Author Guidelines

Note that we're on partial leave for July. You can still submit, but newly submitted manuscripts will not be processed until August.

Please start by carefully reading the about the publication section.  

Submission Types

Original Article
Original empirical and/or theoretical contributions in the field of Meta-Psychology. 

Registered Report
Pre-registered proposals on the same topics as Original Articles that are given in-principle acceptance prior to data collection. 

Tutorial
Tutorials on methods relevant for psychology researchers.

Replication Report
Replications of previous empirical findings on any topic relevant to psychology. Preregistration is required. If not, consider submitting as a File-Drawer Report.

Registered Replication Report
Pre-registered proposals of replications, that are given in-principle acceptance prior to data collection. 

Commentary 
Commentaries on articles in MP,  commentaries on articles published in other journals, as well as extensive re-analysis of your own published research. This category also includes opinion on psychology as a field, or on specific lines of research.

File-Drawer Report
A complete emptying of your file drawer on a topic in psychology. We encourage these reports to be brief in the introduction, full-length in method and results, and to have a brief results-focused discussion. File-Drawer Reports should not compete with journals on general or specialized psychology topics, and should be reserved for studies that would elsewhere remain in the file-drawer.

They should contain a transparency statement:

"This report is an exhaustive report on all data available from research project(s) relating to the topic, where at least one of the authors was principal investigator, or have otherwise the right to publish the results. This includes not only null findings, or unexpected findings, but also studies that are suspected to have failed, with careful explanation of the circumstances of the failure (e.g., experimental error, failed manipulation check). The context surrounding how these data were collected, and if they are somehow connected to already published studies (e.g., dropped experiments) is carefully explained. "

The primary goal of a File-Drawer-Report is to reduce the impact of publication bias by making hard to published data available.  Another goal is to make researchers learn from failures and mistakes. Poorly designed studies that are part of the topic should thus be included, even if they are embarrassing for the authors, but their limitations should be carefully explained. 

Submitting an Original Article, Commentary, Replication Report or File-Drawer Report

If you are unsure about the suitability of your manuscript for the journal, we encourage you to contact us before submission. Also please make sure to explain important things about your submission in the cover letter. Then follow these steps.

1.  Prepare an OSF page

All manuscripts should be accompanied by an OSF project page that contains data, the code necessary to reproduce the statistical analysis and the research materials. Please note that this will be made open for everyone to see and use. To avoid any misunderstandings, if data, analysis or materials are not applicable please explain this. If you have technical or ethical problems with sharing data, analysis or materials, please carefully explain this in the cover letter and the editor will contact you about how to proceed.

2.  Upload a preprint

Upload (or update) a preprint on PsyArXiv. Other preprint services are allowed if they support hypothes.is. commenting that is used for the open peer review where everyone can comment. Tag it with meta-psychology.

Your preprint should follow APA-style except that figures and tables should be embedded in the PDF/manuscript, and placed where they are easy to read. The PDF can be either in the usual APA-manuscript form, or in a reader-friendly form, for example an APA-article-styled PDF.

The first page of your preprint should contain the following statement:

Submitted to Meta-Psychology. Click here to follow the fully transparent editorial process of this submission. Participate in open peer review by commenting through hypothes.is directly on this preprint.

The editor will add the link to the editorial process on the *here* in that statement.

3. Submit a cover letter

Submit only a cover letter through the Open Journal System at the journal web page. Your cover letter should contain the following:

- Link to the preprint. Confirm version at time of submission.
- Link to the OSF site for data, code and materials (if applicable)
- Link to the preregistration (if available)
- A statement about what badges (Data, materials, preregistration) that you apply for
- A short statement about the paper that will help us in selecting appropriate reviewers

Please do not submit any other files as this would only add to confusion about file versions.

Please note that the cover letter is public and will be read by the reviewers.  If you need to have a confidential discussion  (e.g., if writing a commentary on a paper that you suspect of fraud) then contact the editor-in-chief over email before submitting your manuscript.

