Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

  • As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • Original work: The submission has not been previously published, and is not being simultaneously submitted elsewhere (we accept submissions of manuscripts that have been previously distributed as online preprints in open repositories).
  • File format: The text is provided as an editable file in either DOC, DOCX, or RTF format. The text follows formatting rules of APA (7th edition), uses a 12-point font and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • Double-anonymized peer review: I am aware that the peer review in this journal is double-anonymized, meaning that the manuscript, any supplementary materials and/or the data file I submit for review do not contain any identifying information. I am also aware that this does not apply to Registered Reports that have already been externally peer-reviewed.
  • A separate file "Cover letter" (mandatory) should contain:
    • Authors' name(s) and e-mail addresses.
    • Affiliation (for each author): Institution, City, Country.
    • Article type and the word count.
    • Highlights of the submitted contribution (what is already known on this subject & what this paper adds). Please write a statement of the conclusions of your study in up to four sentences (with a maximum of 100 words). Please include interesting information about your paper and do not only rephrase the title.
    • Data Availability: All empirical articles should contain datasets and codebooks as attachments to the submission (if it is not possible, please explain in detail).
    • Pre-registration statement: all empirical articles should contain a clear statement on study pre-registration.
    • Solomon Asch Early Career Prize Eligibility: If you are an Early Career Researcher (a student or a scholar up to 3 years after completion of your Ph.D.) and you are the only author/first co-author of the submitted manuscript, you may receive $500 annual SPB Best Paper award - please claim your eligibility in the cover letter.
    • Author Contribution Statement: A statement that specifies the role(s) of each author should be included. We strongly recommend using CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy; https://www.elsevier.com/authors/policies-and-guidelines/credit-author-statement) for this purpose.
    • Funding: All sources of financial aid (if applicable) should be declared.
    • Competing interests (if applicable): Financial and personal relationships of any author with SPB or any organizations related to the study matter should be declared.
    • Ethical Practice: Please include a statement about the ethics of the research conducted, ethical approval from an institutional ethics or review board whenever appropriate (e.g., human participants involved, parental consent for research with children, etc.) and information whether participants’ informed consent was obtained. If not applicable (e.g., simulation studies), please state: ‘No ethical issues and/or ethics approvals need to be disclosed’ - or explain why your study is considered exempt from specific requirements.
    • Suggestions for at least 3 potential referees for peer review with their full names and affiliation (University, Country) and email address. (This does not apply to submissions of Registered Reports that have already been externally reviewed.)
    • If submitting a Registered Report (Stage 2 manuscript): Add a statement that your Registered Report was submitted and reviewed via the PCI RR track (https://rr.peercommunityin.org/). Include a URL to the recommended preprint, and confirm that the submitted manuscript is identical to the recommended preprint.

  • The main article body should be anonymized and should include:
    • Running head: short title (one line), no more than 50 characters including spaces
    • The abstract (with no more than 250 words)
    • Keywords: 4–7 keywords or brief phrases separated by commas
    • Main article body: Please note that the final publication (after peer-review) must not exceed 8,000 words in length (excluding only references) with a limit of 4 figures and 50 references. The supplementary materials do not have a word count nor figure/table/reference limit. Read more about word count and article types
    • All figures (including relevant captions) should be placed within the main article body (any small but readable versions of the figure)
    • All tables (including titles, description, footnotes) should be placed within the text body
    • References: APA style (7th Edition). Please use the https://reciteworks.com/ to check if your references are accurate and complete.
    • Appendices (if any): Appendix A, Appendix B, etc (please mind the word count limit and you may want to use supplementary materials instead)
  • Supplementary files:
    • All datasets and codebooks should be uploaded during submission and clearly described using the metadata
    • All figures should be separately submitted in the original, high-resolution version (ready for print)
    • Each supplementary material should be explicitly referenced (by the file name) within the body of the article, e.g., "See supplementary file 1: 'Protocol_of_Study1.gif'".
  • Data anonymization (if applicable): I confirm that all research data have been fully anonymized.
  • Authorship: I certify that all authors who contributed to this article are named in the cover letter. I and all co-authors have read and contributed to the final version of the manuscript and all have agreed on its submission to this journal.
  • Copyright: I understand that authors retain copyright and the article and all accompanying files will be published under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0). No copyrighted material is used unless that material has also been made available under a CC-BY license.

Author Guidelines

Please read the detailed author guidelines and should you encounter any technical difficulties in submitting a manuscript to this journal, please contact the technical Support Team at support@spb.psychopen.eu.


The manuscript submission process is separated into the following five steps:

submission_workflow

  • Step 1: Verifying the submission checklist and specifying the manuscript type

  • Step 2: Uploading the cover letter (with identifying information), the anonymized submission file (main article), datasets and any supplementary files (see guidelines for details on how to prepare those) 

  • Step 3: Specifying the author(s) names, contact information, title, abstract, keywords, and other metadata 

  • Step 4: Final verification of the submitted files and confirmation of your submission (please note this is the last step before sending out your submission to SPB Editorial Office)

  • Step 5: Summary of the peer-review process (does not apply to Registered Reports): Each submitted paper will be initially sent to the Editor-in-Chief's office who will appoint an Action Editor (if all authors' guidelines are met), who will seek and invite appropriate Reviewers. Each paper is sent to at least three Reviewers (experts in the field), and the decision is made on the basis of at least two reviews. The authors may follow the status of the paper throughout the entire process by logging into the system. The decision (accept, minor revision, revise and resubmit, or reject) will be communicated electronically (via e-mail) together with the reviews and letter from the Action Editor.
    Note that Registered Reports are not sent for review, the editorial decision is based on the PCI RR (https://rr.peercommunityin.org/) recommendation.