Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science Submission Guidelines
Updated 4/29/2024
Call for Participants: Multilab Registered Replication Report
Call for Papers: Adversarial Collaborations
AMPPS JOINS THE PCI RR
AMPPS is pleased to be a member of the Peer Community in Registered Reports (PCI RR), which performs Stage 1 and Stage 2 review of RR preprints.
As a “PCI RR-friendly” journal, AMPPS will automatically offer Stage 1 in-principle acceptance (IPA) to any quantitative Stage 1 RR within the journal’s disciplinary scope that receives IPA at PCI RR, and will accept without further peer review any Stage 2 RR that has been recommended by PCI RR, subject to the manuscript meeting applicable journal requirements which can be found here.
Authors intending to publish in AMPPS via PCI RR should submit their manuscript to AMPPS only after a final positive Stage 2 recommendation from PCI RR.
On submission, the manuscript will be checked by the editor to confirm that the submission is identical to the Stage 2 manuscript that is approved by PCI RR. Acceptance will be subject to the editor’s satisfaction that the manuscript is the same as the preprint approved by PCI RR.
Authors taking advantage of the PCI RR track should submit their Stage 2 Registered Report using our usual submission system. The manuscript must include the URL to the reviews and recommendation at PCI RR. The submission must also be accompanied by a cover letter stating that the authors are submitting via the PCI RR track, including a URL to the recommended preprint, and confirming that the manuscript is identical to the recommended preprint.
Additional details regarding PCI RR may be found here.
IMPORTANT UPDATE ON OUR PEER REVIEW PROCESS
Beginning on April 1, 2022, AMPPS is transitioning to a Transparent Peer Review (TPR) system. For papers that are accepted at AMPPS, all elements of the review history will be published on Publons, linked from the paper, including all peer reviews, action and decision letters, and authors’ responses. (For papers that are not accepted, no elements of the peer review will be published.) Reviewers may remain anonymous or identify themselves as part of the peer review, but all aspects of authors’ responses and correspondence with the journal will be identifiable and documented within the TPR system, as will the journal’s action and decision letters. Our move to TPR reflects an effort to increase transparency in psychological science and to provide reviewers the opportunity to take credit for their work. In addition, we believe TPR provides interested scientists and early career researchers the opportunity to study the peer review process and, if interested, dig a little more deeply into the back-end decisions for any given paper. Here is an example, from a different SAGE journal, of how the TPR will operate: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/11795565211056649. As you will see, the peer review history link opens to Publons and the review history includes a DOI that can be shared and cited. All papers submitted to AMPPS after April 1, 2022 will be automatically enrolled in the TPR system; during submission, authors will be asked to confirm their understanding that these documents will be published if their manuscript is ultimately accepted.
PUBLISHING MODEL
In 2021, AMPPS shifted to an open access publication model. Open Access publishing means that all articles and related content are freely and publicly available on the journal’s website; all articles are published under a Creative Commons license. As part of this change, AMPPS is now online only: print issues will no longer be produced, and articles will be published online immediately after completion of the copyediting and production process. As part of the transition to open access and online publication, all previously published AMPPS articles have been made freely and publicly available under the same Creative Commons license as of January 1, 2021.
Under a traditional publishing model, the costs of production largely are covered by subscription fees paid to the publisher by individuals and university libraries. Open access means that libraries no longer pay subscription costs for AMPPS. To offset the costs of production and publication, authors will be charged an Article Processing Charge (APC) of $1,000 after acceptance of their paper. This fee does not reflect the actual costs of production to APS which are substantially higher. APS has decided to subsidize those additional costs in order to keep the APC charge as low as possible for authors. During submission, authors will be asked to acknowledge that they understand the article will be subject to an APC should it be accepted for publication. The APC will be discounted or waived for authors who can demonstrate that they lack funding from their institution, grants, or other sources to pay it (AMPPS APC Waivers Policy). You will not be required to pay using personal funds, but we do encourage you to explore possible sources of funding that might be available before applying for a waiver. To apply for a waiver, please send an inquiry to [email protected].
