Author Guidelines

[Updated: 24-8-2025]

Annals of Psychology [Anales de Psicologia] publish manuscripts in all areas of scientific psychology and follows all the standards and quality policies of open access scientific journals. Authors can submit their manuscript for selection and review throughout the year. Manuscripts must be original and have not been published totally or partially in other journals.

Authors can submit their manuscripts for the selection and review process throughout the year. This process is followed online through the Open Journal Systems (OJS) web application. Before uploading the required files, authors have two tasks:
1) Understand and inform themselves about the journal's characteristics and requirements in this General Information section 1.

2) Prepare the two files that must be uploaded as a minimum: manuscript (section 2 of these Guidelines) and Letter of authorship or presentation (section 3).

With all this, authors will be ready to upload their files to the journal's OJS application, as described in the PDF linked in section 4 of these Guidelines.

The general index of these Guidelines for authors is as follows:

1) INFORMATION ABOUT THE FEATURES AND REQUIREMENTS OF THIS JOURNAL, BEFORE PREPARING AND SENDING THE MANUSCRIPT:
Before preparing and submitting your manuscript, please read the following sections carefully:
   1.1. Types of papers that can be submitted to the journal.
   1.2. General information: Copyright, commitments and code of ethics for authors, payment of editing fees (APC).
   1.3. Submission format: Language, APA 7th ed. standards, manuscript file, and author letter file.
   1.4. Manuscript evaluation process and editorial monitoring

2) PREPARATION OF THE MANUSCRIPT FOR SUBMISSION FOR THE JOURNAL
   2.1. Anonymization of the manuscript
   2.2. Structure and parts of the manuscript
   2.3. Initial Section
   2.4. Text of the manuscript
   2.5. References

3) PREPARATION OF THE LETTER OF AUTHORSHIP FOR SUBMISSION FOR THE JOURNAL

4) SEND FILES OF ORIGINAL WORK TO JOURNAL WEBSITE  

1) INFORMATION ABOUT THE FEATURES AND REQUIREMENTS OF THIS JOURNAL, BEFORE PREPARING AND SENDING THE MANUSCRIPT

1.1. Type of manuscripts

Authors can submit to this journal: (a) Original manuscripts for publication, and/or (b) Proposals for original articles grouped into issues or monographic themes. Depending on the topic or methodology, they will have a different structure and organization, as shown below.

Each paper has a specific structure and requirements that authors must follow and respect if they wish to have their work published in Annals of Psychology. Manuscripts that do not meet these conditions will be returned directly to the authors without possibility of continuing the review process.

The different types of submissions and their requirements are outlined below. Authors should decide which of these best qualifies their manuscript.

- Empirical studies.- Each manuscript should clearly present the problem statement, objectives, design and the method used, the results and discussion of the results, ending with the most relevant conclusions for psychological practice; in addition, the conclusions should include the limitations and future prospects of the study.

- Experimental, quasi-experimental, and correlational studies.- This type of study should include the following sections: Introduction, Methods (Design, Participants, Instruments, Procedure and Statistical Analysis), Results, Discussion and Conclusion, and References. Tables and figures must follow the APA format and they will be presented in separated pages at the end of the text after the references pages.

Special care should be taken in the Participants and Results sections. Where the authors must fully describe the sample/s used in the study and specify whether it was incidental or random. If missing data have occurred, they should specify their percentage and how they have treated the missing data; e.g., dropping cases or using some method of imputation.

A study only provides information on the gender variable (% of male and female) and age (mean and standard deviation) can hardly pass the filter of Editorial Team for later review.

