Submitting an Article Online

To submit an article online, and to check the status of your submission, you need to have an account with Health Psychology Bulletin

Don't have an account? Register Here.

Start Submission

Author Guidelines

Article types | Submission process | Structure | Permissions | Data Guidelines | Language & Text | Data & Symbols | Figures & Tables | References

Submissions should be made electronically through this website. Once submitted, the author can track the submission and communicate with the editors via the online journal management system.

Please ensure that you consider the following guidelines when preparing your manuscript. Failure to do so may delay the processing of your submission. A downloadable version of the style guide is available by clicking here.

Authors should strive to keep articles below or around 4000 words. Please justify longer papers in the cover letter.

Article types

• Pre-registration: the introduction and methods sections describing the rationale and methods of an empirical study (see below) for which no data has been collected yet. Authors can then benefit of the constructive review process to further improve their methodology. Any pre-registration that is accepted for publication also guarantees publication of the corresponding results and discussion sections, assuming reviewers’ requests regarding the analyses and discussion are met.
• Design paper: This is similar to a pre-registration, except that data collection has already started. Design papers allow in-detail discussion of study designs that can then be referred to in the empirical papers reporting the results.
• Pre-registered study report: the results and discussion sections of a pre-registered paper.
• Empirical paper:a qualitative or quantitative study where (primary) empirical data were collected and described. Some categories of empirical papers are:
  • Operationalisation failure: a brief report describing one or more invalid or unreliable operationalisations. For example, if researchers want to conduct an experiment where they want to manipulate coping planning in the context of hand hygiene, the pilots they conduct to develop an effective coping planning manipulation (i.e. the pilots where they try out coping planning manipulations that fail) contain valuable information about when coping planning works. Another example is when a generally used questionnaire yields a different factor structure in a given study, which helps determine inb which (sub-)populations a questionnaire ‘works’ properly. Publishing these data, along with the replication package, can considerably speed up health psychology.
  • Null findings: studies where the operationalisations were successful, but the expected associations were not found.
  • Direct replications: exact replications of a given study at the same or another institution.
  • Conceptual replications: replications where one or more variables were changed from the original study design or execution.
  • Regular papers (i.e. as found in other journals).
• Systematic review or meta-analysis: integration of evidence collected through a systematic search in one or more bibliographic databases and systematic analysis of the identified literature.
• Theoretical/debate paper: a paper presenting an in-depth analysis of a theoretical or methodological issue in health psychology.
• Open Methods papers: presentations of methods, analyses, materials or software that make health psychology research more accessible or improve its quality.

All word limits exclude referencing and citation.

Submission process

The aim of HPB is to contribute to solving a number of problems of Health Psychology. One of these problems is publication bias (a bias in which research gets published); another is significant outcome bias (a bias in how research is reported); another is the vulnerability of Health Psychology to incorrect analyses; and yet another is the neglect to share lessons learnt.

HPB embodies three means to remedy these problems. First, it publishes all reports that convey a lesson, including null findings and reports of failed manipulations. Second, it enforces Full Disclosure, so that, for example, reports of failed manipulations are completely accessible and enable future researchers to avoid the same pitfalls. Third, HPB discourages the type of narrative that is encouraged by many other journals. Specifically, HPB discourages ‘selling’ results, instead promoting objective narrative, valuing what can be learnt over confirmation or falsification of a theory.

This rationale is based on the acknowledgement that knowledge accumulation largely happens through meta-analysis, and adequate meta-analysis requires unbiased reporting of all research outcomes. Thus, HPB papers are technical reports, prioritising systematic description of methodological specifics and study outcomes over narratives that incorporate findings in a coherent story. It is useful to keep this policy in mind when reading this checklist.

Review tier 1: introduction & methods

When submitting an empirical paper, first only submit the introduction and methods sections, as well as the Replication Package. The Results and Discussion sections are only submitted after the first tier has been completed (and the contribution has been provisionally accepted).

