For authors

Psicológica is a peer-reviewed, electronic-only journal publishing original, high-quality content on Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. Psicológica considers that quality research can also involve replication studies and negative results.

The Journal publishes theoretical and methodological articles, research articles, replications studies, opinion letters and registered reports. Special issues are also considered.

• Articles. Manuscripts reporting empirical results, theoretical perspectives or novel methodologies that advance knowledge in any area spanning the entire spectrum of Experimental Psychology. Replication studies and studies reporting null results (especially from pre-registered experiments) are welcome.
• Opinion letters. This is a flexible format that can be used to report original findings or comments of broad interest for Experimental Psychology. This format includes discussion of controversial issues in any area of Experimental Psychology and related fields. Opinion letters will undergo a peer review process similar to that used for other journal publications.
• Registered Reports. Registered Reports are a form of empirical article in which the methods and proposed analyses are pre-registered and reviewed prior to conducting the experiments. This format is designed to minimize bias in deductive science, while also allowing full flexibility to conduct exploratory (unregistered) analyses and report serendipitous findings. The review process for registered reports is described below.
• Invited Reviews. The journal occasionally publishes short review articles on the state of the art of specific psychological functions or developments of general interest in the field of experimental psychology or science in general. These reviews are usually commissioned by the journal’s associate editors, but external contributors are also welcome to submit ideas for reviews by contacting the journal’s editorial team at info@psicologicajournal.com.

Psicológica accepts articles based solely on their scientific merit and not their projected impact. Reviewers are expected to provide their expert opinion only on whether an article meets certain scientific standards (methodological rigour, adequate sample size, sufficient statistical power, clear hypotheses, distinction between exploratory and confirmatory analyses, presentation of the theoretical background and state of the art in the field, etc) and to provide comments on specific improvements that might assist in meeting these standards. However, reviewers are not called to recommend whether or not the manuscript should be published in Psicológica. The decision on acceptance or rejection of a manuscript is the responsibility of the Associate Editor. Specifically, editors are instructed to accept all articles that have undergone a rigorous review process in which all initial concerns about their scientific quality have been resolved.

Manuscript pre-submission enquiries should be submitted to Psicológica via the Journal’s online form. For the initial submission, the entire manuscript, including tables and figures, should be uploaded as a single PDF file. Please check the Journal’s About page for additional information on publication practices, including citation standards, pre-registration policy, replication studies, and availability of data, software code, and other research material.

The Journal does not charge any article processing fees but instead requires that authors format their manuscript themselves. Adhering to the required format is recommended for preprints but mandatory for the final version of the manuscripts. To assist you in this task, a link to .tex, .odt, and .docx preprint templates are provided below:

.tex preprint template for Psicológica

.odt preprint template for Psicológica

.docx preprint template for Psicológica

During submission you will be optionally asked to provide a cover letter (confidential comment to the editor) and a list of suggested reviewers. In the cover letter you can provide links to any additional resources that may facilitate the review process (data, software code, pre-registration, etc.). If you choose to recommend reviewers, please acknowledge that they are not currently associated with you or your research group in any formal way. The Journal editors reserve the right to select these reviewers at their discretion.

By submitting a manuscript to Psicológica you acknowledge that you have read and accepted the Journal’s editorial policy described in this section. You also acknowledge that your manuscript (or one with substantially the same content) has not been formally published previously (preprints are permitted and encouraged) and that it is not under consideration by another journal.

In case of problems during the submission process, please contact the editorial team at info@psicologicajournal.com.

Research articles

Research articles should be organized into the following sections:

• Title page (Title, running head, author names and affiliation).
• Abstract (approximately 250 words)
• Keywords
• Introduction
• Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Acknowledgments
• Author contributions
• Ethics statement
• Data code and availability
• Funding sources
• Conflict of interest
• References
• Tables (at the end or inserted at the appropriate section place within the document)
• Figures (at the end or inserted at the appropriate section place within the document)

Opinion letters

Opinion letters consist of an abstract, a short introduction, and a brief summary of the most important findings/arguments. All opinion letters will be peer reviewed.

Registered reports
The submission of registered reports includes two stages. In Stage 1, manuscripts will include only an Introduction, Methods (including proposed analyses), and Pilot Data (where applicable). Manuscripts that pass Stage 1 peer review will be issued an in principle acceptance (IPA), indicating that the article will be published pending successful completion of the study. In Stage 2, authors have to submit the manuscript as a regular research article for further consideration. More information about registered reports can be found at https://www.cos.io/initiatives/registered-reports.

In studies involving human participants, authors must include a statement that consent has been obtained from each participant (or their parents or guardians) after a full explanation of the purpose and nature of all procedures involved.