Any work that lacks a Statistical Analysis section with and explanation of the method used and the statistical criteria to evaluate the goodness of fit of the models used will not be published. Statistical Analysis Section should not go in the Procedure section or Results.
The presentation of statistical results should clearly include the name of the test, degrees of freedom, p-value that was significant, the confidence interval and statistical effect size (e.g., Cohen's d, ω², among others). For questions about the type of research designs one can consult a published in our journal (in English or Spanish; and whose recommendations will be taken into account in the revisions of the manuscript) in http://revistas.um.es/analesps/article/view/analesps.29.3.178511:

Ato, M., López-García, J. J., & Benavente, A. (2013). A classification system for research designs in psychology. Anales de Psicología / Annals of Psychology, 29(3), 1038–1059. https://doi.org/10.6018/analesps.29.3.178511

- Meta-analysis studies.- A meta-analysis is a quantitative review of the literature in order to answer a clearly formulated questionas determining the effect of a treatment, or prevention training program, find risk factors (or protection) getting a disorder, and generally to estimate relationships between variables and moderating variables. A key topic has to do with the search engines used to retrieve papers that include the required information, which are essential to the proper use of this technique. Therefore, authors should explicitly specify the databases used and how it has made finding work (keywords). The search must be comprehensive, incorporating more recent works, and should present the results obtained in terms of a flow chart according to the PRISMA statement (http://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/prisma/).

The structure of a meta-analysis should be: Introduction, Method (study selection criteria, search procedures for studies, coding of variables, index / s of effect size and statistical analysis), Results, Discussion and Conclusion, and References. The references used directly for the meta-analysis are highlighted with an asterisk (*) in the list of references.

- Systematic reviews.- A systematic review is a synthesis of research on a particular aspect important of psychology and on which there is sufficient information either qualitative or quantitative to conduct the review. In this sense, except in the presentation of results, follow the same course of action in the meta-analysis. In this case, databases used to compile studies and keywords that allow their inclusion in the study will be of special interest. Authorswill present the results of the search in a flowchart of the PRISMA statement (see above). The sections that must appear in a qualitative systematic review are: Introduction, Method (Criteria for selecting studies for search and coding of variables), Results, Discussion and Conclusion, and References. The references used directly for the review are highlighted with an asterisk (*) in the list of references.
If the systematic review is about psychometric properties of a psychological scale, the study may include a study of the quality of these psychometric properties with a scale built ad hoc for this study or using any other method (e.g., COSMIN group http://www.cosmin.nl/).

- Psychometric studies.- Annals of Psychology [Anales de Psicologia] regularly publish studies about psychometric validation of new scales or adapted to Spanish or other languages. The structure of a psychometric study must be: Introduction (including objectives and rationale for validation), Method (Participants, Instruments, Procedure, and Statistical and Psychometric Analysis), Results, Discussion and Conclusion, and References. If the study includes an exploratory factor analysis, it is advisable to consult three recently published papers in our journal (in Spanish; and whose recommendations will be taken into account in the revisions of the manuscript):

- Lloret-Segura, S., Ferreres-Traver, A., Hernández-Baeza, A., & Tomás-Marco, I. (2014). El análisis factorial exploratorio de los ítems: una guía práctica, revisada y actualizada. Anales de Psicología / Annals of Psychology, 30(3), 1151–1169. https://doi.org/10.6018/analesps.30.3.199361
- Ferrando, P. J., & Lorenzo-Seva, U. (2014). El análisis factorial exploratorio de los ítems: algunas consideraciones adicionales. Anales de Psicología / Annals of Psychology, 30(3), 1170–1175. https://doi.org/10.6018/analesps.30.3.199991

- López-Pina, J.-A., & Veas, A. (2024). Validación de instrumentos psicométricos en ciencias sociales y de la salud: una guía práctica. Anales de Psicología / Annals of Psychology, 40(1), 163–170. https://doi.org/10.6018/analesps.583991

For a study of the adaptation of a scale, it must clearly explain the back-translation process used. Manuscripts should contain evidence of empirical validity (concurrent, convergent and discriminant) with other scales. If clinical diagnostic criteria or performance (cut scores) are included, preference will be given to those studies that provide evidence of the sensitivity and specificity, and provide psychometric norms.