Because HPB has a Full Disclosure policy, all submissions should be accompanied by a Replication Package. Therefore, check whether you included everything somebody would need to conduct a direct replication of your study, such as:

• Original protocols, communications with participants (e.g. email templates, protocols for phone calls, etc), and instructions for physical set-ups – as well as translations to English that were approved by all authors;
• All information on design and randomisation procedures etc;
• All operationalisations, such as:
  • All measurement instruments such as questionnaires or source code for computer tasks, both in the original version, and where that was not English, translations for English that were approved by all authors (note: back-translations are not required; a simple translation by one of the authors suffices);
  • All manipulations and stimuli, source code, interventions, etc;

Writing style:

• Introduction:
  • Does the introduction clearly describe the background and aims of the paper? Note that whether these aims were achieved or not does not matter at this point. The goal is to accurately describe why the study was conceived, regardless of anything that may have gone wrong or any findings that may or may not have been obtained. In other words, whether the introduction is submitted before or after data collection should not matter.

• Methods: Does the methods section clearly and succinctly describe the study’s methodology, referring to the Replication Package where applicable? We recommend including sub-sections similar to the following (if applicable):
  • ‘Operationalisations’, which can have sub-sections ‘measurements’ and ‘manipulations’.
  • ‘Procedure’, where the research protocols are briefly summarized.
  • ‘Sampling’ or ‘Recruitment’, where the authors describe how they defined their population and how they (plan to) recruit from that population; note that this section, or for that matter, the entire Methods section, contains no data or results! The sample size, nor sample characteristics, are not described in the Methods section, but in the Results section.
  • ‘Required Sample Size’, where the authors explain how they arrived at the estimate for their required sample size. For quantitative research, authors explain whether they conducted power analyses, and if so, at which effect size estimates they arrived prior to conducting the study, where they were based on, and of course the outcomes of the power analyses.
  • ‘Data collection period’, where the authors describe between which dates the data have been collected.
  • ‘Analysis plan’, where the authors describe the analyses they plan to conduct.
  • ‘Software and materials’, where the software and materials that are used for data collection and analysis are described and cited. Note that there is a strong preference for open source, or at least free, software.
  • ‘Ethics’, where the authors describe whether and how they obtained approval from an ethical committee, ideally linking to a scanned letter from the relevant committee in the supplemental materials. Note that this sub-section can also contain the justification of why no ethical approval was sought. After all, ethical committees are not yet established everywhere, and were certainly rare up until a decade ago or so, and one of the goals of HPB is to publish data that have been lying in a file drawer.

Once the introduction and methods sections have been provisionally accepted, this means the editors and reviewers consider the contribution informative. This practically guarantees publication, as long as reviewers’ and editors’ requests regarding the analysis and the way these are interpreted are followed (this is important to correct any tendencies to prevent ‘overselling’, remedy reluctance to acknowledge null findings as null findings, and avoid other practices that contribute to publication and significant outcome bias).

The review process from here on will mainly focus on improving the analyses. In this process, it is important to acknowledge the limitations to the authors’ methodological and statistical competence. For example, if reviewers request multilevel analyses, and if those are indeed more appropriate, it is not mandatory to conduct multilevel analyses. Instead, the authors can opt to explain in the paper that while those would be better, they were not conducted because none of the authors is sufficiently proficient with that type of analysis to adequately apply and interpret them. This policy is implemented because, despite the unfortunate implicit assumption otherwise, not all researchers are also statisticians. Because of HPB’s Full Disclosure policy, other researchers can re-analyse the data with superior methods, if they choose to do so. If authors feel less than entirely confident with a given statistical procedure, it may be better to not perform it, instead of performing it and doing it wrong.

Note that the pre-publication reviewers may also not be expert in a given analysis; thus, there is no guarantee that all errors are detected during the pre-publication peer review process. Therefore, any errors may only be pointed out in post-publication peer reviews.

Review tier 2: results & discussion

If the first tier of the review process has been completed, the results and discussion sections can be submitted. This checklist can be useful to make sure everything that needs to be included, is included.

