Author Guidelines

1. Length of articles

Submitted manuscripts must not have been previously published and must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. All submissions are peer-reviewed.

The editors accept manuscripts that should be no longer than 20 double-spaced pages (ca. 6000 words).

The article should not exceed the prescribed length, otherwise, it will be returned immediately to the author and will not be submitted into the editorial process.

2. Publication ethics and publication malpractice statement

Studia Psychologica follows the standard for Ethics and Publication Malpractice set by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Editors, authors and reviewers are expected to conform to the Core practices, which reflect the current best principles of transparency and integrity of scholar records.

3. Manuscript preparation

The editors accept only contributions written in English. For editors and reviewers to accurately assess your manuscript, please, make sure the English language is of sufficient quality to be understood. We strongly recommend using professional language copy editors who will improve the English to ensure that your meaning is clear and the manuscript adheres to APA standards.

Prepare manuscripts according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th edition). Review APA's Checklist for Manuscript Submission before submitting your article. For easy navigation, you can also check https://www.psychopen.eu/author_guidelines/. This journal uses double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process.

Double-space all copy. Other formatting instructions, as well as instructions on preparing tables, figures, references, metrics, and abstracts, appear in the Manual. Submission items include a cover letter, title page, blind manuscript (including a blind title page, abstract, manuscript text, references, and figure legends), tables, and figures. Revised manuscripts should also be accompanied by responses to reviewers' comments.

Title page. In addition to an expressive title, the author (authors) should give their full names and affiliation with full address and e-mail. The title should be concise and informative. Titles are often used in information-retrieval systems. Avoid abbreviations and formulae where possible.

Author names and affiliations: Where the family name may be ambiguous (e.g., a double name), please indicate this clearly. Present the authors' affiliation addresses (where the actual work was done) below the names. Indicate all affiliations with a lower-case superscript letter immediately after the author's name and in front of the appropriate address. Provide the full postal address of each affiliation, including the country name and, if available, the e-mail address of each author. Clearly indicate who will handle correspondence at all stages of refereeing and publication, also post-publication. Contact details must be kept up to date by the corresponding author.

Manuscript. The manuscript file must include a blinded title page, containing only the manuscript title, abstract and keywords. Abstract and keywords: All manuscripts must include a concise and factual abstract and 3-5 keywords or brief phrases. The abstract must be a single paragraph that summarizes the main findings of the paper in fewer than 150 words.

Abstract. An abstract should contain information about: (1) the purpose, possibly with some predictions, (2) info about participants, (3) main methods, (4) major results, (5) some sort of conclusion with implications and/or application. The abstract should be clear and concise, as it often is the only part of the paper people will read. Note that using active verbs is preferable to nominalization and passive voice.

Introduction. Ensure that your introduction is clear from the beginning what the paper is going to be about. As Studia Psychologica focuses on cognitive and emotional processes, which is a relatively wide field, do not assume that every reader will be familiar with the technical details of your specific field. The paper should be interesting and readable for the wider public. In your review of relevant previous works, you should include seminal papers from the field, not only local papers of your colleagues, which are not accessible to an international audience (unpublished students´ theses, local conferences, etc.). In your introduction you should stress how the current report differs from the earlier reports and how hypotheses and research design relate to one another. Write the Introduction with focus on what is not known, do not just list all relevant research without any pointing to the knowledge gap or how your work fits in the picture.

Methods. Description of a sample should include eligibility and exclusion criteria, major demographic characteristics, sampling procedures. You should comment on sample size, power, precision. Please note that Studia Psychologica encourages its authors to share their materials, research protocols, codes and raw data either with submission or through osf.io to promote practices of Open Science.

Results. Results should be presented concisely and according to APA standards. Include confidence intervals or effect sizes, where appropriate. Distinguish between planned and post hoc analyses. Make sure that all titles of tables and graphs are informative enough and are comprehensible without referring to the text. You can upload your dataset along with the submission to allow reviewers to evaluate your work more thoroughly.

Discussion. Discussion should contain (1) statement of support or non-support for all original hypotheses (distinguished by primary and secondary hypotheses & post hoc explanations); (2) similarities and differences between results and work of others, (3) interpretation of the results, taking into account limits of the study, (4) generalizability (external validity) of the findings; (5) discussion of implications for future research, program, or policy. Comment on any limits of your research design, but do not end your manuscript with the limitations. You want to conclude with strong take-away message.