- Methodological papers.- Annals of Psychology [Anales de Psicologia] supports the presentation of methodological studies that show through theoretical and mathematical developments and/or simulation, properties of some procedures for which there are not available a solution directly implemented. These studies will be clearly highlighting the need for the study, the problem solving and its possible implementation for psychological practice. Given the eminently practical orientation of this journal, methodological studies that do not involve a clear improvement of the procedures used to date will not be accepted.

- Qualitative studies.- Works involving the use of qualitative methodologies are also welcome in Annals of Psychology. In this case, we will follow the same pattern of an empirical study, but should take special care in collecting the data, the coding system used, ensuring a review of the category system by external researchers to own study, description of the group of participants, and the use of appropriate data for such statistical techniques, where appropriate, such as interrater reliability coefficients and methods based on chi-square test for qualitative data.

- Theoretical studies.- Annals of Psychology [Anales de Psicologia] also publish theoretical studies related to an essential aspect of any area of psychology with special relevance or practical utility for professionals. The theoretical studies will be commissioned by the editorial team, and exceptionally will be accepted depending on the quality of the study in the opinion of the editorial team. This study must be organized in: Introduction (review objective approach to the subject), Development of theoretical content, Conclusions and References.

- Special issues.- Annals of Psychology will publish annually (within a regular issue) a monographic issue with a maximum length of eight studies of which at least 4 will be empirical (experimental, quasi-experimental, correlational, systematic review and meta-analysis). The proposal should include the title, a summary of its main objectives and contents, name (and contact) of the coordinator of the special theme, an index of manuscripts, indicating authors (contact address) and titles. The Editorial Board will consider the proposal and will take decision to accept or reject this monograph. If accepted, the manuscripts must follow the rules for original manuscripts presented above, including the peer review system. The Editorial Board will appoint from among its members the Editor who will oversee the entire editorial process of the issue or special issue. 

1.2. General information for authors

• a) Commitment of authors: Submitting an article to this journal implies that the authors accept the following commitments:
  - The person submitting the manuscript acts in representation of all authors (if there is more than one).
  - Neither the manuscript nor any version or translation of it has been published in any other media or journal.
  - The manuscript has not been submitted to any other publication or journal, and will not be sent during the process of evaluation in Annals of Psychology [Anales de Psicologia].
  - To preserve the originality and intellectual integrity of published articles, the journal reserves the right to check the authorship of the manuscript using anti-plagiarism systems and tools, and authors should also be aware of the journal's policy regarding the appropriate use of Artificial Intelligence.
  Breach of any of these commitments will result in the automatic removal of the manuscript.
  In any case, the Editorial Team understands that the opinions expressed by the authors are their sole responsibility.

b) Ethics Code for Authors, Reviewers and Editors: We strongly recommend that authors take into account all the standards and recommendations outlined in our journal's Ethics Code for Authors. The journal also has ethical standards and recommendations for Reviewers and Editors throughout this process.

c) Article processing charges (APCs):

For article processing charges (APCs), once the manuscript is accepted and before publication, the author is charged the following:
- Individual payment for authors from European Union countries: 216 euros plus VAT (261.36 euros for Spanish authors); excluding VAT if the payment is from the author's university or institution.
- If the author is not from a European Union countries: 216 euros (excluding VAT).
There is no charge for picking up the article after submission.

1.3. Presentation format

- Language: The manuscript can be submitted in English or Spanish. If the work is submitted in Spanish and accepted, it must be translated into English for publication. The author is responsible for this translation (which may be reviewed by the Editorial Board). All articles will be published in English and it can also be published simultaneously in Spanish, as long as the authors request it.

