Infant Mental Health Journal: Infancy and Early Childhood

Author Guidelines

Sections

1. Article Types
2. Submission and Peer Review Process
3. After Acceptance
4. Referral of Declined Manuscripts via the Developmental Science Publishing Network

1. Article Types

Original Papers are reports of new research, empirical findings or conceptual analyses that make a significant contribution to knowledge, to the extant literature, and to the science of infant and early childhood mental health. Manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words, inclusive of references but not tables or figures. Abstracts are unstructured and no more than 200 words. Please list the country in which the research was conducted in the abstract. All manuscripts must include a data availability statement, an ethics statement, key findings, and statement of relevance of the work for infant and early childhood mental health. Place the key findings and statement of relevant on the page under the abstract. Place the key findings and statement of relevant on the page under the abstract.

Brief Reports are no more than 5,000 words, inclusive of references but not tables or figures, and are appropriate for preliminary findings of cutting-edge pilot studies. Case reports reflecting novel or highly significant clinical approaches may be considered as well. Abstracts are unstructured and no more than 200 words. Please list the country in which the research was conducted in the abstract. All brief reports must include a data availability statement, an ethics statement, key findings, and statement of relevance of the work for infant and early childhood mental health. Place the key findings and statement of relevant on the page under the abstract.

Review Articles reflect critical, thorough literature reviews or theoretical/conceptual articles that synthesize and critique the research literature to date or offer new theoretical and conceptual frameworks that are highly relevant to the field of infant and early childhood mental health. Manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words, inclusive of references but not tables or figures. All manuscripts must include a data availability statement (if applicable), an ethics statement (if applicable), key findings, and statement of relevance of the work for infant and early childhood mental health. Abstracts should be no more than 200 words. Place the key findings and statement of relevant on the page under the abstract.

Special Collections/Special Sections are collections of three to five manuscripts on a topic highly relevant to the field of infant and early childhood mental health. Authors interested in submitting special sections should contact the editor. The editor will require a brief proposal include the proposed focus of the collection/section, working titles/foci of the manuscripts, rationale for the collection/special section. If the collection/special section is approved by the editor, each manuscript will go through the standard review process.

2. Submission and Peer Review Process

Once the submission materials have been prepared in accordance with the Author Guidelines, manuscripts should be submitted online at https://wiley.atyponrex.com/journal/IMHJ.

For help with article preparation, Wiley Editing Services offers expert help with English Language Editing, as well as translation, manuscript formatting, and figure preparation.

Free-format submission

Infant Mental Health Journal: Infancy and Early Childhood now offers free-format submission for a simplified and streamlined submission process. Although authors are not required to format their manuscript according to specific style guidelines, references should be formatted according to APA Publication Manual: 7th Edition. Formatting changes needed in manuscripts to comply with APA 7^th edition guidelines will be made by the Wiley production team after a manuscript is accepted for publication. This applies to all article types.

(Important: this journal operates a double-blind peer review policy. Please anonymize your manuscript and prepare a separate title page containing author details.)

Infant Mental Health Journal: Infancy and Early Childhood operates a double-blind peer review process, so please ensure that all identifying information such as author names and affiliations, acknowledgements, or explicit mentions of authors’ institutions in the text are on a separate page.

Your manuscript: This can be a single Word file including text, three key findings and statement of relevance to infant and early childhood mental health, figures, and tables, or separate files—whichever you prefer. All required sections should be contained in your manuscript, including abstract, introduction, methods, results, and conclusions. Figures and tables should have legends. References may be submitted in any style or format, as long as it is consistent throughout the manuscript. If the manuscript, figures or tables are difficult for you to read, they will also be difficult for the editors and reviewers. If your manuscript is difficult to read, the editorial office may send it back to you for revision.

Before you submit, you will need the following:

• A cover letter to the editor confirming the following: 1) the manuscript and its content are not under review or in publication elsewhere; 2) all research protocols were approved by the appropriate research ethics board(s) prior to initiation of the study; 3) all authors have meaningfully contributed to the work and approved the submitted manuscript.
• The title page of the manuscript with author/coauthor information, including statements relating to our ethics and integrity policies as follows:
  • Data sharing and data availability statement
  • Funding statement
  • Conflict of interest disclosure
  • Permission to reproduce material from other sources if applicable
  • Clinical trial registration if applicable
  • An ORCID for the corresponding author, freely available at https://orcid.org.
• Ethics approval statement (please blind the full name of the approving board to ensure a blind review) in the cover letter and in the methods section of the manuscript
• Participant consent statement in the methods section of the manuscript

Title Page

The title page should contain:

1. A brief, informative title containing the major key words. The title should not contain abbreviations (see Wiley's best practice SEO tips);
2. A short running title of less than 40 characters;
3. The full names of the authors;
4. The author's institutional affiliations where the work was conducted, with a footnote for the author’s present address if different from where the work was conducted;
5. Acknowledgements;
6. Conflict of Interest statement.