Abbreviations: Define abbreviations that are not standard in this field in a footnote. Such abbreviations that are unavoidable in the abstract must be defined at their first mention there, as well as in the footnote. Ensure consistency of abbreviations throughout the article.

Acknowledgements: For reasons of assisting with double-blind review, collate acknowledgements in a separate section on the title page beneath the author information. List here those individuals who provided help during the research (e.g., providing language help, writing assistance or proof reading the article, etc.).

Tables, figures, diagrams, photos, drawings, as well as possible footnotes should be included in the text of the manuscript and should follow the APA format (6th Edition). Studia Psychologica 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.

Citations in text and the reference list should conform to APA style (6th Edition). Each listed reference should be cited in the text, and each text citation should be listed in the References section. References in the list should be in alphabetical order.

Reference style:

Text: Citations in the text should follow the referencing style used by the American Psychological Association. You are referred to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Sixth Edition. Details concerning this referencing style can also be found at http://humanities.byu.edu/linguistics/Henrichsen/APA/APA01.html.

List: references should be arranged first alphabetically and then further sorted chronologically if necessary. More than one reference from the same author(s) in the same year must be identified by the letters "a", "b", "c", etc., placed after the year of publication. Journal titles should be written out in full rather than abbreviated. Please note the style of capitalization and punctuation for journal articles, books, and edited books in the examples below. Wherever possible, you should include DOI.

Examples:

Reference to a book. Kahneman, D. (1973). Attention and effort. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. https://doi.org/10.2307/1421603

Reference to a journal. Bandura, A. (2012). On the functional properties of perceived self-efficacy revisited. Journal of Management, 38(1), 9-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311410606

Reference to a publication within a publication. McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T, Jr. (2008). The five-factor theory of personality. In O. P. John, R. W. Robins, & L. A. Pervin (Eds.), Handbook of personality: Theory and research (3rd ed., pp. 159–181). New York: Guilford. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118001868.ch6

4. Data and materials

We strongly encourage the submission of raw data (with a key to the meaning of variable names, if needed) and stimulus materials at the time of the initial submission and will often request these if they are not already submitted. Alternatively, you can include links to other public repositories, such as osf.io. Publications should, insofar as possible, include all key information necessary to understand (and replicate) the study and data analysis. Feel free to use footnotes, appendices, or supplements. We include the data of accepted articles with the articles (unless this is for some reason difficult). We also include stimuli, questionnaires, and code, when these are necessary to understand exactly what was done (again, unless this is difficult for some reason, such as questionnaires with copyright restrictions). Please, include in the text information about the data availability (either in supplementary materials or link to other online repositories).

5. Submission of articles

Our online submission system guides you stepwise through the process of entering your article details and uploading your files. Please, ensure that your manuscript is without identifiers and ready for blind review. Editable files (e.g., Word, LaTeX) are required to typeset your article for final publication. All correspondence, including notification of the Editor's decision and requests for revision, is sent by e-mail. The submission and processing of the articles in Studia Psychologica is without any charges.

6. Permissions

Authors of accepted papers must obtain and provide to the executive editor on final acceptance all necessary permissions to reproduce in print and electronic form any copyrighted work, including, for example, test materials (or portions thereof) and photographs of people.

7. Editorial process

This journal uses double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process.

8. Copyright notice

Authors who publish with Studia Psychologica agree to the following terms:

Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License (CC-BY 4.0).

Under the CC-BY license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but authors grant others permission to use the content of publications in Studia Psychologica in whole or in part provided that the original work is properly cited. Users of Studia Psychologica contents are required to cite the original source, including the author's names, Studia Psychologica as the initial source of publication, year of publication, volume number and DOI (if available). Authors grant Studia Psychologica the right of first publication. Although authors remain the copyright owner, they grant the journal the irrevocable, nonexclusive rights to publish, reproduce, publicly distribute and display, and transmit their article or portions thereof in any manner.

Authors of articles published in Studia Psychologica are entitled to deposit their articles (even in final, published form) in institutional and/or centrally organized repositories. They are also authorized to announce their studies at their personal websites or academic social networks or make them publicly available in another way, provided that the journal Studia Psychologica is attributed as the original place of publication and that correct citation details are given.

The journal strongly encourages authors to deposit and announce the final, published version of the study instead of the accepted manuscript. This will guarantee that the definitive version is readily available to those accessing your article, and means that your article is more likely to be cited correctly.