Behavioral Neuroscience
Submission Guidelines
Prior to submission, please carefully read and follow the submission guidelines detailed below. Manuscripts that do not conform to the submission guidelines may be returned without review.
Submission
Behavioral Neuroscience® is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed journal that publishes research articles in the broad field of the neural bases of behavior. A detailed description of the editorial coverage policy appears on the inside of the front cover of each issue.
Behavioral Neuroscience publishes direct replications. Submissions should include “A Replication of XX Study” in the subtitle of the manuscript as well as in the abstract.
Behavioral Neuroscience is a member of the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium.
To submit to the Editorial Office of Geoffrey Schoenbaum, please submit manuscripts electronically through the Manuscript Submission Portal in Microsoft Word or Open Office format.
Prepare manuscripts according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association using the 7th edition. Manuscripts may be copyedited for bias-free language (see Chapter 5 of the Publication Manual). APA Style and Grammar Guidelines for the 7th edition are available.
SUBMIT MANUSCRIPT
General correspondence may be directed to the Editorial Office.
The manuscript file for new submissions or revisions should include the text, tables, and figures; should be in Word (.doc), Rich Text Format (.rtf) or PDF formats; and should not exceed 20MB.
In addition to addresses and phone numbers, please supply email addresses for potential use by the Editorial Office and later by the Production Office.
Behavioral Neuroscience is now using a software system to screen submitted content for similarity with other published content. The system compares the initial version of each submitted manuscript against a database of 40+ million scholarly documents, as well as content appearing on the open web. This allows APA to check submissions for potential overlap with material previously published in scholarly journals (e.g., lifted or republished material).
Registered Reports
In addition to full-length research papers reporting novel findings, the journal publishes registered reports, negative findings, replications, commentaries and reviews. Preregistration of replication studies is strongly recommended, but not required.
Registered reports require a two-step review process.
The first step is the submission of the registration manuscript. This is a partial manuscript that includes hypotheses, rationale for the study, experimental design, and methods. The partial manuscript will be reviewed for significance and methodological approach.
If the partial manuscript is accepted this amounts to provisional acceptance of the full report regardless of the outcome of the study. The full manuscript will receive rapid editorial review, for adherence to the preregistered design, and expedited production for publication in the journal.
All articles can be published as full length articles or as brief communications. Brief communications must not exceed 3,250 words of text, with no more than two figures and/or tables.
Submission Letter
Include the following in your submission letter:
A statement designating the type of article being submitted: report of novel findings, registered report (report registration or manuscript reporting completed study), negative finding, replication, commentary, or review.For brief communications, a statement that the article is 3,250 words of text and two figures and/or tables, or less.A statement of compliance with APA ethical standards in the treatment of your sample, human or animal, or a description of the details of the treatment.A statement that the manuscript or data have not been published previously and that they are not under consideration for publication elsewhere.A statement to reflect that all listed authors have contributed significantly to the manuscript and consent to their names on the manuscript.A statement to disclose any possible conflict of interest in the conduct and reporting of research (e.g., financial interests in a test or procedure, funding by pharmaceutical companies for drug research).The current date.If your manuscript is a follow-up to another manuscript previously published in Behavioral Neuroscience, please include the manuscript number and title of the previous manuscript in your submission letter, if you would like us to try to invite the reviewers of the previous manuscript.
Authors are encouraged to suggest five reviewers who are especially qualified to review their work and would not have a conflict of interest serving as a referee.
Review Policy
Masked reviews are optional, and authors who wish masked reviews must specifically request them when submitting their manuscripts.
Each copy of a manuscript to be mask-reviewed should include a separate title page with authors' names and affiliations, and these should not appear anywhere else on the manuscript. Footnotes that identify the authors should be typed on a separate page.
Additionally, authors should make every effort to see that a manuscript intended for masked review itself contains no clues to their identities, including grant numbers, names of institutions providing IRB approval, self-citations, and links to online repositories for data, materials, code, or preregistrations (e.g., Create a View-only Link for a Project).
If your manuscript was mask reviewed, please ensure that the final version for production includes a byline and full author note for typesetting.
Journal Article Reporting Standards
Authors should review the APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. The standards offer ways to improve transparency in reporting to ensure that readers have the information necessary to evaluate the quality of the research and to facilitate collaboration and replication.
