of the research (e.g., This research was supported by NIDA grant X). 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.

Second, a contributors statement should be included indicating that all authors contributed in a significant way to the manuscript and that all authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

Third, all authors are expected to provide a conflict of interest statement disclosing any real or potential conflict(s) of interest, including financial, personal, or other relationships with other organizations or pharmaceutical/biomedical 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.

Fourth, authors are encouraged to acknowledge the assistance or contribution of others in the endeavors of the research.

Fifth, authors who have posted their manuscripts to preprint archives prior to submission should include a link to the preprint.

Authors may suggest up to five scientists who are qualified to review their manuscript without bias or conflict of interest. Send prospective reviewers' names, affiliations, academic rank, email address, complete mailing address, and phone number in your cover letter.

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).

Articles about nonhuman animals should specify animals’ species as well as their sex; authors should not refer to nonhuman animals in terms of the human construct gender.

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

If your manuscript was mask reviewed, please ensure that the final version for production includes a byline and full author note for typesetting.

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

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

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. 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Examples of basic reference formats:

Journal article

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

Authored book

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

Chapter in an edited book

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

Data set citation

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

Software/Code citation

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

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

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

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

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

Resolution 

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

Line weights 

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

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

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

Color figure fees

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

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

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

To construct your equations with MathType or Equation Editor 3.0:

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

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

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

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

In online supplemental material

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

In the text of the article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

APA’s current policies on generative AI include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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