Please start by carefully reading the about the publication section. Also note that during July each year our editors have a well-deserved break. We will not process new submission until august. Current submissions are still peer-reviewed, copy-edited etc., during this break.
Submitting a manuscript
If you are unsure about the suitability of your manuscript for the journal, we encourage you to contact us before submission. Then follow this checklist.
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.
All studies that collect data (including non-primary data such as in meta-science and literature reviews), or have confirmatory research questions / hypotheses must be preregistered with hypotheses, data collection and analysis plan as a minimum, but preferably with a full study protocol (e.g., for systematic reviews).
Commentaries, editorials, tutorials should normally not be preregistered unless they involve data collection or confirmatory analyses.
Make sure to upload your data in a clear and easy to use format (e.g., .csv) and to provide clear description (e.g., use a data dictionary / code book). Always include a README file.
Also make sure that your code is carefully commented and easy to understand. A good rule of thumb is that a grad student in your research area should be able to reproduce it without help.
For complex analyses where reproducibility might depend on the computer environment, consider also sharing it using a container (e.g., Code Ocean, Anaconda).
Upload (or update) a preprint on PsyArXiv. Other preprint services are allowed if they provide a DOI. 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. If your article was originally written for another area (e.g., history) APA style is not required.
The first page of your preprint must contain the following statement:
Submitted to Meta-Psychology. Participate in open peer review by sending an email to open.peer.reviewer@gmail.com. The full editorial process of all articles under review at Meta-Psychology can be found following this link:
https://tinyurl.com/mp-submissions
You will find this preprint by searching for the first author's name.
Submit only the submission form (and preregistration checklist if applicable) through the Open Journal System at the journal web page.
Authors are required to fill out a submission form provided by the journal. This form serves as the cover letter, application for OSF open badges, and includes a link to the preprint. The submission form and preregistration checklist templates can be found on OSF at the following link: OSF Submission Form and Preregistration Checklist Templates.
Include the preprint: In the submission form, provide a link to the preprint associated with the manuscript. The preprint should be available on a suitable platform (e.g., psyArxiv or other preprint services that provide a DOI) and accessible to the reviewers.
Upload additional materials to OSF: Authors should refrain from uploading any additional files with the submission. Instead, all supplementary materials, including datasets, data analysis, and materials, should be available in the authors’ OSF projects. Provide links to these resources in the submission form.
Preregistration (if applicable): If the study has been preregistered, authors should submit the preregistration checklist along with the submission form. This checklist helps ensure transparency and alignment between the preregistered protocol and the submitted manuscript. If you’re submitting a registered report, this checklist is not necessary.
Please do not submit any other files unless absolutely necessary 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.
Do not submit your word processing files at this point. If your article is accepted, you should be prepared to take a larger part of the copy-editing compared to journals that have APCs. We like to think of this as collaborative copy-editing. We do it in LaTeX through Overleaf, where we support you through the entire process. Writing your manuscript in LaTeX is thus strongly preferred, but not required.
We value transparency highly, and it's not only about the supplementary files. All articles should be checked against and meet the requirements of APA JARS: https://apastyle.apa.org/jars .
Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses must meet PRISMA. A published protocol (e.g., PROSPERO or OSF registration) before data collection is strongly encouraged.
Randomized Controlled Trials must follow CONSORT.
The editor will likely not send your submission out for peer review before it meets these standards.
At the end of the article the following sections should be included:
Conflict of Interest and Funding
Declare any conflict of interest or state that there is none. Declare any funding or state that there was none.
Author Contributions
Author contributions should follow CRediT: https://casrai.org/credit/.
It's easier if you use this app for it: https://martonbalazskovacs.shinyapps.io/tenzing/
Registered Reports should follow everything above (e.g., preprint that is updated), but has additional instructions.
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. A unique feature is that registered reports are given in-principle-acceptance (IPA) prior to data collection and/or analysis.
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 a high-standard that prevents p-hacking and HARKing.
The registered report guidelines described below are based on empirical hypothesis testing research, primarily as a way to prevent p-hacking and HARKing. However, the format of planning research together with reviewers before data collection / and or analysis can be useful regardless of the type of research. Authors are strongly encouraged to submit other types of contributions in this format, but should be aware that the guidelines below do not fully apply then. Please contact the Editor-in-Chief about such submissions so that we can plan ahead for it.
Rarely, a registered report cannot be made public immediately because that would interfere with the project itself. For example, if the study is an audit of researchers who are likely to read Meta-Psychology. In that case, send an email to the Editor-in-Chief instead of submitting.
Author
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.
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. However, this has to be made explicit and justified in the paper.
In stage 1, authors submit papers including a full introduction and methods section. The methods section must have a statistical analyses subsection that explains all analyses to test the hypotheses derived in the introduction. If possible, we recommend that the code for the proposed analysis are included as supplementary material and tested on simulated mock data.
The introduction and methods section may not be changed after the report is in-principle-accepted for publication. That is, 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
Reviewers
Reviewers should carefully read the author instructions as a registered-report is quite different. 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
This section contains original articles on the topic of meta-psychology. All articles in this section have been peer-reviewed according to the journal policy.
Tutorials on methods relevant for psychology researchers.
This section contains commentaries on articles published in Meta-Psychology as well as commentaries on articles published in other journals. Re-analysis of own research are essentially a self-commentary and should also be part of this section.
Replication studies that are submitted as proposals that are given in-principle acceptance prior to data collection.
Replications of previous empirical findings on any topic relevant for psychology. Has to be preregistered.
This section contains File-Drawer Reports. Unlike Original articles, these need not be on the topic of Meta-Psychology but can be on any topic of psychology. They require a complete emptying of a file-drawer on a topic, including - but not limited to - null results and failed studies.
File-Drawer Reports is a reporting format where researchers have the opportunity to completely empty their file-drawer on a psychology topic. File-Drawer-Reports should not compete with journals on general or specialized psychology topics, and should be specifically 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 publish 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.
The data collected from registered and non-registered users of this journal falls within the scope of the standard functioning of peer-reviewed journals. It includes information that makes communication possible for the editorial process; it is used to informs readers about the authorship and editing of content; it enables collecting aggregated data on readership behaviours, as well as tracking geopolitical and social elements of scholarly communication. The data is safely stored on a server at Linnaeus University.
This journal’s editorial team uses this data to guide its work in publishing and improving this journal. Data that will assist in developing this publishing platform may be shared with its developer Public Knowledge Project in an anonymized and aggregated form, with appropriate exceptions such as article metrics. The data will not be sold by this journal or PKP nor will it be used for purposes other than those stated here. The authors published in this journal are responsible for the human subject data that figures in the research reported here.
Those involved in editing this journal seek to be compliant with industry standards for data privacy, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provision for “data subject rights” that include (a) breach notification; (b) right of access; (c) the right to be forgotten; (d) data portability; and (e) privacy by design. The GDPR also allows for the recognition of “the public interest in the availability of the data,” which has a particular saliency for those involved in maintaining, with the greatest integrity possible, the public record of scholarly publishing. Contact information: oa@lnu.se
In an upcoming Meta-Psychology article, we introduce a method to estimate a study's replication value. We ask the members of the scientific community to provide substantive criticism, interpretation, or elaboration on the article by submitting commentaries to Meta-Psychology.
ISSN: 2003-2714