4.  Prepare your word processing files, figures etc
You do not need to submit your word processing files at this point. However, keep in mind that if your paper is accepted you will be asked to paste your text into either a LaTeX, Rmarkdown, or a word template. We only provide minimal copy-editing so be prepared to take a larger part of this than in OA journals that have APCs.


Submitting a Proposal for a Registered Report or Registered Replication Report

A registered report is an article form in which theory, data collection and/or proposed analyses are pre-registered and reviewed prior to the data collection and/or proposed analyses. Registered reports are submitted and reviewed in two stages; once before data collection and/or analyses, and once when the final paper is completed.

The registered report is on the one hand one of the most convincing ways of doing research, as it precludes p-hacking and HARKing. We therefore very much welcome submissions of the ‘registered report’ type. On the other hand, the registered report is also one of the most challenging ways of doing research, as many important decisions of the research need to be stipulated beforehand. We provide a checklist that authors and reviewers need to use when writing and evaluating a registered report, to assist them in creating high-standard that prevents p-hacking and HARKing.

The guidelines for both authors and reviewers follow those of the journal Cortex http://cdn.elsevier.com/promis_misc/PROMISpub_idt_Guidelines_cortex_RR_17_04_2013.pdf with a few notable exceptions described below.

Author

Registered reports that plan to collect data in small samples and consequently may have low statistical power are considered for publication. The reason is that small-sample research without bias (i.e., no publication bias, no ­p-hacking, no HARKing) may be very useful for subsequent meta-analyses

 In stage 1, authors submit papers including full introduction, theory section (if any), and methods section including a statistical analyses subsection that explains all analyses to test the hypotheses derived in the introduction of theory section. These sections may not be changed after the report is provisionally accepted for publication, i.e.,these sections will not change while or after collecting data and/or doing the analyses

Authors should use a checklist (https://osf.io/6bv27/) when writing their report in the first stage to preclude p-hacking and HARKing. To be more precise, we require researchers to be specific, precise, and exhaustive in their plan of the study (Wicherts et al., 2016). These three prerequisites are translated into the scoring of items of the checklist, with a score of 3 tantamount to a specific, precise and exhaustive description with respect to an item. Authors should aim at score “3” for each relevant item on the checklist

In stage 2, the final report should consist of a “planned analyses” section, and possibly an “exploratory analyses” section. Authors are free to report any analyses in the “exploratory analyses” section, as long as the details of these analyses are provided in the article (or in supplements).

Note that the editor and reviewers will NOT evaluate the registered report on its novelty, statistical significance, or how ‘exciting’ it is. The main criteria for acceptance are

(i)              soundness of theory, and hypotheses following from the theory
(ii)             soundness of methodology and statistics to test the hypotheses
(iii)            adherence to the checklist (aiming for ‘3’s on items of the checklist)
(iv)            the report in part 1 being the same as the report in part 2 (wrt introduction, theory, methods)
(v)             results section being divided into one part corresponding to the “planned analyses” section, and possible one “exploratory” part; does the first part correspond to the         planned analyses section, and does the exploratory part include the details of the analyses? Are statistical techniques used that are appropriate for exploratory data analysis?
(vi)            soundness of conclusion and discussion section

Reviewers
See the last bullet for the authors, above. Reviewers see the paper at least twice, although it is possible that a reviewer is involved only in one stage of the review. Simply put, the “hard job” for reviewers is at the first stage of the research, when the reviewer judges the soundness of the proposed research and the adherence to the checklist. At the second stage, the reviewer’s most important task is to check the correspondence between the proposed research and the actual analyses.

References
Wicherts, J.M., Veldkamp, C.L.S., Augusteijn, H.E.M., Bakker, M., Van Aert, R.C.M., and Van Assen, M.A.L.M. (2016). Degrees of freedom in planning, running, analyzing, and reporting psychological studies: A checklist to avoid p-hacking. Frontiers.  http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01832