Authors must acknowledge that ethical approval to conduct their research has been issued by the pertinent ethical committee, as well as to provide the corresponding code/number.

After an initial screening that may result in outright rejection (e.g. out of scope, serious methodological or linguistic problems, etc.), all manuscripts submitted to Psicológica are uploaded as preprints to the DIGITAL.CSIC repository. This task is performed by the Journal without requiring any additional work on behalf of the authors. The publication of research results prior to formal peer review is a rapidly expanding practice, while in some scientific disciplines it has been carried out for more than 30 years (e.g. arXiv). The advantages of publishing your work immediately rather than waiting for journal peer review include early dissemination in the academic community, registration of your results and theoretical ideas, and a citation advantage. Preprints, however, are recognised as work in progress that has not yet been properly validated by the scientific community and should not be considered as formal publications.

Preprint manuscripts published in DIGITAL.CSIC receive a digital handle and become publicly available regardless of the outcome of the review process. If the manuscript is ultimately rejected by Psicológica, authors are free to use their preprints and accompanying reviews (see the section on peer review below) in subsequent submissions. When a manuscript is accepted and published by another journal, depending on the journal’s copyright policy, authors may update their DIGITAL.CSIC preprint with the publisher’s version of record, or the author’s latest copy. We encourage you to ask Psicológica to assist you in this process by contacting us at info@psicologicajournal.com

After a quick initial screening, each manuscript is assigned to an associate editor based on its thematic area. The associate editor is responsible for inviting reviewers, communicating with authors and reviewers, and deciding whether the manuscript should be rejected, revised and resubmitted, or accepted for publication. A list of all associate editors is available on our about page.

Psicológica implements an open and transparent peer review protocol. This means that reviewers, who are invited by the associate editor in charge of the submission, are required to disclose their identity to authors and the public and that the full text of their reviews becomes publicly available at the repository.

As soon as a review is submitted to the Journal, it is uploaded to the repository, receives a DOI and is linked to the reviewed article. Reviewers can then cite their reviews as any original contribution, regardless of whether the article is accepted for publication or not. This process encourages positive and well-argued reviews with the aim of improving the scientific quality of the reviewed works.

During the review process, reviewers are also invited to optionally rate articles on a scale of 0 to 100 on the basis of their overall scientific quality, relevance to their field, relevance to other fields (multidisciplinarity), and societal value. These ratings do not affect the editorial decision on whether an article should be accepted or not, but are considered potentially useful for developing, in the long term, more direct ways of measuring scientific quality and impact, and eventually reducing our community’s dependence on metrics such as the impact factor. They are also intended to provide additional information to readers who wish, for example, to rank articles by their perceived impact, or to search for articles that are more socially relevant.

At any time during the review process, authors may be invited by the associate editor to revise and resubmit their manuscript. In this case, in addition to their revised manuscript, authors are asked to submit a detailed response to each reviewer in a single PDF file. These responses are also uploaded to DIGITAL.CSIC so that a complete record of the review process is available for public consultation.

Copy editing and formatting

When an article is accepted for publication, authors are invited to submit the final version of their manuscript as a .tex, .odf, or .docx file using the available templates that can be downloaded following the link below:

.tex publication template for Psicológica

.odf publication template for Psicológica

.docx publication template for Psicológica

Manuscripts need to be spell and grammar-checked. Please note that the Journal will not perform any copy editing. Formatting following the templates, spelling, grammar-checking and correct referencing is the responsibility of the authors prior to submission of the accepted manuscript. If the manuscript does not meet the requirements specified here, it may be returned to the authors for correction.

Artwork

Each figure included in the manuscript should also be submitted as a high-quality separate image (e.g., pdf, svg, png). Authors are also encouraged to submit a picture to be used as a featured image in the presentation of their article on the website. This picture can be one of the article figures or an artistic image that captures the essence of the article’s content in a more abstract way. Featured images should be 800 x 533 px in size, and the name of the creator and the source should be indicated.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material should be provided as an accompanying .pdf file.

Reference style

References should follow the referencing style used by the American Psychological Association, 7^th edition. Article DOIs should be provided when possible.

Language

The language of the Journal is English. UK and US spellings are welcome and they should be used consistently throughout the article.

All articles and supplementary material (data, software code, etc.) are published by default under a creative commons license. Authors can choose from four different licences (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA), all of which allow them to retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions. Psicológica adheres to the fair open access principles as set out at the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and https://fairopenaccess.org/

When an article is published by Psicológica, it receives a DOI, appears on the Journal’s homepage and is registered by all compliant indexing services. In addition, authors are invited to optionally rate their article’s reviews on a scale of 0 to 100 according to their usefulness in improving the scientific quality of their work. In the long term these ratings may be useful in promoting the work of reviewers who contribute substantially to the process of scientific validation.