APC charges and waiver requests are processed by the production staff after acceptance of an article, and the editorial team is not involved in that process; editors and reviewers are blind to all aspects of the processing of article charges. Nothing about the journal’s standard, rigorous submission, review, and editing process will change as a result of this shift to open access publishing.
Please see APS’s announcement and FAQ for more information about the conversion of AMPPS to open access.
Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science (AMPPS) welcomes submissions that communicate advances in methods, practices, and metascience from all areas of scientific psychology and related disciplines. The journal publishes a range of article types, including empirical articles that exemplify best practices, articles that discuss current research methods and practices in an accessible manner, and tutorials that teach researchers how to use new tools in their own research programs. An explicit part of the journal’s mission is to encourage discussion of methodological and analytical questions across multiple branches of psychological science and related disciplines. Because AMPPS is a general audience journal, all articles should be accessible and understandable to the broad membership of APS—not just to methodologists and statisticians. The journal particularly encourages articles that bring useful advances from within a specialized area to a broader audience. Submissions that push scientific and methodological boundaries are encouraged, provided that they would be relevant and of interest to a broad readership.
Read the latest editorial policies from the APS Publications Committee.
Quick Links
- General Journal Information
- Preparing Your Manuscript
- The Review and Editing Process
- The Production Process
General Journal Information
Articles in AMPPS will not compete with those in other APS journals. For example, empirical articles in AMPPS may involve contributions from multiple research teams or be of larger scale than those published in traditional empirical journals. Other AMPPS articles will cover current practices and considerations relevant to open science in psychology, and these will be unique to the journal. In addition, AMPPS publishes multilab collaborative studies (e.g., adversarial collaborations, consortium studies, team efforts at replication). AMPPS welcomes metascience contributions that examine research practices in the field.
All articles in AMPPS will strive to adhere to best practices for open and transparent research, with de-identified data, code, and materials publicly available to the fullest extent possible. Empirical submissions to AMPPS are expected to be eligible for all three open-science badges available in APS journals (Open Data, Open Materials, Preregistration; see the APS Open Practice Badges page). Authors are encouraged to provide video recordings of their testing settings and experimental procedures.
Not all analyses must be confirmatory for an article to earn a Preregistration badge. However, all confirmatory hypothesis tests are expected to be preregistered in submissions to AMPPS (e.g., articles might include a study reporting exploratory tests, accompanied by a preregistered replication). AMPPS also publishes analyses of preexisting data sets, not all of which can be preregistered. Authors should indicate clearly which hypotheses and analyses were preregistered and which were not. Authors with questions about preregistration should read this discussion written by the editors of APS’s three empirical journals.
The online versions of articles on the AMPPS website can include interactive content such as videos, Shiny applications, and working code snippets; the print and PDF versions of articles with interactive content will contain a link to it. AMPPS encourages the use of interactive content, particularly in tutorials. AMPPS authors may deposit materials in a permanent repository of their choice.
Manuscripts must be submitted through the AMPPS submission website. If, after reviewing these guidelines, authors have questions about the appropriateness of a manuscript for AMPPS, they are encouraged to email the editor at [email protected] to inquire.
SAGE is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. We strongly encourage all authors and co-authors to use ORCID iDs during the peer-review process. If you already have an ORCID iD, please login to your account on SAGE Track and edit the account information to link to your ORCID iD. If you do not already have an ORCID iD, please login to your SAGE Track account to create your unique identifier and automatically add it to your profile. PLEASE NOTE: ORCID iDs must be linked to author accounts prior to manuscript acceptance or they will not be displayed upon publication. ORCID iDs cannot be linked during the copyediting phase.
Preparing Your Manuscript
Types of Articles
AMPPS accepts articles reporting novel types of empirical work and nonempirical articles on research practices, metascience, statistical practices, and methodology. AMPPS publishes two types of empirical articles:
AMPPS publishes three types of nonempirical articles:
Each of these article types is described in detail below. Authors can use this interactive tool to determine whether a manuscript is appropriate for AMPPS.
AMPPS does not impose word limits on articles, but the word counts noted below provide a rough guide to expectations. Shorter articles are encouraged, and substantially longer articles may be permitted with prior approval from the Editor.