Full Disclosure:

• Are the data provided, and are they accompanied by a codebook (which can be in the form of an analysis script that designates variable and value labels to link variables and values to their operationalisations)?
• Is the analysis package complete? In other words, does it contain everything somebody would need to fully reproduce your analyses and results? For example:
  • Any analysis scripts that were used (e.g. a ‘syntax’ file for SPSS)
  • Relevant intermediate output generated by the authors
  • All final output generated by the authors (i.e. every statistic in the paper must be available in the raw results files)

Results:

• In the description of the results, HPB recommends emphasis on effect size over null hypothesis significance testing. However, this is not strongly enforced: authors may choose to use whichever approach they choose, as long as it is methodologically and statistically adequate. After all, provision of the datasets enables readers to compute whichever statistics they consider of interest.
• We recommend including sub-sections similar to the following (if applicable):
  • ‘Sample description’, where the sample size and sample characteristics are described.
  • ‘Validity of the operationalisations’, where for each operationalisation, its validity is reported. Note that failed manipulations, by definition, have no validity; that means that for reports of failed manipulations, this is quite an important section. For manipulations, this section reports the outcomes of the manipulation checks. For the measurements, this section reports the outcomes of factor analyses for every measurement instrument to confirm whether the dimensionality is consistent with the theoretical expectations, as well as reliability coefficients such as Omega, the GLB, or coefficient Alpha.
  • ‘Univariate analyses’, where the outcomes of an inspection of the distribution of each variable is described. Authors are encouraged to refer to plots (e.g. histograms) that are included in the supplemental materials. In addition, in this section, authors explain their criteria for identifying data points as outliers, as well as the procedure for missing values.
  • ‘Bivariate analyses’, where bivariate associations between all, or at least the most important, variables in the study are listed and described.
  • ‘Multivariate analyses’, where any multivariate analyses that are conducted are described.
  • ‘Coding structure’, where the hierarchical coding structure, arrived at through qualitative analysis, is described.
  • ‘Anecdotal evidence’, where any research notes, comments from participants, and informal lessons that the researchers wish to share are included.

Discussion:

• When writing the discussion, keep in mind that highlighting all that can be learned from the collected data takes precedence over the fit of those lessons with any particular theory, narrative, or story. Make sure that the results are interpreted with a certain ‘objective ruthlessness’. If null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) is employed, ‘trends’ or ‘almost significant results’ do not exist: instead, respect the dichotomy at the core of NHST. Note that reliance on confidence intervals around effect size measures or employing Bayesian methods are recommended over applying NHST in the first place.
• We recommend including sub-sections similar to the following (if applicable):
  • ‘Limitations’, where the limitations of this study are clearly and exhaustively described.
  • ‘Recommendations for future research’, where for every limitation, a specific recommendation is made to prevent or minimize that limitation in the future. Of course, additional recommendations can also be included here – but make sure they all relate to something discussed in the results section, and resist the temptation to include strongly held beliefs that are however not backed up by the data described in this specific contribution.
  • ‘Take home messages’, where the most important findings are summarized. For example, for null findings, a take home message can be that the hypothesized association may in fact not exist; for reports of failed manipulations, that apparently, a manipulation with those specific characteristics appears flawed; and for other papers, simply the most important conclusions.

Structure

Title page

If the article is undergoing blind peer review, then please only list the title and abstract on the submitted manuscript file.

The names of all authors, affiliations, contact details, biography (optional) and the corresponding author details must be completed online as part of the submission process. All authors must fit within the journal's definition of an author, available here.

Author names should include a forename and a surname. Forenames cannot include only initials.

• J. Bloggs is not preferred. The full name, Joe Bloggs is required (this will enhance the 'findability' of your publication).

The affiliation should ideally include ‘Department, Institution, City, Country’. However only the Institution and Country are mandatory.

Abstract
Research articles must have the main text prefaced by an abstract of no more than 250 words summarising the main arguments and conclusions of the article. This must have the heading ‘Abstract’ and be easily identified from the start of the main text.

A list of up to six key words may be placed below the abstract (optional).

