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.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General publishes Registered Reports (RRs). 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 hypotheses, rationale for the study, experimental design, and methods. The partial manuscript will be reviewed for significance and methodological approach.

If the partial manuscript is accepted, this amounts to provisional acceptance of the full report regardless of the outcome of the study. The full manuscript will be reviewed for adherence to the preregistered design.

To submit to the editorial office of Sarah Brown-Schmidt, please submit manuscripts electronically through the Manuscript Submission Portal.

Prepare manuscripts according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association using the 7^th edition. The text should be double-spaced with a minimum of 10-point font. 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. Manuscripts that do not follow the Guidelines for font, spacing, and other Style matters may be returned to the authors.

Please note that the author affiliation in the byline identifies where the author(s) worked (or studied) when the work was conducted. Include a dual affiliation only if two institutions contributed substantial support to the study. If the affiliation has changed since the work was completed, give the current affiliation in the author note (see section 2.6 of the Publication Manual). Affiliation and contact information are not updated postpublication.

Submit Manuscriptopens in new window

The file format should be Microsoft Word Format (.doc or .docx), or LaTex (.tex) as a zip file with an accompanied Portable Document Format (.pdf) of the manuscript file.

To facilitate readability, please include tables, figures, and figure legends as appropriate in the manuscript close to where they would appear in the published article. Note however that when a paper is accepted, a file will need to be promptly submitted that must exactly copy, in all respects and in a single Word file, the complete APA-style printed version of the manuscript.

In a cover letter, provide the following information:

• a brief paragraph summarizing how the work might be of broad, general interest or appeal to more than one traditional area of psychology;
• a list of 3–5 appropriate reviewers with no conflict of interest, explaining what their relevant expertise is;
• a list of non-preferred reviewers (no explanation is necessary but is welcomed);
• a list of 2 appropriate associate editors from the editorial board of Brown-Schmidt (please use the list of associate editors, not the consulting editor list).

On the first page of the manuscript, provide a word count for the text excluding title, references, author affiliations, acknowledgments, figures and figure legends, but including the abstract. If you have a web link to data or materials, please include it in your author note on the title page.

Articles in the journal will be evaluated for the quality of the research designs, in particular their ability to provide strong tests of broadly important theoretical hypotheses.

Articles will also be evaluated for the soundness of their statistical claims. Authors are urged to consider reporting effect sizes (and confidence intervals around them) and to discuss their practical and theoretical implications.

We also encourage authors to explain their sample sizes, ideally using power analyses based on effect sizes calculated from prior work, or when available, meta-analyses. This is particularly important when samples sizes are relatively small, or vary greatly from one experiment to the next, in which case the stopping rule for data collection should be clearly stated.

Authors should include a final Constraints on Generality paragraph (Simons, Shoda, & Lindsay, 2017) which “explicitly identifies and justifies the target populations for the reported findings.” The paragraph will be included in the word count for brief reports.

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.

In addition to mailing addresses and phone numbers, please supply an email address for potential use by the editorial office and later by the production office.

Keep a copy of the manuscript as a guard against loss.

General correspondence may be directed to the editor's officeopens in new window.

Masked reviews are optional. If you want a masked review, please select one of the masked article types upon submission. You will still include authors' names and affiliations on the title page, though reviewers will not have access to it. They will only see the main manuscript text and any supplemental file(s). Please be sure to also include this information in the cover letter.

Authors should make every effort to make sure that the manuscript itself contains no clues to their identities, including grant numbers, names of institutions providing IRB approval, self-citations, and links to online repositories for data, materials, code, or preregistrations. (Create and use an anonymized link to the repository.)

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

The process for appealing a manuscript decision is described on the APA's peer review process page.

For the other JEP journals, authors should submit manuscripts according to the manuscript submission guidelines for each individual journal:

• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
• Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

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

LaTex files (.tex) should be uploaded with all other files such as BibTeX Generated Bibliography File (.bbl) or Bibliography Document (.bib) together in a compressed ZIP file folder for the manuscript submission process. In addition, a Portable Document Format (.pdf) of the manuscript file must be uploaded for the peer-review process.

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

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.

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 of Experimental Psychology: General are required to provide 2–3 (between 120–150 words) brief sentences regarding the public significance of the research described in their paper. This description should be included within the manuscript on the abstract/keywords page. It should be written in language that is easily understood by both professionals and members of the lay public.

Examples:

• "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."
• "When treating individuals of (name of a particular ethnic minority group) who are experiencing PTSD, this study demonstrated the importance of taking into account cultural factors, especially those that involve one's spiritual beliefs."
• "This study highlights the importance of directly including one's family in treatment when helping adults diagnosed with cancer overcome their depression."

To be maximally useful, these statements of public significance should not simply be sentences lifted directly out of the manuscript.

They are meant to be informative and useful to any reader. 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.

Prior to final acceptance and publication, all public significance statements will be carefully reviewed to make sure they meet these standards. Authors will be expected to revise statements as necessary.

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 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 the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General must, at a minimum, meet Level 2 (Requirement) for citation standards, data transparency, and code transparency, and Level 1 (Disclosure) for materials transparency, design and analysis transparency, study preregistration, and analysis plan preregistration meet the “requirement” level for citation and data and code transparency as well as the “disclosure” level for materials transparency, design and analysis transparency, and preregistration. Authors should include a subsection in the method section titled “Transparency and openness.” This subsection should detail the efforts the authors have made to follow 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 the study follows JARS (Appelbaum, 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.

Data, materials, and code

Authors must make data and code available via a trusted repository or explain the legal and/or ethical reasons why they cannot be provided. Authors must state whether study materials are available and, if so, how to access them. Recommended repositories include Research Boxopens in new window and 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.

If you are unable to share the de-identified data and/or code due to legal or ethical reasons, this in and of itself is not a barrier to publication in the journal. In such situations, please mention the concern in the cover letter to the editor. The editorial team will consider exceptions to these requirements on a case-by-case basis.

For example:

• All data have been made publicly available at the [trusted repository name] and can be accessed at [persistent URL or DOI].
• Data and code associated with this study are not available because [legal or ethical reason].
• 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 the research  via a publicly accessible registry system (e.g., Research Boxopens in new window, OSFopens in new window, ClinicalTrials.gov, or other trial registries in the WHO Registry Network).

There are many available templates; for example, AsPredictedopens in new window or the Preregistration Standards for Quantitative Research in Psychologyopens in new window (Bosnjak et al., 2022) created by APA, the British Psychological Society, and the German Psychological Society partnering with the Leibniz Institute for Psychology and Center for Open Science.

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

For example:

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

Authors should consider the APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standardsopens in new window (JARS) when reporting empirical research. The standards offer ways to improve transparency in reporting to ensure that readers have the information necessary to evaluate the quality of the research and to facilitate collaboration and replication.

The JARS:

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

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.

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.

References

Nosek, B. A., Alter, G., Banks, G. C., Borsboom, D., Bowman, S. D., Breckler, S. J., Buck, S., Chambers, C. D., Chin, G., Christensen, G., Contestabile, M., Dafoe, A., Eich, E., Freese, J., Glennerster, R., Goroff, D., Green, D. P., Hesse, B., Humphreys, M., Ishiyama, J., Karlan, D., . . . Yarkoni, T. (2016, October 5). Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines. Science, 348(6242), 1422–1425. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aab2374opens in new window