Author Guidelines
The journal features seven major categories of papers: Empirical Research, Registered Reports, Theoretical Contributions, Commentaries, Applied Perspectives, Editorial, and Book Reviews. Authors are asked to indicate the primary category of paper they are submitting. The paper category is indicated on the final, published paper. Each paper category comes with a set of recommendations for the maximum number of words in the document (excluding cover page, abstract, references, tables, figures, etc.), as well as the number of references, tables, and figures. While these are not strict numbers, the recommendations will be enforced. We ask authors to stay preferably below the maximum numbers and justify when they have to go beyond them. It will be at the discretion of the section editors to allow higher numbers, but we generally discourage submitting papers that go beyond the recommendations outlined below.
| Category | Instantiation Examples | Word count | Number of References | Number of Tables | Number of Figures |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Main Article Types | |||||
| Emperical Research | Emperical studies (single or multiple experiments), meta analysis | 7,000 | 50 | 6 | 4 |
| Short report single experiment | 4,000 | 25 | 3 | 3 | |
| Registered Reports | Empirical studies (single or multiple experiments), meta analysis | 4,000 | 25 | 4 | 2 |
| Commentaries | Commentary, discussion, news, update, blog post | 1,000 | 10 | 1 | 2 |
| Theoretical contributions | Literature review, narrative review, new theory | 7,000 | 50 | 4 | 4 |
| Applied perspectives | Transfer, practice case study, best practice | 5,000 | 40 | 3 | 3 |
| Editorials | Comments, reviews | 1,300 | 50 | 2 | 2 |
| Book reviews | 1,300 | 5 | 0 | 0 | |
More information about the various types of article that can be submitted and any relevant information in each case can be found under Section Policies.
Submissions must comply with the PsychOpen Author Guidelines. Those that do not adhere to these guidelines may be returned to authors. Further, submissions have to adhere to the journals standards on Open Science Practices. Submissions that do not adhere to these guidelines may be returned to authors. Note that submissions are subject to plagiarism screening (read more). Please also see PsychOpen's Guidelines on Publication Ethics.
Electronic Supplementary Materials (EMS)
Authors may submit study data, analysis scripts, and other study materials for manuscripts that involve new data as Electronic Supplementary Materials (ESM). The Electronic Supplementary Material (ESM) is not included in the word count. In general, ESM contains additional items that are not essential for inclusion in the full text but would nevertheless benefit the reader (e.g., raw data sets).
ESM will be published at the PsychArchives repository. PsychArchives is a disciplinary repository for psychology, provided by Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID). All ESM will be published under a CC-BY license, meaning that authors grant others permission to use the ESM in whole or in part provided that the original work is properly cited. (Please check that no copyrighted material is included unless that material has also been made available under a CC-BY license. For more details see Supplementary Material Guidelines.)
ESM will be published online as received from the author(s) without any conversion, testing, or reformatting. They will not be checked for typographical errors or functionality. The responsibility for the content and functionality remains entirely with the author(s).