The Abstract and Keywords should also be added to the metadata when making the initial online submission.

Main text
The body of the submission should be structured in a logical and easy to follow manner. A clear introduction section should be given that allows non-specialists in the subject an understanding of the publication and a background of the issue(s) involved. Methods, results, discussion and conclusion sections may then follow to clearly detail the information and research being presented.

Up to three level headings may be present and must be clearly identifiable using different font sizes, bold or italics. We suggest using Headings 1, 2 and 3 in MS-Word’s ‘Style’ section.

Supplementary Files (optional)
Any supplementary/additional files that should link to the main publication must be listed, with a corresponding number, title and option description. Ideally the supplementary files are also cited in the main text.

e.g. Supplementary file 1: Appendix. Scientific data related to the experiments.

Note: additional files will not be typeset so they must be provided in their final form. They will be assigned a DOI and linked to from the publication.

Ethics and consent (if applicable)
Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, studies must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee and the authors should include a statement within the article text detailing this approval, including the name of the ethics committee and reference number of the approval. The identity of the research subject(s) should be anonymised whenever possible. For research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian) and added to this statement. If a study involving human subjects/tissue/data was exempt from requiring ethical approval, a confirmation statement from the relevant body should be included within the submission.

Experiments using animals must follow national standards of care. For further information, click here.

Acknowledgements (optional)
Any acknowledgements must be headed and in a separate page, included in the document with the title page (in the final paper, this will be included after the main text but before the references).

Funding Information (if applicable)
Should the research have received a funding grant then the grant provider and grant number should be detailed. 

Competing interests
If any of the authors have any competing interests then these must be declared. A short paragraph should be added in the document containing the title page; in the final paper, this declaration will be included after the main text but before the references. Guidelines for competing interests can be found here.

References
All references cited within the submission must be listed at the end of the main text file.

Data Guidelines

Health Psychology Bulletin (HPB) strongly recommends Full Disclosure. Full Disclosure is the practice of publishing everything required to replicate a study as well as the analyses of its data (for more information, see here).

At HPB, this Full Disclosure policy is implemented in the Replication and Analysis Packages.

Replication Package

The Replication Package contains everything other researchers require to replicate a study, such as study protocols, questionnaires, source code of computer tasks, stimuli, and the forms that were used to obtain ethical approval. The Replication Package contains everything that was developed or collected before data collection. This means it contains all operationalisations for quantitative research, the interview schemes or topic lists for qualitative research, all supporting protocols, all analysis plans and power analyses if applicable, the communications used to recruit and debrief participants, the forms or letters used to request ethical permission from an institutional review board (IRB), and the letter providing that permission. Another researcher should be able to download the Replication Package and run the same study.

Analysis Package

The Analysis Package contains everything other researchers require to replicate the analysis conducted upon the data that were collected in a study. The Analysis Package therefore contains the raw datafile(s), all analysis scripts that were used to produce the results (for example SPSS syntax files or R scripts), and the resulting output. If the datafiles do not have English and self-explanatory variable names (e.g. 'selfEfficacyBeliefs_condomUseIsEasy', 'HADS_suddenFeelingsPanic') please provide a codebook. Make sure that the analysis script is commented to explain the rationale of each analysis.

How to compile the Full Disclosure Packages

The Full Disclosure Packages (i.e. the Replication Package and the Analysis Package) should together contain all products generated in the study. These files can simply be archived using whichever directory structure the files are in (or they can all be placed in one directory). If the files do not have English and self-explanatory filenames (e.g. 'protocols - instructions to experimenter.docx', 'raw data.csv', 'analysis script - datacleaning.R', and 'operationalisations - t0 - questionnaires.pdf'), include a manifest called 'manifest.txt' (or 'manifest.odt', 'manifest.rtf' or 'manifest.docx') where the content of each file is described.

How to archive multiple files and directories into one archive file

To archive multiple files, a number of tools exist, though many operating systems such as Windows and OSX offer native capability to archive. The easiest way to find out how to archive files for your operating system is to enter the query 'how to archive files in a zip archive using' appended with the name and version of your operating system into a search engine. For example, when using Windows 10, you could google 'how to archive files in a zip archive using windows 10' to find a number of easy to follow instructions (such as this one or this one).