- Journal style for manuscripts: APA style, from Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition, 2020 (https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/index)

- Style for empirical manuscripts: The authors of empirical work must follow the recommendations in Statistical Methods in Psychology Journals: Guidelines and Explanations, from Wilkinson and the APA Task Force on Statistical Inference, published in the journal American Psychologist (1999, 54,594-604) which is available on https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-54-8-594.pdf. They must report confidence intervals and measures of effect size for all statistical results.

- Digital format:Two files will be created: (1) The article manuscript will be prepared in Microsoft Word, and it is recommended that you transfer everything to the following Word file (which includes a template for the appropriate heading and subheading styles). Once prepared in accordance with the rules explained in section 2 of this Guide for Authors, it will be converted to PDF format for uploading to the journal's website according to the rules in section 4 of this Guide, for evaluation. If the article passes the review and is accepted for publication in the journal, the final version must be sent in Microsoft Word for Windows, in order to facilitate layout. (2) The Letter of Authorship will be prepared in Word according to the requirements of section 3 of the Guide and will be sent in PDF to the journal's application according to the rules in section 4 of the Guide.

- Maximum length of work: it should not exceed 8000 words including all sections listed below according to the type of contribution; and excluding abstract, notes, references and tables/figures.

- Number of files: Two files must be submitted via the journal's web platform:
  . A PDF file containing the article manuscript without author or affiliation information. It must include tables, figures, and appendices. See section 2 of these Guidelines
  . A PDF file containing the Letter of Authorship (or Cover Letter).
See section 3 below. 

1.4. Process of evaluation and monitoring of originals until publication

Process monitoring: Authors can monitor the evaluation process of their article on the journal's website (OJS system with username and password at http://revistas.um.es/analesps). 

• a) Editorial process for manuscript review and acceptance: From the time the manuscript is received until the final editorial decision (acceptance or rejection), the estimated duration of the process will not exceed five months. The phases are as follows:
•  
• a1) Acknowledgment of receipt and submission to reviewers: The journal's own web system activates the acknowledgment of receipt.
•  
• a2) Manuscript review process:
•  
• a2a) First initial review of the manuscript by the Editorial Board (duration: up to 15 days):
  This is an initial review of format, style, and editorial policy. This may result in a decision to refer the work to external expert reviewers or a decision to assign the work sufficient priority to send it for external peer review. Generally, in the latter case, this would be for reasons such as:

. Detection of publication or submission/review in another publication.
. Lack of current interest in the manuscript's topic (novelty and current relevance; exclusively local interest).
. Outside the thematic scope and types of work of the journal (the list is in the Instructions to Authors).
. Poor methodological quality.
. Outdated theoretical framework.
. Major errors in the English text.
. Non-compliance with the journal's Publication Standards (APA standards - citation correspondence, incorrect references, poor statistical formatting, incorrect tables and figures, etc.), metadata completion, submission requirements, incomplete authorship or cover letter).

a2b) 2nd Review by external expert reviewers (maximum duration: 4.5 months from the 1st review):
- If it passes the 1st review, the manuscript will be sent to an associate editor, who will assign it to two external reviewers who are experts in the subject matter and, in the case of empirical works, in the methodology.
- Reviewers are external to the journal and selected by the Editorial Team. They will issue a proposal on whether the article should be published and, if necessary, suggest any necessary corrections. Once their work is completed, they will receive a certificate of completion upon request from the journal.
- Review Method.- The review method used is double-blind (anonymity of author and reviewers), with a member of the Editorial Team responsible for establishing contact between the two. If the work is accepted for review, the final report will be issued by the Editorial Board within a maximum of 5 months.
- Review Results.- The outcome of the evaluation process may be:
(a) Acceptance of the article,
(b) Publishable with modifications (acceptance subject to corrections),
(c) Re-evaluable (requiring corrections and re-evaluation by the reviewer), or
(d) Not publishable (rejection).