Types of Empirical Manuscripts
Most Empirical Articles at AMPPS take the form of registered reports in which the initial submission and review process occurs prior to data collection. AMPPS publishes three types of Empirical Articles:
- Large-scale, multi-lab collaborations. These papers report a strong test of a hypothesis or a precise estimate of an effect by combining evidence from many research teams. Such articles can include Registered Replication Reports, ManyLabs projects, adversarial collaborations, etc.
- Meta-science studies. These empirical articles provide evidence about research practices of relevance to readers from multiple subfields of psychology.
- Registered Reports on methodological issues. AMPPS considers single-lab (or collaborative) registered reports focusing primarily on methodological issues that (a) are relevant to multiple areas of psychology and/or (b) that are of broad practical importance.
AMPPS does not publish single-lab empirical articles addressing theoretical questions within a literature (i.e., the sorts of articles regularly published by journals such as Psychological Science or field-specific journals). AMPPS also does not consider empirical papers that focus on a method practices for a single task or that address method or research practices relevant primarily within a single literature or subfield of psychology; papers in AMPPS must be of interest to and relevant for researchers from many areas of psychology. Finally, AMPPS does not publish single-lab direct replications (although we do consider large-scale, multi-lab direct replications in the form of registered replication reports).
Empirical Articles
Empirical Articles in AMPPS should adhere to and demonstrate rigorous reporting and documentation standards: Studies should be preregistered whenever feasible, data and materials should be available from an independent third-party repository during the review stage and afterward, and so forth. Empirical Articles can report on studies across the full range of methodological approaches, from field observation to laboratory research, provided that they exemplify best practices or novel methodological approaches. They also can report new analyses of data collected previously. Submissions that are inappropriate for AMPPS may be rejected prior to review.
The Method and Results sections of Empirical Articles should be concise, but complete and accessible. Every Empirical Article should fully describe the procedures necessary to reproduce the study and should fully convey the results of the study. Concisely reported robustness checks are encouraged, and more extensive analyses can be included in Supplemental Material. Results and discussion should be combined to ensure clear and concise communication of findings. Broader theoretical discussion and speculation should be confined to the General Discussion section. Tables and figures may be used as necessary to convey the results.
The journal welcomes Empirical Articles that take the form of registered reports. For registered reports, the primary review and revision process occurs prior to data collection and focuses on evaluating and improving the introduction, methods, and analysis plan (see https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/ampps/registered-report-guidelines for detailed guidelines and examples).
For registered reports, authors submit a manuscript that includes a complete introduction, Method section(s), and Results section(s). The Results section(s) should be written as if the data had been collected, with placeholders—for example, “t(XX) = XXXX, p = XXXX”—for the results of any statistical tests and contingent language illustrating how different outcomes will be described (e.g., “the observed effect was [larger than | comparable to | smaller than] the predicted one”). Ideally, all analysis scripts should be written prior to data collection, and the Results section(s) can include tables and figures generated using simulated data to illustrate how each outcome will be tested and reported.
The submission of a registered report should include links to all materials that will be used to conduct the study and all scripts that will be used to analyze the data. Once a registered report has been provisionally accepted, the authors conduct the study and analyze the collected data following the preregistered plan. Assuming that all prespecified conditions have been met and that the actual study has adhered to the registered plan, the article will be accepted regardless of the outcome of the study. Note that the final article can include additional analyses beyond those described in the original submission. However, those additional analyses should not be treated as confirmatory hypothesis tests and should be clearly marked as exploratory.
- The suggested maximum length for Empirical Articles is 5,000 words, including the introduction, presentation of methods and results, discussion, and references.
Registered Replication Reports (RRRs)
A Registered Replication Report is a special type of registered report that describes the meta-analytic result of a set of independently conducted direct replications of an important original study. These replications all follow a preapproved, preregistered protocol and analysis plan. The decision about whether or not to launch an RRR involves a multistage process to determine (a) whether the original study has high replication value, (b) whether the results would be of broad interest regardless of the outcome, and (c) whether enough laboratories could participate given the resources available. If the editors determine that an RRR would be of value, the submission process works much like that for an Empirical Article that is a registered report. The introduction and General Discussion sections for RRRs should be brief, objective, and focused on the study under investigation. RRR manuscripts should not include extensive speculation or theorizing. For more information about RRRs, see Simons and Holcombe (2014).