How to submit the Full Disclosure Packages

You can submit your Full Disclosure Packages to an acceptabel repository (e.g. the free Open Science Framework (OSF), your institution's repository or the journal's own dataverse, and upload a file with a link to that repository along with your article submission to HPB.

Remember that the review procedure at HPB is doubleblinded, so make sure to 'anonymize' all files. When using the Open Science Framework as repository, for example, make sure to generate an anonymous read-only link (tab Contributors, add View-Only link at the bottom, then check the checkbox to Anonymize the contributor link).

Preferred file formats

It is important that researchers all over the world have access to your Full Disclosure Packages. This means that proprietary file formats should be avoided. Here is a table with a number of recommendations for different types of files. Of course, avoiding proprietary formats is not always possible. If data was collected using proprietary software, export options are often limited, because commercial software producers often wish to limit the ease with which their customers could switch to a different package (investing in making it easier for their customers to leave is not an obvious choice). In those cases, simply submit the 'sub-optimal' format (and maybe look into Open alternatives for your software).

What if you don't have (complete) Full Disclosure Packages?

Because one of the goals of HPB is to start publishing file drawered studies, it is possible that you still have reports for which you no longer have the raw data, operationalisations, analysis scripts, or output. Similarly, you may still have reports of studies that were conducted before ethical testing by IRB's was common or even possible. In those cases, simply collect everything you have, and combine this with a document where you explain what you omitted, and why you omitted these resources. If you have no Replication Package or Analysis Package at all, simply upload two documents explaining this.

Translations

If you conducted a study in another language than English, you don't have to translate, for example, the study protocols and the operationalisations. However, the datafiles must use English language variable names and value labels (or an English language codebook must be included), and analysis scripts must be commented in English, so that the analyses can be scrutinized and reproduced by all researchers.

More questions?

See the Frequently Asked Questions section here or get in touch.

Permissions

The author is responsible for obtaining all permissions required prior to submission of the manuscript. Permission and owner details should be mentioned for all third-party content included in the submission or used in the research.

If a method or tool is introduced in the study, including software, questionnaires, and scales, the license this is available under and any requirement for permission for use should be stated. If an existing method or tool is used in the research, it is the author's responsibility to check the license and obtain the necessary permissions. Statements confirming that permission was granted should be included in the Materials and Methods section.

Language & Text

Capitalisation
For the submission title:

Capitalise all nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and subordinate conjunctions (i.e. as, because, although). Use lowercase for all articles, coordinate conjunctions and prepositions.

• Slip-Sliding on a Yellow Brick Road: Stabilization Efforts in Afghanistan

Headings within the main text:

First level headings in the text should follow the same rule as the main title.

For lower-level subheadings, only capitalise first letter and proper nouns.

Headings should be under 75 characters.

Spelling
Submissions must be made in English. Authors are welcome to use American or British spellings as long as they are used consistently throughout the whole of the submission.

• Colour (UK) vs. Color (US)

When referring to proper nouns and normal institutional titles, the official, original spelling must be used.

• World Health Organization, not World Health Organisation

Grammar
American or English grammar rules may be used as long as they are used consistently and match the spelling format (see above). For instance, you may use a serial comma or not.

• red, white, and blue OR red, white and blue

Font
The font used should be commonly available and in an easily readable size. This may be changed during the typesetting process.

Underlined text should be avoided whenever possible.

Bold or italicised text to emphasise a point are permitted, although should be restricted to minimal occurrences to maximise their efficiency.

Lists
Use bullet points to denote a list without hierarchy or order of value. If the list indicates a specific sequence then a numbered list must be used.

Lists should be used sparingly to maximise their impact.

Quotation marks
Use single quotation marks except for quotes within another speech, in which case double quotation marks are used.

Quotations that are longer than three lines in length must be in an indented paragraph separate from the main text.

