Cognitive Science

Author Guidelines

Cognitive Science is an online journal of the Cognitive Science Society focusing on the multidisciplinary study of minds and other intelligent systems. It aims to publish the highest quality articles of multidisciplinary concern on cognition from multiple perspectives, including anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology. Papers in all areas of cognitive science are welcome. Research reports written for a multidisciplinary audience are given high priority. Papers which are very general or speculative, which constitute parametric refinements of well-known ideas, or which are accessible to only a narrow or discipline-specific audience, will be given low priority and may be returned to authors without formal review.

The following kinds of submissions illustrate those appropriate for the journal:

• Theoretical or philosophical analyses of knowledge representation, cognitive processes, or brain theory, especially if these theoretical developments integrate across multiple traditions in cognitive science.
• Experimental or ethnographic studies relevant to issues in cognitive science, especially if these studies have implications for multiple areas of cognitive science.
• Descriptions of computational or mathematical models that exhibit some human or non-human cognitive process, especially if these models are implemented and tested and relate to observations of behavior in other domains.
• Review articles that offer guidance on new problem areas or methodological issues in cognitive science.
• Continuing commentary or theoretical notes on articles in the journal or major issues in the field.

Preference will be given to articles that employ a combination of methodologies (e.g., experimental and computational) or that otherwise demonstrate multidisciplinarity.

1. Submission and Peer Review Process
2. Article Types
3. After Acceptance

1. 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://www.editorialmanager.com/cogsci

For help with submissions, please contact: [email protected]

This journal does not charge submission fees.

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.

Free Format submission

Cognitive Science 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 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:
  • 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.)
  • 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):
    • data availability statement
    • funding statement
    • conflict of interest disclosure
    • ethics approval statement
    • permission to reproduce material from other sources

Important: this journal operates a double-anonymized peer review policy. Please anonymize your manuscript and supply a separate title page file.

Open Access

This journal is a subscription journal that offers an Open Access option. You’ll have the option to make your article open access after acceptance, which will be subject to an APC unless a waiver applies. Read more about APCs here.

Preprint Policy

Please find the Wiley preprint policy here.

This journal accepts articles previously published on preprint servers.

Cognitive Science 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.

This Journal operates a double-anonymized peer review process. Authors are responsible for anonymizing their manuscript in order to remain anonymous to the reviewers throughout the peer review process (see “Main Text File” below for more details). Since this journal also encourages posting of preprints, however, please note that if authors share their manuscript in preprint form this may compromise their anonymity during peer review.

Open Materials Policy: For submissions that include programming code, experimental data, study stimuli, etc., authors are required to share materials so that reviewers gain a clear sense of how a study was conducted, how data were structured and analyzed, how a computational model was implemented, etc. Final, accepted versions of paper must be accompanied by relevant study materials.

During Review: In order to satisfy both this Open Materials Policy and a double-anonymous review process, the journal requires anonymized study materials during the review process. These initial materials may be partial, representing a subset of all materials yet sufficient to illustrate key features of the work to assist the review process (data snapshot, analysis script, model script, etc.). Authors are free to share all their materials if these have already been anonymized. For example, authors may use the Open Science Foundation's anonymized link feature. Authors may also attach anonymized materials as "Supplementary Material" in the journal's Editorial Manager.

After Review: Before a paper is accepted, any empirical study will require the sharing of data, code (stimulus presentation, data analysis, cognitive model, etc.) and other materials in such a way that the work can be reproduced by others. Many public and open-access repositories are committed to preserving materials along with design and analysis plans. These repositories include the Open Science Framework (OSF), GitHub, ICSSR and the Dataverse Project. These and many other qualifying repositories are listed at the Registry of Research Data Repositories (http://www.re3data.org). Personal and most departmental websites do not qualify as repositories.

Exception to Open Materials Policy: Due to such issues as privacy or proprietary constraints, it may not be possible for authors to share all their data or other materials. During the submission process, in Editorial Manager, authors may request an exception to this process with a brief justification.