Main Text File

Infant Mental Health Journal: Infancy and Early Childhood operates a double-blind peer review process, so please ensure that all identifying information such as author names and affiliations, acknowledgements or explicit mentions of authors’ institutions in the text are on a separate page. Please see “Article Types” in item 2 before for manuscript options.

The main text file should be in Word and include the following for all article types:

• A short informative title containing the major key words. The title should not contain abbreviations
• Abstract (unstructured) No subheadings are required in the abstract but abstracts should include a brief introductory sentence, the research question(s), the sample size, brief demopgraphic characteristics of the sample, including the country in which the research was conducted, a brief summary of the methods, results, and conclusions. Abstracts may be no more than 200 words.
• Up to six keywords appearing below the abstract;
• Key Findings and Statement of Relevance
  • 3 key findings/practitioner points appearing below the abstract: Authors will need to provide no more than 3 ‘key points’, written with the practitioner in mind, that summarize the key messages of their paper to be published with their article. Each finding should be one sentence in length.
  • Statement of relevance to infant and early childhood mental health: Authors will need to describe how this research 1) addresses a topic relevant to infant and early childhood mental health, and 2) how the research substantially contributes to the field of infant and early childhood mental health. Please refer specifically to relevance of the work for the field of infant and early childhood mental health rather than commenting broadly on significance. This statement should be no more than three to four sentences, and no more than 80 words in total.
• Diversity and Anti-Racist Scholarship: Please refer to the following guidelines to address the items below.
  
  • Fully describe in the abstract, the racial, ethnic, and/or cultural background of the sample and the country in which the study was conducted. We understand that not all research protocols and human research review boards allow for the collection of data on variables such as race and ethnicity.  In these cases, please describe the sample in ways permitted.
  • Intentionally use systems-centered language and inclusive language in the abstract, manuscript text, and tables/figures.
  • Intentionally cite the relevant work of diverse scholars, and as far as possible, actively work to collaborate with scholars from the countries in which studies are conducted.
  • o Although not required, authors are invited to include a 100-150 word statement explaining how the research undertaken reflects an appreciation for diversity and/or an anti-racist approach. This statement should appear after the abstract. There are many ways this can be addressed.  Please read the guidelines on creating a statement here. 
• Main body: formatted as introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion and implications for practice and/or further research. 
  • In support of fully transparent research, please make sure to fully describe recruitment processes, data collection methods, data analyses, and results.  Please include reports of effect sizes, confidence intervals, or other information that provides additional context for the interpretation of findings.  
  • Consider making measures and protocols available in an open sources framework, such as Open Science Framework, Dataverse, Databrary, or in another repository that you may find through the Registry of Research Data Repositories.
  • Please be cautious not to overinterpret findings or suggest implications that go beyond the scope of the results.  
• References (formatted using the citation style of the APA Publication Manual: 7th Edition;
• Tables (each table complete with title and footnotes);
• Figures: Figure legends must be added beneath each individual image during upload AND as a complete list in the text.

Reference Style

This journal uses APA 7th Edition reference style. As noted, you are not required to submit the manuscript in APA 7th edition; formatting changes may be made at the time of manuscript acceptance. However, authors wishing to submit manuscripts initially in APA 7th edition style may certainly do so.

Figures and Supporting Information

Figures, supporting information, and appendices should be supplied as separate files. You should review the basic figure requirements for manuscripts for peer review, as well as the more detailed post-acceptance figure requirements. View Wiley’s FAQs on supporting information.

Data Sharing and Data Availability

Infant Mental Health Journal: Infancy and Early Childhood recognizes the many benefits of archiving data for scientific progress. Archived data provides an indispensable resource for the scientific community, making possible future replications and secondary analyses, in addition to the importance of verifying the dependability of published research findings.

IMHJ expects that, where possible, data supporting the results in the paper will be archived in an appropriate public repository. Authors are required to provide a data availability statement to describe the availability or the absence of shared data. When data have been shared, authors are required to include in their data availability statement a link to the repository they have used, and to cite the data they have shared. Whenever possible, the scripts and other artifacts used to generate the analyses presented in the paper should also be publicly archived. If sharing data compromises ethical standards or legal requirements, then authors are not expected to share it. Review Wiley’s Data Sharing policy where you will be able to see and select the data availability statement that is right for your submission. If the authors cannot or do not intend to make the data publicly available, a statement to this effect, along with the reasons that the data is not shared, must be included in the manuscript. Visit Wiley’s Author Compliance Tool to check the data sharing policy of your funder or institution before submitting your work. Visit re3data.org or fairsharing.org to help identify registered and certified data repositories relevant to your subject area. 