- Introductions should be concise (< 1,500 words) and focused on the motivations for conducting the replication study rather than a review of the broader literature.
- General Discussion sections should be brief (500–1,000 words).
Types of Nonempirical Articles
General Articles in AMPPS can cover any topic related to methods and practices. For example, they can report simulation studies, discuss metascience, evaluate and compare different analysis techniques, and present reanalyses of existing data. AMPPS does not publish methods and statistics articles that are written primarily for methodological or statistical experts; the target audience should be the broad membership of APS. Authors should assume that readers come from all subfields of psychology and have a level of statistical training equivalent to one or two graduate psychology statistics courses at some point in their past. The journal does not publish articles focused on methods or practices specific to a single substantive content area; articles must be relevant to and useful for a broad readership. For the same reason, AMPPS typically does not publish validation studies for new materials/tasks that will be of relevance only to researchers who use those types of materials. The journal also does not publish General Articles on best practices for the use of a single task/measure. AMPPS publishes articles focused on methodological issues relevant to a broad audience of psychological scientists. By contrast, qualitative or quantitative literature reviews (e.g., meta-analyses, systematic reviews) are generally a better fit for other journals, unless they serve the methodological issue, or the review itself is methodological and of broad interest across psychology (e.g., meta-science reviews). Reporting of any systematic review material must adhere to the PRISMA guidelines, and authors should include the PRISMA flowchart and form with their submission. Authors should provide the code necessary to reproduce any simulations, analyses, or results.
- The suggested length for General Articles is 3,000 to 5,000 words.
Tutorials provide hands-on, practical guidance for researchers. Any topic that could enhance research practices or methods might be suitable for a Tutorial, provided that the material covered in the Tutorial would be relevant to and useful for the journal’s broad readership; Tutorials of more narrow interest or of relevance to only one subfield or literature typically are not appropriate for AMPPS. AMPPS welcomes Tutorials that focus on helping researchers learn to use statistical tools, improve their statistical practices and intuitions, better their data-management and lab practices, enhance the reliability and reproducibility of their research, engage in transparent and open practices, and so on. Tutorials often include dynamic, interactive content and should provide concrete guidance rather than solely abstract principles. Some Tutorials will be solicited by the editorial team, and the team welcomes suggestions and proposals for Tutorials.
- Most Tutorials should be brief (< 3,000 words), but they may be longer if necessary to explain the content fully and make it accessible to and usable by readers.
- The introduction to a Tutorial typically should be no more than one to two paragraphs long (< 500 words) and should not include an extensive literature review. The introduction should explain the motivation for the Tutorial and highlight how learning the contents will benefit readers.
- Tutorials should have a brief summary of their contents, rather than a General Discussion section.
- Tutorials should be accompanied by publicly available code and all resources necessary for researchers (and reviewers) to follow the text.
- Tutorials can include a list of additional resources (e.g., citations and links) for readers who would like to learn more.
AMPPS invites Commentary articles on any papers published in our journal. Commentary articles are submitted similar to all other paper types and should be no more than 1500 words (excluding references). In all cases, authors of the original article (that is, the target article for the Commentary) will be invited to submit a reply article. From time to time, AMPPS receives multiple Commentary articles on a single target article. For example, when we publish major Registered Replication Reports, there are occasions in which we receive multiple Commentary articles. In these situations, we may organize all the commentaries into a set, then ask the authors of the target article to reply to the Commentary articles; we make an effort to publish the set of Commentary articles and the reply together in a single online issue.
All Commentary articles submitted to AMPPS will receive peer review. For Commentary articles in response to General Articles, Tutorials, and non-Registered Reports, we will solicit input from at least one independent reviewer in the field. Commentary articles on Registered Reports will be peer-reviewed by one of the editors of AMPPS (including the Deputy Editor or Associate Editors) who is not the handling editor— that is, one editor will handle the paper and the Commentary will receive an independent peer review from another editor. We typically review Commentary articles for tone, civility, coherence, and clarity.