Data Sharing and Data Availability

This journal encourages data sharing. 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.

Data Citation

Please review Wiley’s Data Citation policy.

Data Protection

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. Please review Wiley’s Data Protection Policy to learn more.

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.

Authorship

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.

Author Pronouns

Authors may now include their personal pronouns in the author bylines of their published articles and on Wiley Online Library. Authors will never be required to include their pronouns; it will always be optional for the author.  Authors can include their pronouns in their manuscript upon submission and can add, edit, or remove their pronouns at any stage upon request. Submitting/corresponding authors should never add, edit, or remove a coauthor’s pronouns without that coauthor’s consent. Where post-publication changes to pronouns are required, these can be made without a correction notice to the paper, following Wiley’s Name Change Policy to protect the author’s privacy. Terms which fall outside of the scope of personal pronouns (e.g. proper or improper nouns), are currently not supported.

ORCID

This journal requires ORCID for the submitting author only. Please refer to Wiley’s resources on ORCID.

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 Obtaining Permission to Reproduce Material.

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.

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. The full names of the authors (first name, middle initial, last name);
3. The authors’ institutional affiliations where the work was conducted (e.g., department, university or company name, city), with a footnote for the author’s present address if different from where the work was conducted;
4. The full mailing address (including street name and postal/zip code) of the corresponding author;
5. 4-8 keywords;
6. Acknowledgments.

Important: this journal operates a double-anonymized peer review policy. Please anonymize your manuscript and supply a separate title page file.

Guidelines for Anonymizing Submissions: Authors should remove their names, affiliations and detailed funding source information from their submitted manuscript. The journal recommends the following checks to ensure integrity of the double-anonymous review process:

• During the review process, ensure manuscripts use third person.
• Remove or anonymize acknowledgements.
• Check any images, figures, etc. in the document to ensure they do not include identifying information.
• Replace citations to the current submission's authors with a consistent anonymized format, such as, "(Anonymous, 2005)."; some self-citations may be necessary to ensure that reviewers understand the importance of their submission, but authors should take care that these self-citations do not reveal their identity.
• Check open material uploads for file names and other potential references to author identities.

Main Text File

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. The main manuscript file can be submitted in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or LaTeX (.tex) format.

Your main document file should include:

• A short informative title containing the major key words. The title should not contain abbreviations;
• Abstract of 150 to 250 words;
• Main body: Sections should be numbered consecutively using Arabic numerals. Subsections within each section should also be numbered, and so on to a depth of 3. (Thus, a paper might include section 2.4.3.) This numbering may be used for cross-referencing;
• Tables (each table complete with title and footnotes);
• Figure legends: At initial submission, figures can be included in the manuscript or can be submitted in separate files. Should your manuscript reach revision stage, figures and tables must be provided as separate files (see below).

LaTeX Guidelines for Submission:

For authors requiring a LaTeX template, we strongly recommend reviewing Wiley’s New Journal Design (NJD) LaTeX Authoring Template.

LaTeX users must use the File Designation "Main Document" from the dropdown box. For reviewing purposes, you should upload to the journal's system a single .pdf that you have generated from your compiled source files.

Should your manuscript reach revision stage, figures and tables must be provided as separate files. You will be asked to provide the LaTeX source files as “Production Files” when submitting your revised manuscript, so that these can be sent to the typesetters if your manuscript is accepted. Please check that you have supplied the following files for typesetting:

• PDF of the finalized source manuscript files compiled without any errors.
• The LaTeX source code files (text, figure captions, and tables, preferably in a single file), BibTeX files (if used), any associated packages/files along with all other files needed for compiling without any errors. This is particularly important if authors have used any LaTeX style or class files, bibliography files (.bbl, .bst. .blg) or packages apart from those used in the NJD LaTeX Template class file.
• Electronic graphics files for the illustrations in Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), PDF or TIFF format. Authors are requested not to create figures using LaTeX codes.