The JARS:
Recommend the division of hypotheses, analyses, and conclusions into primary, secondary, and exploratory groupings to allow for a full understanding of quantitative analyses presented in a manuscript and to enhance reproducibility;Offer modules for authors reporting on replications, clinical trials, longitudinal studies, and observational studies, as well as the analytic methods of structural equation modeling and Bayesian analysis;Include guidelines on reporting of study preregistration (including making protocols public); participant characteristics (including demographic characteristics); inclusion and exclusion criteria; psychometric characteristics of outcome measures and other variables; and planned data diagnostics and analytic strategy.
The guidelines focus on transparency in methods reporting, recommending descriptions of how the researcher’s own perspective affected the study, as well as the contexts in which the research and analysis took place.
Transparency and Openness
APA endorses the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines by a community working group in conjunction with the Center for Open Science (Nosek et al. 2015). Effective July 1, 2021, empirical research, including meta-analyses, submitted to Behavioral Neuroscience must meet the “disclosure” level for all eight aspects of research planning and reporting. Authors should include a subsection in the Method section titled “Transparency and Openness.” This subsection should detail the efforts the authors have made to comply with the TOP guidelines. For example:
We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions (if any), all manipulations, and all measures in the study, and we follow JARS (Kazak, 2018). All data, analysis code, and research materials are available at [stable link to repository]. Data were analyzed using R, version 4.0.0 (R Core Team, 2020) and the package ggplot, version 3.2.1 (Wickham, 2016). This study’s design and its analysis were not pre-registered.
Links to preregistrations and data, code, and materials should also be included in the Author Note.
Data, Materials, and Code
Authors must state whether data and study materials are available and, if so, where to access them. Recommended repositories include APA’s repository on the Open Science Framework (OSF), or authors can access a full list of other recommended repositories.
In both the Author Note and at the end of the Method section, specify whether and where the data and material will be available or include a statement noting that they are not available. For submissions with quantitative or simulation analytic methods, state whether the study analysis code is available, and, if so, where to access it.
For example:
All data have been made publicly available at the [repository name] and can be accessed at [persistent URL or DOI].Materials and analysis code for this study are available by emailing the corresponding author.Materials and analysis code for this study are not available.The code behind this analysis/simulation has been made publicly available at the [repository name] and can be accessed at [persistent URL or DOI].
Preregistration of Studies and Analysis Plans
Preregistration of studies and specific hypotheses can be a useful tool for making strong theoretical claims. Likewise, preregistration of analysis plans can be useful for distinguishing confirmatory and exploratory analyses. Investigators may preregister prior to conducting the research (e.g., ClinicalTrials.gov or the Preregistration for Quantitative Research in Psychology template) via a publicly accessible registry system (e.g., OSF, ClinicalTrials.gov, or other trial registries in the WHO Registry Network).
Articles must state whether or not any work was preregistered and, if so, where to access the preregistration. If any aspect of the study is preregistered, include the registry link in the Method section and the Author Note.
For example:
This study’s design was preregistered; see [STABLE LINK OR DOI].This study’s design and hypotheses were preregistered; see [STABLE LINK OR DOI].This study’s analysis plan was preregistered; see [STABLE LINK OR DOI].This study was not preregistered.
Author Contributions Statements using CRediT
The APA Publication Manual (7th ed.) stipulates that "authorship encompasses…not only persons who do the writing but also those who have made substantial scientific contributions to a study." In the spirit of transparency and openness, Behavioral Neuroscience has adopted the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) to describe each author's individual contributions to the work. CRediT offers authors the opportunity to share an accurate and detailed description of their diverse contributions to a manuscript.
Submitting authors will be asked to identify the contributions of all authors at initial submission according to this taxonomy. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the CRediT designations will be published as an Author Contributions Statement in the author note of the final article. All authors should have reviewed and agreed to their individual contribution(s) before submission.
CRediT includes 14 contributor roles, as described below:
Conceptualization: Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.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 re-use.Formal analysis: Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.Funding acquisition: Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.Investigation: Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.Methodology: Development or design of methodology; creation of models.Project administration: Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.Resources: Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.Software: Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.Supervision: Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.Validation: Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.Visualization: Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.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 post-publication stages.
Authors can claim credit for more than one contributor role, and the same role can be attributed to more than one author.
Title Page
All manuscripts must include a title page, typed on a separate page within the manuscript file, which includes the title of the manuscript, all author names and institutional affiliations, any funding received from one of the listed organizations in the Author Questionnaire, any disclosure of interests, and contact information for at least the corresponding author. For masked manuscripts, see Review Policy above.