The standard, non-italicised font must be used for all quotes.

It must be clear from the text and/or citation where the quote is sourced. If quoting from material that is under copyright then permission will need to be obtained from the copyright holder.

Acronyms & Abbreviations
With abbreviations, the crucial goal is to ensure that the reader – particularly one who may not be fully familiar with the topic or context being addressed – is able to follow along. Spell out almost all acronyms on first use, indicating the acronym in parentheses immediately thereafter. Use the acronym for all subsequent references.

• Research completed by the World Health Organization (WHO) shows …

A number of abbreviations are so common that they do not require the full text on the first instance. Examples of these can be found here.

Abbreviations should usually be in capital letters without full stops.

• USA, not U.S.A

Common examples from Latin origin do not follow this rule and should be lower case and can include full stops.

• e.g., i.e., etc.

Use of footnotes/endnotes
Use endnotes rather than footnotes (we refer to these as ‘Notes’ in the online publication). These will appear at the end of the main text, before ‘References’.

All notes should be used only where crucial clarifying information needs to be conveyed.

Avoid using notes for purposes of referencing, with in-text citations used instead. If in-text citations cannot be used, a source can be cited as part of a note.

Please insert the endnote marker after the end punctuation.

Data & Symbols

Symbols
Symbols are permitted within the main text and datasets as long as they are commonly in use or have explanatory definition on their first usage.

Hyphenation, em and en dashes
There is no set rule on the use of hyphenation between words, as long as they are consistently used.

Em dashes should be used sparingly. If they are present, they should denote emphasis, change of thought or interruption to the main sentence and can replace comas, parentheses, colons or semicolons.

• The president’s niece—daughter of his younger brother—caused a media scandal when…

En dashes can be used to replace ‘to’ when indicating a range. No space should surround the dash.

• 10-25 years
• pp. 10-65

Numbers
For numbers zero to nine please spell the whole words. Please use figures for numbers 10 or higher.

We are happy for authors to use either words or figures to represent large whole figures (i.e. one million or 1,000,000) as long as the usage is consistent throughout the text.

If the sentence includes a series of numbers then figures must be used in each instance.

• Artefacts were found at depths of 5, 9, and 29 cm.

If the number appears as part of a dataset, in conjunction with a symbol or as part of a table then the figure must be used.

• This study confirmed that 5% of…

If a sentence starts with a number it must be spelt, or the sentence should be re-written so that it no longer starts with the number.

• Fifteen examples were found to exist…
• The result showed that 15 examples existed…

Do not use a comma for a decimal place.

• 2.43 NOT 2,43

Numbers that are less than zero must have ‘0’ precede the decimal point.

• 0.24 NOT .24

Units of measurement
Symbols following a figure to denote a unit of measurement must be taken from the latest SI brochure. See http://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si_brochure_8_en.pdf for the full brochure.

Formula
Formulae must be proofed carefully by the author. Editors will not edit formulae. If special software has been used to create formulae, the way it is laid out is the way they will appear in the publication.

Figures & Tables

Figures
Figures, including graphs and diagrams, must be professionally and clearly presented. If a figure is not easy to understand or does not appear to be of a suitable quality, the editor may ask to re-render or omit it.

All figures must be cited within the main text, in consecutive order using Arabic numerals (e.g. Figure 1, Figure 2, etc.).

Each figure must have an accompanying descriptive main title. This should clearly and concisely summarise the content and/or use of the figure image. A short additional figure legend is optional to offer a further description.

• Figure 1: 1685 map of London.
• Figure 1: 1685 map of London. Note the addition of St Paul’s Cathedral, absent from earlier maps.

Figure titles and legends should be placed within the text document, either after the paragraph of their first citation, or as a list after the references.

The source of the image should be included, along with any relevant copyright information and a statement of authorisation (if needed).

• Figure 1: Firemen try to free workers buried under piles of concrete and metal girders. Photo: Claude-Michel Masson. Reproduced with permission of the photographer.

If your figure file includes text then please present the font as Ariel, Helvetica, or Verdana. This will mean that it matches the typeset text.

