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.

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

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

To submit to the editorial office of Lisa K. Kearney, 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

Authors should keep a copy of the manuscript to guard against loss. Please provide full contact information—authors' addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and fax numbers—for use by the editorial office and later by the production office.

General correspondence may be directed to the editorial officeopens in new window.

All manuscripts must include on separate pages:

• a title page with the author's name and affiliation at the time the research was done
• author notes, which include acknowledgments of support, changes of affiliation since the research was done, and the name and address of the author to whom correspondence should be sent
• an abstract containing a maximum of 250 words, followed, below it, by up to five keywords or brief phrases to assist in indexing

Number all pages serially, including these pages, the text, references, acknowledgments, tables, and figure captions.

Include in a cover letter assurances that the manuscript is not under review elsewhere and that the primary data have not been published previously nor accepted for publication.

Manuscripts will be subject to masked review.

Authors' names and affiliations should appear only on the separate title page and separate author footnotes page if any; authors should not be identified anywhere else in the manuscript. Authors should make every effort to see that the manuscript itself contains no clues to their identities. If a study has been pre-registered, please create and add an anonymized link to the repository for peer review.

It is acceptable for authors to suggest individuals qualified to do the reviewing.

This journal is participating in the STM Peer Review Taxonomy Pilot. This pilot aims to identify and standardize definitions and terminologyopens in new window in peer review practices across publishers to help make the peer review process for articles and journals more transparent, and enable the community to better assess and compare peer review practices between different journals. More information is available onlineopens in new window.

The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:

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

If submitting a brief report, the manuscript should be prepared in line with the guidelines for full-length articles, yet should not exceed 15 pages.

Psychological Services will consider commentaries on articles previously published in this journal. Comments will be sent out for external review and must meet a high threshold for publication.

Comments will be evaluated based on how accurately and fairly they represent the target article, the importance of the comment in providing a more comprehensive understanding of the target article, and the clarity, conciseness, and tone of the writing. External reviewers will include individuals not associated with the target article as well as the corresponding author of the target article.

Only brief comments will be considered. A brief comment is written in response to a single article previously published in Psychological Services. The primary purpose is to provide a meaningful insight, concern, alternative interpretation, clarification, or critical analysis. The comment should provide a richer and more comprehensive understanding of a methodological, conceptual, or interpretation issue that significantly adds to the literature.

Brief comments should not exceed 265 lines of text including references. This limit does not include the title page, abstract, or author notes.

The title of a brief comment should include a subtitle reflecting the actual title and year of publication of the article that engendered the comment. For example— "The importance of focusing on external validity: A brief comment on Testing the Efficacy of Two Differing Types of Stress Management Interventions for the Treatment of Essential Hypertension (Jones & Smith, 2012)."

Brief comments must be submitted in a timely manner, no later than six months after publication of the original article.

Upon acceptance of a brief comment, the author(s) of the original paper would be invited to submit a response; if the authors' response is acceptable, both the brief comment and response would be published together. Such responses to a brief comment also should not exceed 265 lines of text including references.

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.

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.

Psychological Services is the journal of Division 18 of APA, Psychologists in Public Service. As such, it publishes high-quality data-based articles on the broad range of psychological services delivered in organized care settings. Organized care settings refer to jails, prisons, courts, Indian Health Service, the military, Department of Veterans Affairs, public university clinics, training hospitals, state and community mental health hospitals, and other public service settings. The journal’s mission reflects Division 18’s stance that public service psychologists seek to advance equity through challenging historical structures that have resulted in systemic marginalization and strive to facilitate the empowerment of all people to participate fully in all dimensions of civic, economic, and social life. Public service psychologists work directly and/or indirectly with underserved and marginalized communities or specialized populations who may not be best served elsewhere and therefore Psychological Services publishes articles that address the needs of these populations.

As a journal focused on services delivered in organized care settings, Psychological Services is committed to supporting the mission of Division 18 to elevate equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) by adhering to practices which will broaden the discussion of these issues in its published content as well as addressing systemic processes that have historically limited opportunities of marginalized communities to contribute to the psychology literature. The editorial team of Psychological Services strives to publish scholarship that furthers effective and equitable community prevention and clinical intervention in the public sector, addresses access to care and health care disparities among groups that have traditionally been underserved, and speaks to the range of needs of the populations participating in psychological services in public settings. To this end, it is a goal to facilitate the empowerment of all people engaged in care in public health settings to participate fully in all dimensions of civic, economic, and social life.

To achieve these goals, Psychological Services welcomes and encourages submissions from scholars representing the full range of identities in our profession and seeks to engage an editorial team, editorial board members, and manuscript reviewers who are similarly representative of diverse backgrounds and perspectives In addition to being knowledgeable and capable of evaluating research on public sector psychology in an equitable fashion. This includes awareness of individual and group biases and the impacts of historical and systemic limitations on full participation in psychological science in order to support the publication of manuscripts with a range of methodologies and types of evidence.

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.

As part of the submission of any article to Psychological Services, authors should include a public significance statement of 1-3 sentences (approximately 30-70 words in length) beneath the abstract. This statement is to provide a brief summary of the paper's significance for a broad audience, including policy makers, public media, and the public. It should also be written for the audience of our journal, which includes psychologists in public sector settings, serving as clinicians, administrators, and/or researchers.

Within the statement, please include the main findings of your paper in approachable language and describe how the findings are important to policy makers, public media, psychologists in public sector settings, and the public. Avoid the use of psychological jargon and technical language and make sure the statement is understandable without the context of the abstract, as these statements may be utilized separately in social media platforms. The statement should not be a sentence or two taken directly out of the submitted manuscript but should be a statement which is informative and useful for any reader.

When a paper is published, the public significance statement will be placed in a box beneath the abstract and will be placed in the table of contents and the journal's web page. Additional guidance on the development of such statements is available in the Guidance for Translational Abstracts and Public Significance Statements.

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.