The decision, along with any of these reports and the necessary reasoned justification, will be sent by email to the author by the Associate Editor in charge of the article.
In the case of corrections, the author has up to one month to make them; if after this period has elapsed without a response, the submission will be rejected and archived.
The author's response to the required corrections should be sent: (1) in a Word file, responding to the reviewers point by point, and (2) by sending the manuscript with the modifications highlighted in a different color (usually red), clearly indicating the changes made to the original manuscript. This will facilitate the second and subsequent revisions, if necessary. Instructions for uploading these modifications to the journal's web application are in the PDF of section 4 of these Guidelines (section 3, point "review").

• - In case the review process is not completed within the maximum period for articles in 2nd expert review: If after 4.5 months after the 1st review the 2nd review has not been completed due to the lack of availability of reviewers who respond within that period, the Editorial Board will ask the author to decide (1) whether to wait longer to send it to new reviewers, or (2) whether to withdraw the manuscript (to send it to another journal, etc.). If the author does not respond within a period of two weeks, the article will be rejected.

• b) Process from acceptance to publication
•  
• b1) If accepted, the author will be instructed in the same email to complete the following steps for the production process up to publication:
  - Rewrite the manuscript with the corrections suggested during the review process.
  - Include in the manuscript any anonymized data: authors, affiliations, correspondence, and author identification data omitted from the text or references. This final version will be uploaded to the journal's application (as explained below).
  - Only if the article was initially submitted in Spanish, proceed with its translation into English (and upload the translated version to the journal's application).
  - Follow the instructions for paying the APC (found in the same acceptance email).

b2) Acceptance Certificate: Once payment of the APC fee has been verified, the Editorial Board will send an acceptance certificate to the authors (if requested).

b3) Layout and Publication:
- Once the final manuscript is received, the Production Team will review it and send it to layout.
- Once received from layout, it will be sent to the author for final error checking (gallery proofing process).
- It will be published online according to the journal's schedule.
- Once published, the author will be able to freely obtain a reprint in the journal's online edition, in PDF format.

b4) Once accepted, disseminate and publicize the work:
- Regardless of the journal's dissemination efforts, it is very important that the author assumes the following:
(1) Requirement to publicize and disseminate the article on their own academic networks (Research Gate, Academia, etc.) and social networks (Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, etc.).
(2) Cite the article. published in Annals of Psychology in their next articles in high-impact journals (whenever appropriate due to similarity in subject matter).

2) PREPARING THE MANUSCRIPT FOR SUBMISSION TO THE JOURNAL

Once we have the first final draft of the manuscript in Word (preferably in the template mentioned in section 1.3), it is now a matter of adapting the manuscript to the journal's specific style and format and omitting author identification data (this will be the version that goes to reviewers):

2.1. Anonymization of the manuscript

The goal of this task is to be able to send it to expert reviewers without them being able to identify the authors. The manuscript should be stripped of author identification data, as it will be entered separately, later, and within OJS (the journal's web platform). The following should be removed from the manuscript:
- Author information: first and last names, affiliation, email address, ORCID, place of origin.
- Any reference to the authors or their workplaces that could allow the reviewer to identify the author must also be removed from the text of the article.
- In direct citations of works by the same author as the manuscript, the last names must be replaced with the word "Author."
- In the References section, for each author's publication, the author and year of publication must be indicated in parentheses: "Author (year)."

Author information must be included, at the time of submission, in: (1) the Cover Letter, as described below; and (2) it will also be included during the submission process in the journal's web application, in the Metadata area.

If accepted, it will be reintegrated into the final text for publication. 

2.2. Structure and parts of the manuscript

The general structure of content distribution that the author must follow in his manuscript includes:
- Initial title, abstract, and keywords (without author identification information).
- Text of the manuscript (from introduction to conclusions).
- References
- Appendices (optional)
- List of Tables and Figures

2.3. Initial Section

Includes title, abstract, and keywords. Authors and affiliations are not included.