NOTE: All figures must be uploaded separately as supplementary files during the submission process, if possible in colour and at a resolution of at least 300dpi. Each file should not be more than 20MB. Standard formats accepted are: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS. For line drawings, please provide the original vector file (e.g. .ai, or .eps).

Tables
Tables must be created using a word processor's table function, not tabbed text.

Tables should be included in the manuscript. The final layout will place the tables as close to their first citation as possible.

All tables must be cited within the main text, numbered with Arabic numerals in consecutive order (e.g. Table 1, Table 2, etc.).

Each table must have an accompanying descriptive title. This should clearly and concisely summarise the content and/or use of the table. A short additional table legend is optional to offer a further description of the table. The table title and legend should be placed underneath the table.

Tables should not include:

• Rotated text
• Colour to denote meaning (it will not display the same on all devices)
• Images
• Vertical or diagonal lines
• Multiple parts (e.g. ‘Table 1a’ and ‘Table 1b’). These should either be merged into one table, or separated into ‘Table 1’ and ‘Table 2’.

NOTE: If there are more columns than can fit on a single page, then the table will be placed horizontally on the page. If it still can't fit horizontally on a page, the table will be broken into two.

References

In-text citations
Every use of information from other sources must be cited in the text so that it is clear that external material has been used.

If the author is already mentioned in the main text then the year should follow the name within parenthesis.

• Both Jones (2013) and Brown (2010) showed that …

If the author name is not mentioned in the main text then the surname and year should be inserted, in parenthesis, after the relevant text. Multiple citations should be separated by semi-colon and follow alphabetical order.

• The statistics clearly show this to be untrue (Brown 2010; Jones 2013).

If three or fewer authors are cited from the same citation then all should be listed. If four or more authors are part of the citation then ‘et al.’ should follow the first author name.

• (Jones, Smith & Brown 2008)
• (Jones et al. 2008)

If citations are used from the same author and the same year, then a lowercase letter, starting from ‘a’, should be placed after the year.

• (Jones 2013a; Jones 2013b)

If specific pages are being cited then the page number should follow the year, after a colon.

• (Brown 2004: 65; Jones 2013: 143)

For publications authored and published by organisations, use the short form of the organisation’s name or its acronym in lieu of the full name.

• (ICRC 2000) NOT (International Committee of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies 2000)

Please do not include URLs in parenthetical citations, but rather cite the author or page title and include all details, including the URL, in the reference list.

Reference list
All citations must be listed at the end of the text file, in alphabetical order of authors’ surnames.

All reading materials should be included in ‘References’ – works which have not been cited within the main text, but which the author wishes to share with the reader, must be cited as additional information in endnotes explaining the relevance of the work. This will ensure that all works within the reference list are cited within the text.

NOTE: If multiple works by the same author are being listed, please re-type the author’s name out for each entry, rather than using a long dash.

NOTE: DOIs should be included for all reference entries, where possible.

Reference format

This journal uses the APA system – see below for examples of how to format:

• Books:

Author, A. A. (year). Title of work. Location: Publisher. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/xx.xxxxxxxx

Leaver, B. L., Ehrman, M., & Shekhtman, B. (2005). Achieving success in second language acquisition. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511610431

Jacobs, G. M., & Hall, S. (2002). Implementing cooperative learning. In J. C. Richards & W. A. Renandya (Eds.), Methodology in language teaching: An anthology of current practice (pp. 52-58). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511667190.009

NOTE: If multiple works by the same author are being listed, please re-type the author’s name out for each entry, rather than using a long dash.

• Journal articles:

Author, A. A., Author, B. B., & Author, C. C. (year). Article title. Journal Title, volume number(issue number), page numbers. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/xx.xxxxxxxx

Radford, M. (2001). Aesthetic and religious awareness among pupils: Similarities and differences. British Journal of Music Education, 18(2), 151-159. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0265051701000249

NOTE: Please include DOIs for all journal articles where possible.