Abbreviations and Metrics
Nonstandard abbreviations should be introduced by placing the abbreviation in parentheses after the first occurrence of the term being abbreviated in both the abstract and the text. The metric system should be followed for all volumes, lengths, weights, and so on. Temperatures should be expressed in degrees Celsius (centigrade). Units should conform to the International System of Units (SI; see the Publication Manual).
Revisions
Revised manuscripts are processed electronically and should also be uploaded through the Manuscript Submission Portal. Manuscripts need not be accompanied by a copy of the original version. Revisions not returned within 2 months of the last action date will be treated as a new submission.
Proofs
All proofs must be corrected and returned within 48 hours of receipt. Any extensive nonessential changes and extensive changes due to author error may incur charges.
With the proofs will be a form providing the author with the opportunity to order reprints. Direct inquiries to the APA Journals Office can be made at 202-336-5540; fax 202-336-5549.
Manuscript Preparation
Prepare manuscripts according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th edition). Manuscripts may be copyedited for bias-free language (see Chapter 5 of the 7th edition).
Review APA's Journal Manuscript Preparation Guidelines before submitting your article.
Double-space all copy. Other formatting instructions, as well as instructions on preparing tables, figures, references, metrics, and abstracts, appear in the Manual. Additional guidance on APA Style is available on the APA Style website.
Below are additional instructions regarding the preparation of display equations, computer code, and tables.
Display Equations
We strongly encourage you to use MathType (third-party software) or Equation Editor 3.0 (built into pre-2007 versions of Word) to construct your equations, rather than the equation support that is built into Word 2007 and Word 2010. Equations composed with the built-in Word 2007/Word 2010 equation support are converted to low-resolution graphics when they enter the production process and must be rekeyed by the typesetter, which may introduce errors.
To construct your equations with MathType or Equation Editor 3.0:
Go to the Text section of the Insert tab and select Object.Select MathType or Equation Editor 3.0 in the drop-down menu.
If you have an equation that has already been produced using Microsoft Word 2007 or 2010 and you have access to the full version of MathType 6.5 or later, you can convert this equation to MathType by clicking on MathType Insert Equation. Copy the equation from Microsoft Word and paste it into the MathType box. Verify that your equation is correct, click File, and then click Update. Your equation has now been inserted into your Word file as a MathType Equation.
Use Equation Editor 3.0 or MathType only for equations or for formulas that cannot be produced as Word text using the Times or Symbol font.
Computer Code
Because altering computer code in any way (e.g., indents, line spacing, line breaks, page breaks) during the typesetting process could alter its meaning, we treat computer code differently from the rest of your article in our production process. To that end, we request separate files for computer code.
In Online Supplemental Material
We request that runnable source code be included as supplemental material to the article. For more information, visit Supplementing Your Article With Online Material.
In the Text of the Article
If you would like to include code in the text of your published manuscript, please submit a separate file with your code exactly as you want it to appear, using Courier New font with a type size of 8 points. We will make an image of each segment of code in your article that exceeds 40 characters in length. (Shorter snippets of code that appear in text will be typeset in Courier New and run in with the rest of the text.) If an appendix contains a mix of code and explanatory text, please submit a file that contains the entire appendix, with the code keyed in 8-point Courier New.
Tables
Use Word's Insert Table function when you create tables. Using spaces or tabs in your table will create problems when the table is typeset and may result in errors.
Academic Writing and English Language Editing Services
Authors who feel that their manuscript may benefit from additional academic writing or language editing support prior to submission are encouraged to seek out such services at their host institutions, engage with colleagues and subject matter experts, and/or consider several vendors that offer discounts to APA authors.
Please note that APA does not endorse or take responsibility for the service providers listed. It is strictly a referral service.
Use of such service is not mandatory for publication in an APA journal. Use of one or more of these services does not guarantee selection for peer review, manuscript acceptance, or preference for publication in any APA journal.
Submitting Supplemental Materials
APA can place supplemental materials online, available via the published article in the APA PsycArticles® database. Please see Supplementing Your Article With Online Material for more details.
Abstract and Keywords
All manuscripts must include an abstract containing a maximum of 250 words typed on a separate page. After the abstract, please supply up to five keywords or brief phrases.
References
List references in alphabetical order. Each listed reference should be cited in text, and each text citation should be listed in the References section.
