Journal of Medical Psychology

Author Guidelines

OPEN ACCESS JOURNAL

All journal papers will be published Open Access (OA). Articles will be freely available from the moment they are published, also in the pre-press module.

Publication fees for this journal are waived for papers submitted in 2022-2023.

Details about the IOS Press Open Access policy and licenses can be obtained at: IOS Press Open Library

SUBMISSION OF MANUSCRIPT

PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR MANUSCRIPT HERE.

By submitting my article to this journal, I agree to the Author Copyright Agreement, the IOS Press Ethics Policy, and the IOS Press Privacy Policy.

Note that the manuscript should be uploaded as one file with tables and figures included. This file can be a Word document, a PDF, or an embedded zip file (.rar) if separate high resolution figures or a supplemental file such as a video are also to be included with the submission (the file size maximum for a video is 25MB). If the video is too large to submit, please contact r.holst@iospress.nl to arrange a file transfer. For more information about submitting supplementary data see “Supplementary Data.”

Resubmissions should include the manuscript number in the cover letter. Resubmissions should clearly mention that the submission is a Revision and include the reference number in the submission letter. The author's replies to the reviewer comments should be included in the revised manuscript itself (at the top). The revised paper should always be a Word document.

Submission of a Review paper should be clearly mentioned in the cover letter to help the editorial process.

Submission of an article is understood to imply that the article is original and unpublished and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. Any possible conflict of interest, financial or otherwise, related to the submitted work must be clearly indicated in the manuscript.

ETHICS POLICIES AND PATIENT PERMISSIONS

Procedures involving experiments on human subjects should be in accord with the ethical standards of the Committee on Human Experimentation of the institution in which the experiments were done or in accord with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975. The author must state compliance in the cover letter and in the Methods section of the article.

Procedures involving experimentation on animal subjects should be in accord with either the guide of the institution in which the experiments were done, or with the National Research Council’s guide for the care and use of laboratory animals. The author must state compliance in the cover letter and in the Methods section of the article.

Preferably patients in figures should be unrecognizable. Authors are responsible for obtaining patient permission for use of the material from all recognizable participants in photographs, videos, or other information that may be published in the Journal or on the journal’s website. A statement that permission was granted by the patient must accompany the figure legend. Do not use study participants' names, initials, or hospital numbers anywhere in the manuscript (including figures).

PREPARATION OF MANUSCRIPTS

Research Reports

Organization and style of presentation
1. Manuscripts must be written in English. Authors whose native language is not English are advised to consult a professional English language editing service or a native English speaker prior to submission.

2. Manuscripts should be double spaced throughout with wide margins (2.5cm or 1in), including the abstract and references. Every page of the manuscript, including the title page, references, tables, etc., should include a page number centered at the bottom.

3. Manuscripts should be organized in the following order with headings and subheadings typed on a separate line, without indentation.

Title page

• Title (should be clear, descriptive and concise).
• Full name(s) of author(s)
• Full affiliation(s). Delineate affiliations with lowercase letters.
• Present address of author(s), if different from affiliation.
• Running title (45 characters or less, including spaces).
• Complete correspondence address, including telephone number and email address.
• Leave the author information blank if double-blind peer review is wished for, but do include the information in the cover letter.

If any author is also a member of the Journal of Medical Psychology Editorial Board, this should be declared in the Conflict of Interest Section (see instructions in the section for Conflict of Interest)

Changes in Authorship

When submitting the manuscript the author listing and order should be final. If any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list does need to be made after submission, this can be done only before acceptance and with the Editor's approval. To request such a change, the Editor must receive the following from the corresponding author: (1) the reason for the change in author list and (2) written confirmation from all authors, including the affected author, that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement.

Only in exceptional circumstances will the Editor consider the addition, deletion or rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted. While the Editor considers the request, publication of the manuscript will be suspended. If the manuscript has already been published in an issue, any requests approved by the Editor will result in an Erratum.

Please read the IOS Press authorship policy for further information.

Abstract and Keywords
-The abstract for research papers should follow the "structured abstract" format:
BACKGROUND: 
OBJECTIVE:
METHODS: 
RESULTS:
CONCLUSIONS:
The abstract should try to be no longer than 250 words.
- For other papers such as Reviews, the abstract should be clear, descriptive, and self-explanatory, and no longer than 250 words.
- Include a list of 4-10 keywords. These keywords should be terms from the MeSH database.