If your manuscript is accepted for publication, we will use the files you upload to typeset your article within a totally digital workflow.

Reference Style

This journal uses APA reference style. Review your reference style guidelines prior to submission.

As this journal offers Free Format submission, however, this is for information only and you do not need to format the references in your article. This will instead be taken care of by the typesetter.

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.

Cover Letter

Authors should provide a concise cover letter with their submission. The cover letter should: a) present an argument for why the submission is appropriate for Cognitive Science (rather than, for example, for a single-discipline journal); b) for extended articles, indicate why an extended article is appropriate; c) confirm that all authors have approved the submission; and d) where data are reported, confirm that ethical guidelines consistent with local variations were adhered to. In the case of extended articles, authors should also make a case for the article's length.

Peer Review

This journal operates a double-anonymized peer review policy. Except where otherwise stated, manuscripts are peer reviewed by at least two anonymous reviewers and an Associate or Assistant Editor. Papers will only be sent to review if the Editor-in-Chief determines that the paper meets the appropriate quality and relevance requirements.

In-house submissions, i.e., papers authored by Editors or Editorial Board members of the title, will be sent to Editors unaffiliated with the author or institution and monitored carefully to ensure there is no peer review bias.

Wiley's policy on the confidentiality of the review process is available here.

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 this 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.

AI Policy

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) tools—such as ChatGPT and others based on large language models (LLMs)—cannot be considered capable of initiating an original piece of research without direction by human authors. They also cannot be accountable for a published work or for research design, which is a generally held requirement of authorship (as discussed in the previous section), nor do they have legal standing or the ability to hold or assign copyright. Therefore—in accordance with COPE’s position statement on AI tools—these tools cannot fulfill the role of, nor be listed as, an author of an article. If an author has used this kind of tool to develop any portion of a manuscript, its use must be described, transparently and in detail, in the Methods or Acknowledgements section. 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. 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 an AIGC 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.

Guidelines on Publishing and Research Ethics in Journal Articles

This journal requires that you include in the manuscript details Institutional Review Board (IRB) approvals (i.e., ethical approval from the lead author's institution), ethical treatment of human and animal research participants, and gathering of informed consent, as appropriate. You will be expected to declare all conflicts of interest, or none, on submission. Please review Wiley’s policies surrounding human studies, animal studies, clinical trial registration, biosecurity, and research reporting guidelines.

This journal follows the core practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and handles cases of research and publication misconduct accordingly (https://publicationethics.org/core-practices).

IThenticate CrossCheck:

This journal uses iThenticate’s CrossCheck software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. Read Wiley’s Top 10 Publishing Ethics Tips for Authors and Wiley’s Publication Ethics Guidelines.

Open Research Badges

This journal is part of Wiley’s Open Research Badges program. The journal's Open Materials Policy above is separate from the Open Science Badges. Authors may choose not to submit a disclosure form for these badges, though they will still be expected to share relevant materials under the Open Materials Policy.

2. Article Types

In all cases, the word limits are intended as approximate upper bounds, excluding references. Authors are encouraged to be as concise as possible within reason and should not aim for the upper limit for their category of article.

3. After Acceptance

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 as well as pay for any applicable APCs.

Copyright & 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. Note that certain funders mandate a particular type of CC license be used.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Correction to Authorship

In accordance with Wiley’s Best Practice Guidelines on Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics and the Committee on Publication Ethics’ guidance, Cognitive Science will allow authors to correct authorship on a submitted, accepted, or published article if a valid reason exists to do so. All authors – including those to be added or removed – must agree to any proposed change. To request a change to the author list, please complete the Request for Changes to a Journal Article Author List Form and contact either the journal’s editorial or production office, depending on the status of the article. Authorship changes will not be considered without a fully completed Author Change form. [Correcting the authorship is different from changing an author’s name; the relevant policy for that can be found in Wiley’s Best Practice Guidelines under “Author name changes after publication.”]