Content Requirements
AMPPS is trialing the publication of CRediT author contribution statements. At submission stage, there will be the option to list the roles that each author was responsible for. Please refer to the CRediT Gateway page for more information.
Articles in AMPPS should adhere to the following policies regarding reporting of statistics and manuscript structure.
Statistics
All statistics reported in AMPPS should be fully reproducible from the data. Authors should provide all statistical scripts and data necessary to reproduce the reported analyses. Authors are strongly encouraged to use open-access tools for their data analysis to allow for maximal reproducibility by other researchers. Authors are also strongly encouraged to verify the accuracy of any reported statistical analyses (e.g., by using online tools such as the R package statcheck or the statcheck Web tool).
When using inferential statistics, authors should clearly specify both the proximal population from which they sampled (e.g., the subject pool at their university, Amazon Mechanical Turk) and the assumed target population for their inferences (e.g., students at American universities, typically developing primary-school children). They should also specify and justify their assumptions about the generality of the materials and testing context used in the study (see Simons, Shoda, & Lindsay, 2017, for guidance).
All statistics should be reported to an appropriate number of decimal places given the precision of the measures involved. Reported p values should be exact (e.g., p = .007 rather than p < .01). All statistical tests should be accompanied by an appropriate effect-size estimate, either in the original units or standardized. Repeated measures analyses should be accompanied by an indication of the correlation between the measures, a reliability estimate, and an effect-size estimate. Effect sizes should be accompanied by confidence intervals.
Given that AMPPS is devoted to discussing and debating best practices, the journal does not prescribe or endorse any particular analytic approach. Researchers should strive to illustrate and communicate the merits of and rationale for the approach they take.
Manuscript Structure
Submissions should follow the guidelines of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) for references, abbreviations, and symbols. AMPPS encourages authors to embed figures in the manuscript near where they are referenced rather than to put all figures at the end. Similarly, tables should be embedded in the text unless they occupy more than one manuscript page; larger tables can be included at the end of the manuscript. After acceptance, authors will need to provide a high-quality version of each figure for production purposes.
For the review process, AMPPS permits submission of an already-formatted article (generated using LaTeX, R Markdown, or other methods) in addition to the pdf or Word version that must be submitted as the primary manuscript file. Authors who wish to submit an already-formatted article in addition to the primary manuscript can submit both the formatted (“knit”) document and the file used to generate it as supplementary files. Such formatted documents (e.g., R Notebooks) allow for a completely reproducible process that incorporates both the manuscript text and analyses within a single file.
Authors should provide access to working versions of any interactive demonstrations or tools (e.g., Shiny Apps, Tutorial videos). If the authors lack a way to host such content that would permit anonymous review, they should contact the editorial team before submission.
Disclosures
All articles must include the following two sections immediately after the main text, before the reference section:
Author Contributions:
Authorship implies significant participation in the research reported or in writing the manuscript, including participation in the design and/or interpretation of reported experiments or results, participation in the acquisition and/or analysis of data, and participation in the drafting and/or revising of the manuscript. All authors must agree to the order in which the authors are listed and must have read the final manuscript and approved its submission. They must also agree to take responsibility for the work in the event that its integrity or veracity is questioned.
Furthermore, as part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent, and fair peer review and publication process, APS journals have adopted the use of CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy). CRediT is a high-level taxonomy, including 14 roles that can be used to represent the roles typically played by contributors to scientific scholarly output.
These roles describe the possible contributions to the published work:
Conceptualization: Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims
Methodology; Development or design of methodology; creation of models
Software: Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components
Validation Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/ reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs
Formal Analysis Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data
Investigation: Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection
Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools
Data Curation: Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse
Writing – Original Draft: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation)
Writing – Review & Editing: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision–including pre- or postpublication stages
Visualization: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/ data presentation
Supervision: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team
Project Administration: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution
Funding Acquisition: Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
In order to adhere to SAGE’s authorship criteria authors must have been responsible for at least one of the following CRediT roles:
- Conceptualization
- Methodology
- Formal Analysis
- Investigation
AND at least one of the following: - Writing – Original Draft Preparation
- Writing – Review & Editing
Authors should indicate their contributions by role. For example: “Conceptualization: D. Simons, A. Holcombe, and M. Augilera; Methodology: T. Sossou; Formal Analysis: D. Simons and J. Xian; Investigation: M. Augilera, T. Sossou, and J. Xian; Writing – Original Draft Preparation: D. Simons and A. Holcombe; Writing – Review & Editing: D. Simons, A. Holcombe, M. Augilera, T. Sossou, and J. Xian.