Introduction

Materials and Methods
Procedures involving experiments on human subjects should be in accord with the ethical standards of the Committee on Human Experimentation of the institution in which the experiments were done or in accord with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975. The author must state compliance in the cover letter and in the Methods section of the article.

Procedures involving experimentation on animal subjects should be in accord with either the guide of the institution in which the experiments were done, or with the National Research Council’s guide for the care and use of laboratory animals. The author must state compliance in the cover letter and in the Methods section of the article.

If applicable to the study, Ethics statements and/or patient permissions must be included in the Materials and Methods section (see top of this page "ETHICS POLICIES AND PATIENT PERMISSIONS"

Results

Discussion

Acknowledgments

Include individuals or companies which have assisted with your study, including advisors, administrative support and suppliers who may have donated or given materials used in the study.

If there are no acknowledgments, then do still include this section and insert: "The authors have no acknowledgments to report."

Funding

Include all funding sources for the study. If there is no funding involved, then do still include this section and insert: "The authors have no funding to report."

Conflict of Interest

All affiliations or financial involvement (e.g., employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants, patents received or pending, royalties) with any organization or entity with a financial interest in, or in financial competition with, the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript must be disclosed in the submitted manuscript.

If there is no conflict of interest to declare, do still include this section and insert "The authors have no conflict of interest to report". If an author is also on the Editorial Board of this journal, the following statement should be included in this section: "<AUTHOR> is an Editorial Board member of this journal, but was not involved in the peer-review process nor had access to any information regarding its peer review.''

References
Authors are requested to use the Vancouver citation style. Place citations as numbers in square brackets in the text. All publications cited in the text should be presented in a list of references at the end of the manuscript. List the references in the order in which they appear in the text. Only articles published or accepted for publication should be listed in the reference list. Submitted articles can be listed as (author(s), unpublished data). If an article has a DOI, this should be provided after the page number details. The number is added after the letters 'doi'. Manuscripts will not be considered if they do not conform to the Vancouver citation guidelines.

References must be listed in Vancouver style:
[1] Rose ME, Huerbin MB, Melick J, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Regulation of interstitial excitatory amino acid concentrations after cortical contusion injury. Brain Res. 2002;935(1-2):40-6.
[2] Murray PR, Rosenthal KS, Kobayashi GS, Pfaller MA. Medical microbiology. 4th ed. St. Louis: Mosby; 2002.
[3] Berkow R, Fletcher AJ, editors. The Merck manual of diagnosis and therapy. 16th ed. Rahway (NJ): Merck Research Laboratories; 1992.
[4] Meltzer PS, Kallioniemi A, Trent JM. Chromosome alterations in human solid tumors. In: Vogelstein B, Kinzler KW, editors. The genetic basis of human cancer. New York: McGrawHill; 2002. p. 93-113.
[5] Canadian Cancer Society [homepage on the Internet]. Toronto: The Society; 2006 [updated 2006 May 12; cited 2006 Oct 17]. Available from: www.cancer.ca/.
[6] Tian D, Araki H, Stahl E, Bergelson J, Kreitman M. Signature of balancing selection in Arabidopsis. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. In press 2002.
[7] Fletcher D, Wagstaff CRD. Organisational psychology in elite sport: its emergence, application and future. Psychol Sport Exerc. 2009;10(4):427-34. doi:10.1016/j.psychsport.2009.03.009.

Tables
- Number according to their sequence in the text. The text should include references to all tables.
- Provide each table on a separate page of the manuscript after the references.
- Include a brief and self-explanatory title with any explanations essential to the understanding of the table given in footnotes at the bottom of the table.
- Vertical lines should not be used to separate columns. Leave some extra space between the columns instead.

Figure Legends
The author is required to have obtained patient permission from all recognizable participants in photographs, videos, or other information that may be published in the Journal or on the journal’s website. A statement that permission was granted by the patient must accompany the figure legend. Do not use study participants' names, initials, or hospital numbers in the legend, figure, or anywhere in the manuscript.