• Newspaper articles (online):

Author, A. (year, date). Article title. Newspaper. Retrieved from www.URL

McMahon, S. (2010, July 19). Fund new Victorian era. Herald Sun. Retrieved from http://www.heraldsun.com.au/

• Newspaper articles (print):

Author, A. (year, date). Article title. Newspaper. pp. page number

Parker, K. (2008, December 3). Plea for languages. Koori Mail, pp. 19-20

• Conference papers:

Author, A. (year, month). Title. Paper presented at Conference title, Location, Country.

Liu, C., Wu, D., Fan, J., & Nauta, M. M. (2008, November). Does job complexity predict job strains? Paper presented at the 8th Biannual Conference of the European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology, Valencia, Spain.

• Organisational publications/Grey literature:

Organisation. (year). Title. Series/publication number. Retrieved from (if online)

World Bank. (2008). Textbooks and school library provision in secondary education in Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank Working Paper No. 126. Africa Human Development Series). Retrieved from EBL database.

• Theses and dissertations:

Author, A. A. (year). Thesis title (Doctoral dissertation, Institution, location). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/xx.xxxxxxxx

Murray, B. P. (2008). Prior knowledge, two teaching approaches for metacognition: Main idea and summarization strategies in reading (Doctoral dissertation, Fordham University, New York)

• Webpages / PDFs:

Author, A. A. (year). Title of work. Retrieved month day, year, from source.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2011). Australia's health 2004. Retrieved from http://www.aihw.gov.au/publications/index.cfm/title/10014

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

1. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
2. Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission obtained from the copyright holder for all formats of the journal.
3. All authors have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper and satisfy the authorship guidelines.
4. The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
5. All DOIs for the references have been provided, when available.
6. Tables and figures are all cited in the text. Tables are included within the text document, whilst figure files are uploaded as supplementary files.
7. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi or above preferred). Each file is no more than 20MB per file. The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximise quality, the original source file is preferred).
8. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines (see above). Every effort has been made to ensure that author names are removed from the manuscript (following the instructions to ensure blind peer review).
9. A Full Disclosure package has been prepared, containing the replication package and/or analysis package. See the HPB Data Guidelines.
10. The authors understand that reviews and editorial communication will be mandatorily unblinded and published upon an accepted article's publication. 

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms. If a submission is rejected or withdrawn prior to publication, all rights return to the author(s):

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Submitting to the journal implicitly confirms that all named authors and rights holders have agreed to the above terms of publication. It is the submitting author's responsibility to ensure all authors and relevant institutional bodies have given their agreement at the point of submission.

Note: some institutions require authors to seek written approval in relation to the terms of publication. Should this be required, authors can request a separate licence agreement document from the editorial team (e.g. authors who are Crown employees).

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party. The full privacy policy can be viewed here.

Publication Fees

European Health Psychology Society (EHPS) members qualify for a £100 discount. Authors who are not EHPS members can become members by visiting the Society’s website. On submission, please note your membership status in your cover letter.

The APC for HPB covers all publisher processing costs (editorial processes; platform development and maintenance; indexing; marketing; archiving; DOI registration etc) and ensures that all of the content is fully open access. This approach maximises the potential readership of publications and allows the journal to be run in a sustainable way. See the publisher's website for a breakdown of processing costs. 

Many institutions have funds available to support open access publications by their staff, therefore we ask that you contact the relevant body to cover the APC.

If you do not know about your institution’s policy on open access funding, please contact your departmental/faculty administrators and institution library, as funds may be available to you.

If published, authors will receive an APC request email along with information on how payment can be arranged.

Tax will be added to all fees charged, when applicable (includes VAT/Sales tax or any other applicable taxes).

Waiver Information

If you do not have funds available to pay the APC (e.g., because your institution/funder will not cover the fee) then we may be able to offer a discount or full waiver. Should you need to discuss waiver options or the APC in general, please ensure that you contact the editor as early as possible. Editorial decisions are made independently from the ability to pay the APC. Waiver requests must be received as part of the submission information (e.g. in the cover letter).