Examples of basic reference formats:
Journal Article
McCauley, S. M., & Christiansen, M. H. (2019). Language learning as language use: A cross-linguistic model of child language development. Psychological Review, 126(1), 1–51. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000126
Authored Book
Brown, L. S. (2018). Feminist therapy (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000092-000
Chapter in an Edited Book
Balsam, K. F., Martell, C. R., Jones. K. P., & Safren, S. A. (2019). Affirmative cognitive behavior therapy with sexual and gender minority people. In G. Y. Iwamasa & P. A. Hays (Eds.), Culturally responsive cognitive behavior therapy: Practice and supervision (2nd ed., pp. 287–314). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000119-012
Data Set Citation
Alegria, M., Jackson, J. S., Kessler, R. C., & Takeuchi, D. (2016). Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES), 2001–2003 [Data set]. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR20240.v8
Software/Code Citation
Viechtbauer, W. (2010). Conducting meta-analyses in R with the metafor package. Journal of Statistical Software, 36(3), 1–48. https://www.jstatsoft.org/v36/i03/
Wickham, H. et al., (2019). Welcome to the tidyverse. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(43), 1686, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01686
All data, program code, and other methods must be appropriately cited in the text and listed in the References section.
Figures
Graphics files are welcome if supplied as Tiff or EPS files. Multipanel figures (i.e., figures with parts labeled a, b, c, d, etc.) should be assembled into one file.
The minimum line weight for line art is 0.5 point for optimal printing.
For more information about acceptable resolutions, fonts, sizing, and other figure issues, please see the general guidelines.
When possible, please place symbol legends below the figure instead of to the side.
APA offers authors the option to publish their figures online in color without the costs associated with print publication of color figures.
The same caption will appear on both the online (color) and print (black and white) versions. To ensure that the figure can be understood in both formats, authors should add alternative wording (e.g., "the red (dark gray) bars represent") as needed.
For authors who prefer their figures to be published in color both in print and online, original color figures can be printed in color at the editor's and publisher's discretion provided the author agrees to pay:
$900 for one figureAn additional $600 for the second figureAn additional $450 for each subsequent figure
Permissions
Authors of accepted papers must obtain and provide to the editor on final acceptance all necessary permissions to reproduce in print and electronic form any copyrighted work, including test materials (or portions thereof), photographs, and other graphic images (including those used as stimuli in experiments).
On advice of counsel, APA may decline to publish any image whose copyright status is unknown.
Download Permissions Alert Form (PDF, 13KB)
Publication Policies
APA policy prohibits an author from submitting the same manuscript for concurrent consideration by two or more publications.
See also APA Journals® Internet Posting Guidelines.
APA requires authors to reveal any possible conflict of interest in the conduct and reporting of research (e.g., financial interests in a test or procedure, funding by pharmaceutical companies for drug research).
Download Disclosure of Interests Form (PDF, 38KB)
In light of changing patterns of scientific knowledge dissemination, APA requires authors to provide information on prior dissemination of the data and narrative interpretations of the data/research appearing in the manuscript (e.g., if some or all were presented at a conference or meeting, posted on a listserv, shared on a website, including academic social networks like ResearchGate, etc.). This information (2–4 sentences) must be provided as part of the Author Note.
Authors of accepted manuscripts are required to transfer the copyright to APA.
For manuscripts not funded by the Wellcome Trust or the Research Councils UK
Publication Rights (Copyright Transfer) Form (PDF, 83KB)For manuscripts funded by the Wellcome Trust or the Research Councils UK
Wellcome Trust or Research Councils UK Publication Rights Form (PDF, 34KB)
Ethical Principles
It is a violation of APA Ethical Principles to publish "as original data, data that have been previously published" (Standard 8.13).
In addition, APA Ethical Principles specify that "after research results are published, psychologists do not withhold the data on which their conclusions are based from other competent professionals who seek to verify the substantive claims through reanalysis and who intend to use such data only for that purpose, provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and unless legal rights concerning proprietary data preclude their release" (Standard 8.14).
APA expects authors to adhere to these standards. Specifically, APA expects authors to have their data available throughout the editorial review process and for at least 5 years after the date of publication.
Authors are required to state in writing that they have complied with APA ethical standards in the treatment of their sample, human or animal, or to describe the details of treatment.
Download Certification of Compliance With APA Ethical Principles Form (PDF, 26KB)
The APA Ethics Office provides the full Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct electronically on its website in HTML, PDF, and Word format. You may also request a copy by emailing or calling the APA Ethics Office (202-336-5930). You may also read "Ethical Principles," December 1992, American Psychologist, Vol. 47, pp. 1597–1611.
Other Information
Visit the Journals Publishing Resource Center for more resources for writing, reviewing, and editing articles for publishing in APA journals.