Figures
- Number the figures according to their sequence in the text. The text should include references to all figures.
- Figures should preferably be formatted in TIF or EPS format. JPG is also acceptable.
- Figures should be designed with the format of JMP in mind and preferable sized as they will appear in the pdf. A single column of the journal is 77mm and two columns are 165mm.
- Figures should be at 300 dpi or higher and be cropped to include the figure only (no blank space). CMYK is preferred for color figures.
- On figures where a scale is needed, use bar scales to avoid problems if the figure needs to be reduced.
- Each illustration should have a brief self-explanatory legend that should be typed separately from the figure in the section of the manuscript following the tables.
- Color figures are free in the electronic version of the journal (this journal is not printed).

Supplementary Material
Supplementary material can be submitted with the manuscript, included within the manuscript after the Figures and Tables (or otherwise after the References). Each supplementary item should have a legend and should not exceed the file size of 10MB. Supplemental videos can be submitted separately (see top of page for submission guidelines of videos). A short description of the supplementary items should be included under the header of “Supplementary Material” within the manuscript before the “References”. Supplementary material will be made available in the format in which it was provided. Large datasets should be hosted on the author’s own or institute’s website or in an appropriate database, and should be properly cited within the manuscript.

Review Articles
Review Articles should be authoritative and topical and provide comprehensive and balanced coverage of a timely and/or controversial issue. Review Articles should be prepared as detailed above for a Research Report, omitting Introduction through Discussion, and include a conclusion. An abstract must also be included. The length of the Review Article is at the discretion of the author but should be within reasonable limits. The Editor-in-Chief can be consulted regarding reviews of unusual length (>10,000 words).

Short Communications
A short communication is an article of original scholarship of unusual interest of less than 1500 words (not including references). An abstract of 100 words or less should be included with no subdivison of text into sections. References should be formatted as above. A total of two tables and/or figures are allowed.

Hypotheses
A hypothesis article should be a balanced and insightful consideration of a topic with novel hypotheses well presented and supported. The article should be prepared as a Research Report but without Methods or Results sections.

Case Reports
Clinical case reports will be considered for publication, but they should feature some novelty, such as improving our understanding of a pathomechanism.

Book Reviews
Book reviews should be 750 words or less and without sections. Suggestions can be proposed to the Editor-in-Chief.

Letters to the Editor
Authors can submit comments of 1000 words or less concerning prior articles published in JMP to the Editor-in-Chief through the Editorial Office.

Commentaries
Commentaries can be around 1000 words with an abstract and no other subdivisions.

REMEMBER TO INCLUDE

In cover letter:
- Name, postal address, phone number and e-mail address of the corresponding author.
- Name of an Associate Editor with expertise in the area of the study (if no Associate Editor is suitable, the Editorial Office will handle the submission).
- Statement that all authors have contributed to the work, agree with the presented findings, and that the work has not been published before nor is being considered for publication in another journal.
- A list of at least 4-6 potential reviewers knowledgeable in the area of the study and potential reviewer conflicts.
- Statement that procedures involving experiments on human subjects are done in accord with the ethical standards of the Committee on Human Experimentation of the institution in which the experiments were done or in accord with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975.
- Statement that procedures involving experimentation on animal subjects are done in accord with either the guide of the institution in which the experiments were done, or with the National Research Council's guide for the care and use of laboratory animals.

In manuscript:
- Compliance with guidelines on human experimentation as well as protocol approval by a local Institutional Review Board should be specified.
- Compliance with guidelines of animal experimentation as well as protocol approval by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee should be specified.
- If there are Figures with recognizable patients then the patient permission for use of the Figure should be specified in the Figure legend.
- Statement of all financial and material support for this research and any potential conflicts should also be clearly identified in the the acknowledgment and Conflict of Interest sections. If there is no Conflict-of-Interest then still add this statement.

Resubmissions
Resubmissions should include the manuscript number and a reference that the paper is a revision. The point-by-point response to the previous reviews should be included at the top of the manuscript. Please submit a tracked version of the paper so editors and reviewers can easily find the changes, or otherwise highlight the edited sections by color or by another detectable way.

Financial Disclosure
All affiliations with or financial involvement (e.g., employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, royalties) with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or in financial competition with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript are completely disclosed in the letter of submission.

All financial and material support for this research and work are clearly identified in the manuscript including listing of support specified in the letter of submission that might constitute or give the appearance of influencing the findings, based on the judgment of the Editor-in-Chief in consultation with the Associate Editor handling the review of the manuscript.