Data Citation

Please review Wiley’s Data Citation policy.

Funding

You should list all funding sources in the Acknowledgments section. You are responsible for the accuracy of their funder designation. If in doubt, please check the Open Funder Registry for the correct nomenclature.

Conflict of Interest Statement

On the title page, please define any conflicts of interest that may be present related to the research or dissemination of the research in IMHJ.

Reproduction of Copyright Material

If excerpts from copyrighted works owned by third parties are included, credit must be shown in the contribution. It is your responsibility to also obtain written permission for reproduction from the copyright owners. For more information visit Wiley’s Copyright Terms & Conditions FAQ.

The corresponding author is responsible for obtaining written permission to reproduce the material "in print and other media" from the publisher of the original source, and for supplying Wiley with that permission upon submission.

If you are invited to revise your manuscript after peer review, the journal will also request the revised manuscript to be formatted according to journal requirements as described below.

Authorship/Co-Authorship Details

All listed authors should have contributed to the manuscript substantially and have agreed to the final submitted version. Review editorial standards and scroll down for a description of authorship criteria.

ORCID

This journal requires ORCID. Please refer to Wiley’s resources on ORCID.

Preprint policy:

Please find the Wiley preprint policy here.

This journal accepts articles previously published on preprint servers.

Infant Mental Health Journal: Infancy and Early Childhood Journal will consider for review articles previously available as preprints. You may also post the submitted version of a manuscript to a preprint server at any time. You are requested to update any pre-publication versions with a link to the final published article.

3. After Acceptance

Accepted Articles

The journal offers Wiley’s Accepted Articles service for all manuscripts. Manuscripts accepted ‘in press’ are published online shortly after acceptance, prior to copy-editing or typesetting and appear in PDF format only. After the final version article is published (the article of record), the DOI remains valid and can still be used to cite and access the .

First Look

After your paper is accepted, your files will be assessed by the editorial office to ensure they are ready for production. Your manuscript will be returned to you and you will receive an email asking you to check the manuscript and make any necessary changes, updates, edits, and to unblind the paper. After the First Look process is complete, the manuscript will be returned to the editorial team and uploaded to the publisher to be published online in Early View.

Proofs

Authors will receive an e-mail notification with a link and instructions for accessing HTML page proofs online. Authors should also make sure that any renumbered tables, figures, or references match text citations and that figure legends correspond with text citations and actual figures. Proofs must be returned within 48 hours of receipt of the email.

Wiley Author Services

When an accepted article is received by Wiley’s production team, the corresponding author will receive an email asking them to login or register with Wiley Author Services. You will be asked to sign a publication license at this point.

Author Licensing

You may choose to publish under the terms of the journal’s standard copyright agreement, or Open Access under the terms of a Creative Commons License.

Standard re-use and licensing rights vary by journal. Review the Creative Commons License options available to you under Open Access.

Authors based at institutions with an Open Access arrangement with Wiley may be eligible for Open Access funding prior to your article’s publication in Early View. Instructions and eligibility requirements can be found at https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/open-access/affiliation-policies-payments/institutional-funder-payments.html. Please note that many institutional arrangements require Open Access to be purchased (APC) at the time you sign your copyright license, before your accepted manuscript appears in Early View. For more information on this journal’s APCs, please see the Open Access page.

Self-Archiving Definitions and Policies: Note that the journal’s standard copyright agreement allows for self-archiving of different versions of the article under specific conditions.

Author Name Change Policy

In cases where authors wish to change their name following publication, Wiley will update and republish the paper and redeliver the updated metadata to indexing services. Our editorial and production teams will use discretion in recognizing that name changes may be of a sensitive and private nature for various reasons including (but not limited to) alignment with gender identity, or as a result of marriage, divorce, or religious conversion. Accordingly, to protect the author’s privacy, we will not publish a correction notice to the paper, and we will not notify co-authors of the change. Authors should contact the journal’s Editorial Office with their name change request.

Author Support

For technical help with the submission system, please review Wiley’s Research Exchange Author Help Documents or contact [email protected].

4. Referral of Declined Manuscripts via the Developmental Science Network

Developmental Science Publishing Network

This journal participates in the Wiley Developmental Science Publishing Network. This exciting collaboration between a number of high-quality journals simplifies and speeds up the publication process, helping authors find a home for their research. At the Editors’ judgement, suitable papers not accepted by one journal may be recommended for referral to another journal(s) in the network. Authors decide whether to accept the referral, with the option to transfer their paper with or without revisions. Once the referral is accepted, submission happens automatically, along with any previous reviewer reports, thereby relieving pressure on the peer review process. While a transfer does not guarantee acceptance, it is more likely to lead to a successful outcome for authors by helping them to find a route to publication quickly and easily.