Conflicts of Interest: Authors should identify any conflicts of interest in this section (and should also report them during the submission process). If authors have no conflicts of interest, they should state, “The author(s) declare that there were no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.”
All articles may also include the following sections after the main text and before the reference list, as appropriate:
- Acknowledgments: Authors should use this section to identify any people who should be credited for their assistance with the reported research.
- Funding: This section should be used to acknowledge funding sources, in complete sentences and with the full names of funders spelled out.
- Supplemental Material: If Supplemental Material will be posted on the journal’s Web site, include this heading and the appropriate link will be added during editing.
- Prior versions: If part or all of a submitted manuscript was previously posted to a blog or to a preprint archive, the authors should provide a link to that source and briefly indicate what aspects of the submitted manuscript are shared with that prior version.
All Empirical Articles, as well as any other article that is eligible for the Open Data, Open Materials, or Preregistration badge, must also include the following content in a separate Disclosures section immediately prior to the Method section:
- Preregistration: This subsection of the Disclosures section provides one or more links to any preregistration documentation. If only some of the reported studies were preregistered, this subsection should indicate which ones were and which ones were not.
- Data, materials, and online resources: This subsection provides one or more permanent, persisting links to a public archive (e.g., osf.io, perma.cc, clinicaltrials.gov) where readers can access any code, materials, de-identified data, or other resources . It should also refer to any Supplemental Material that will be posted on the journal’s Web site. If any materials or data are not publicly available, this paragraph should explain why and should note how researchers can access them for research purposes.
- Reporting: For all manuscripts reporting new empirical work, the text in this subsection should state, “We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures in the study” (see Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011). If any aspect of this statement is untrue or not applicable, the authors should instead explain why (e.g., “This study involved an analysis of existing data rather than new data collection”). For studies not involving new empirical work, authors should verify that they have reported any and all simulations or other analyses they conducted as part of the work.
- Ethical approval: Authors should indicate whether the research was approved by an institutional review board or similar committee and whether the research meets relevant ethical guidelines, including adherence to the legal requirements of the study country and international frameworks, such as the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki. (note that the latest version of the Declaration of Helsinki requires preregistration before data collection begins). Authors reporting research involving nonhuman animal subjects should indicate whether institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed. If ethical approval was not required, the reason should be given. Information that could identify subjects will not be published unless the information is necessary and written, informed consent is obtained.
The Review and Editing Process
Authors may query the editors for guidance before submission of any manuscript type or to submit an article proposal in the form of a 1-2 paragraph summary. Although editors might be able to provide input and suggestions prior to submission, editor encouragement to submit a manuscript does not guarantee that the submission will be deemed appropriate for AMPPS or that it will eventually be accepted for publication.
Initially, editors will evaluate each submission internally to determine whether the content fits the scope of AMPPS and whether the submission meets all of the requirements for publication in AMPPS (e.g., see the “Content Requirements” section above). Articles in AMPPS must be understandable to a wide audience, and those deemed inappropriately narrow may be rejected or returned to the authors prior to external review. Manuscripts that that fall within the scope of AMPPS will be sent to two or more external experts for peer review. To ensure accessibility, at least one reviewer, often an editorial board member, will be asked to evaluate the accessibility of the article to a broad audience. That “breadth” reviewer will not be an expert on the subject matter or methodology. Authors may submit the names of preferred (“recommended”) and nonpreferred (“opposed”) reviewers, and editors will consider these requests.
Based on that review process, and typically within 60 days, the assigned Associate Editor or the Editor in Chief will send an action letter with their decision (accept, decline/reject, or revise and resubmit). Articles that are declined may not be revised for resubmission. Revised submissions may be sent to the original reviewers or to additional reviewers should the editor need more guidance, or the editor might act on the revision without further review. The final, published version of the article will identify the action editor.