PRE-PRESS AND PROOFS

Accepted articles will be placed online as "pre-press" articles two weeks after acceptance. The corresponding author will receive the PDF proof around the same time, and is asked to check this proof carefully (the publisher will execute a cursory check only). Corrections other than typesetter's errors should be avoided. Costs arising from excessive corrections will be charged to the authors. The pre-press file will remain as the uncorrected proof version until the article is published in an issue and the final published version replaces the pre-press file.

Policy regarding Funding Agencies’ Access Policy mandate (PubMed Central)

The Journal of Medical Psychology is a full Open Access journal, which helps authors to comply with major funder mandates. Because the Journal of Medical Psychology is a newly-launched journal it is currently not yet able to deposit articles directly into Pubmed Central for the author, and the author must do this themselves. IOS Press grants authors permission to freely deposit the published PDF to PubMed Central and affiliated repositories after final publication in an issue with no embargo period. The guidelines for PubMed Central submission can be found here (follow Submission Method C). As soon as the Journal of Medical Psychology has passed the Pubmed Central application review, IOS Press will be able to deposit the articles for the authors directly on publication, and these instructions will be updated accordingly. Of course it is a priority to the Editors and Publisher to have this journal listed into Pubmed Central as soon as possible to optimize our service to our authors.

If requested by the author, Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Wellcome Trust funded Open Access articles will be published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). After acceptance of their article, the author should send a separate message to the publisher at r.holst@iospress.nl to notify that their article (include reference number) should be published Open Access under the RCUK mandate. An extra fee applies for CC-BY publications. Here also the author must make the deposit to Pubmed Central themselves using Submission Method C until the Journal of Medical Psychology has been accepted by Pubmed Central.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright of your article
Authors submitting a manuscript do so on the understanding that they have read and agreed to the terms of the IOS Press Author Copyright Agreement.

Article sharing
Authors of journal articles are permitted to self-archive and share their work through institutional repositories, personal websites, and preprint servers. Authors have the right to use excerpts of their article in other works written by the authors themselves, provided that the original work is properly cited. The consent for sharing an article, in whole or in part, depends on the version of the article that is shared, where it is shared, and the copyright license under which the article is published. Please refer to the IOS Press Article Sharing Policy for further information.

Quoting from other publications
Authors, when quoting from someone else's work or when considering reproducing figures or tables from a book or journal article, should make sure that they are not infringing a copyright. Although in general authors may quote from other published works, permission should be obtained from the holder of the copyright if there will be substantial extracts or reproduction of tables, plates, or other figures. If the copyright holder is not the author of the quoted or reproduced material, it is recommended that the permission of the author should also be sought. Material in unpublished letters and manuscripts is also protected and must not be published unless permission has been obtained. Submission of a paper will be interpreted as a statement that the author has obtained all the necessary permission. A suitable acknowledgement of any borrowed material must always be made.

Quoting from Journal of Medical Psychology Permissions for use of materials published in JMP Reports (figures, tables, thesis publication) can be requested at publisher@iospress.nl.

COMPLIMENTARY COPY AND PURCHASE

Complimentary copy
The corresponding author of a contribution to the journal will receive the published pdf by email after final publication, unless otherwise stated. Conference proceedings and abstract issues will be sent to the guest-editor only.

How to order reprints or IOS Press journals and books
Note that this journal is online only and articles are Open Access. If you wish to order and distribute commercial reprints of a published article, please contact the publisher for a quotation. IOS Press, Email: editorial@iospress.nl.

An author is entitled to 25% discount on IOS Press books. See Author's Discount (25%) on all IOS Press book publications.

KUDOS

Authors of published articles (non-prepress, final articles) will be contacted by Kudos. Kudos is a service that helps researchers maximize the impact and visibility of their research. It allows authors to enrich their articles with lay metadata, add links to related materials and promote their articles through the Kudos system to a wider public. Authors will receive no more than three emails: one invitation and a maximum of two reminders to register for the service and link the published article to their profile. Using and registering for Kudos remains entirely optional. For more information, please have a look at our authors section.

HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR WORK

Would you like some pointers on how to help your research achieve a wider reach and greater impact? Please consult our Promotional Toolkit for Authors for tips.

Please visit the IOS Press Authors page for further information.