Unlike other article types, both Registered Reports and RRRs undergo review prior to data collection. The process for each differs from that for other types of articles that are submitted as a final product. Note, though, that hybrid approaches in which one or more studies meet the registered report requirements and others do not will be considered as well. Authors are encouraged to contact the editors to evaluate the best approach for such submissions.
Registered Reports
The review process for a Registered Report occurs before data collection. The review process focuses on whether the planned study is well motivated and well designed. Reviewers will be asked to evaluate whether the study outcome will be theoretically and empirically meaningful regardless of the outcome. They will also be asked to identify possible factors that could undermine the usefulness of the study (e.g., unreliable measures or manipulations, ceiling or floor effects, necessary manipulation checks). In some cases, the review process might suggest necessary pilot work or preliminary testing before the study design can be pre-approved. If accepted, the submission will be provisionally accepted. And, assuming the study meets the prespecified conditions, the eventual article will be published regardless of the study outcome. The post-data manuscript will be reviewed for clarity and for constructive comments about possible additional exploratory analyses, but acceptance will not be contingent on the outcome of the study or any additional tests. All Registered Replication Reports (RRRs) are a unique form of a Registered Report (see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-021-01193-7). For RRRs, AMPPS presently only considers proposals that involved multiple laboratories; some general considerations can be found here, and all authors considering multilab RRRs are encouraged to make contact with the Editor ([email protected]) prior to the Stage 1 submission. AMPPS is a PCI RR-friendly journal, which means that we accept papers that are submitted to, reviewed, and recommended by the PCI RR. More information about the PCI RR can be found here: https://rr.peercommunityin.org/
Other Considerations
Given that AMPPS requires public availability of data (to the extent that is ethically possible), AMPPS reviewers are required to agree to keep both the manuscript and the data confidential. Reviewers may re-examine the claims made in the article by verifying the accuracy of the analyses, but they should treat the data as proprietary throughout the review process. Once an article is published and the data become publicly available, others may access those public data and conduct analyses based on them. Authors can specify how use of those data should be cited/credited.
AMPPS does not compete directly with other journals of the Association, including Psychological Science, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Current Directions in Psychological Science, or Clinical Psychological Science. The editors of AMPPS are willing to consider manuscripts that were previously rejected by another APS journal provided that the topic is within the scope of the journal. Editors at AMPPS have access to, and are free to consider, the action letter and reviews from the previous APS submission as part of their editorial process. In a cover letter accompanying the new submission, authors should explain in detail how they have addressed the concerns raised in the prior action letter. Manuscript submissions that have not addressed legitimate concerns raised during the first review process are unlikely to be reviewed further at AMPPS.
Articles in AMPPS sometimes make use of pre-existing data, code, or other research products. Any use of such materials must be appropriately cited both in the text and in the list of cited sources. For example, a manuscript relying on pre-existing data for secondary analyses should cite the data set(s) by providing a unique identifier. In order of preference, that citation should refer to: (a) the recommended citation for that data set, (b) the DOI or other persistent identifier, (c) an accession number, (d) a persistent URL. When data or other resources are available only in the Supplemental Materials for a published article, the manuscript should cite the Supplemental Materials. When in doubt, cite the most durable, persistent, and unique identifier that is specific to that particular research product.
The Production Process
Preprints and Embargoes
Posting of a manuscript to a preprint archive prior to submission is permitted by AMPPS. Such preprints should be disclosed explicitly in the submitted manuscript. Similarly, content posted originally to a blog or other online site or appearing in a conference proceeding may be rewritten as a manuscript submission for AMPPS, provided that the manuscript discloses and cites the earlier version and adheres to all other submission guidelines.
APS does not have media embargoes for any of its publications. However, for submissions such as RRRs, in which the final result involves a meta-analysis across many replication studies, results from individual studies should not be made available until the complete manuscript is publicly available. That policy prevents piecemeal release of results that could bias ongoing studies in the project and also allows for a commentary or response from the original author to be included alongside the complete set of results.
Ready to submit your manuscript? Access the submission portal at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ampps.