At the beginning of the document, the following must appear, left-justified:
- The title of the work (in lowercase except for the initial letter, without italics or bold), in English and Spanish. Authors and affiliation information should not appear, as this version will be the one read by the reviewers.
- An abstract of no more than 200 words, in both English and Spanish.
- A number of keywords between 4 and 8, in English and Spanish, separated by periods (.), in lowercase except for the first letter of the first word, which will be capitalized. To maximize the visibility of the papers, authors must be very careful in choosing keywords, ensuring that at least one of them appears in the title, abstract, and text of the paper, which will facilitate the search for the papers in common search engines.

2.4. Text of the manuscript

The following must be taken into account:

- Titles or headings are not numbered. First-level headings (Introduction, Conclusions, etc.) are on the left and in bold. Second-level headings (Participants, Procedure, etc.) are indented 1 cm and in bold. Third-level headings are indented 1 cm and in italics.

- The text should preferably be in size 12 and Times New Roman, with 1.5 line spacing, with no spacing before or after. A space must be placed before and after each title.

- Citations: Every author citation in the text must have a bibliographic reference at the end, and every reference must correspond to its citation(s) in the text. No citations should be unreferenced. No references should be uncited. The manuscript will be returned to the author if this is not correct.

- Notes must be included in footnotes.

- The maximum recommended length, excluding the abstract, notes, references, and tables/figures, is 8,000 words.

- Tables and figures: These may be included in the text in their corresponding place. They must be numbered consecutively from 1 onward and must always be cited in the immediately preceding text, with t and f capitalized (Table 1, Figure 1, etc.). In addition, starting on the last page of the file, the list of tables and figures, with their titles and legends, must be consecutively numbered. If figures and tables are included only at the end, the place or places where they should be inserted must be marked in the text. For tables and figures, according to APA 7th ed. standards, the title should appear at the top, with the text "Table X" or "Figure X" in bold on one line, and the legend in italics on the next line. Tables should also follow APA style (without visible vertical lines). The size of tables and figures should be as small as possible (as long as they are comfortably legible). Figures may be included in the PDF of the manuscript and must be of good quality (minimum 300 dots per inch).

- Regarding research data, we recommend submitting data obtained from the research conducted for the preparation of the article to reputable, discipline-specific or general repositories. See more details here. If you have submitted your data to a public data repository, you should include a link to it in the manuscript text, for example, in the data analysis section, in the Methods section.

- Take into account the journal's policies regarding gender-neutral language and gender perspective in research (where applicable).

2.5. References

Follow APA 7th edition standards, for example in the APA guide. Remember that the DOI must be included, especially in articles. To find out if it has one, a suggestion is to search for it at http://www.crossref.org/guestquery/

3) PREPARING THE AUTHORSHIP LETTER BEFORE UPLOADING IT TO THE APPLICATION   

In this Word template, include the information required below. Once completed, convert the Word file to PDF and then upload it to the journal's OJS application as explained in section 4 of these Guidelines.
(1) Title of the work, in English and Spanish.
(2) All authors, with first and last names according to ORCID and in the order of their signature. For each author: First and last name (1st letter capitalized, rest lowercase), affiliation information, email address, ORCID.
(3) Additional information:
Mandatory:
- Specific contributions of the authors to the research and preparation of the manuscript (CRediT taxonomy)
- Declaration of absence of conflicts of interest.
- Funding: Declare whether the research has been funded (declare the name of the funding entity and project code) or not.
Optional:
- Acknowledgments, if any.
- Availability of data files (web link to the repository).
- Specific declaration of use of generative AI (name of application and model, specify use).
- Use of online translators from other languages into English (name of translator, specific use in this manuscript).

(4) List of 3-5 potential peer reviewers with expertise in the subject matter of the work (name, affiliation, and email address).

(5, optional) Any comments the author wishes to make to the editor.

This file will be uploaded by the corresponding author to the application once the manuscript submission process is complete in the journal's OJS application. To do so, when you access the application again, in the "Pre-review Discussions" area, click "Add discussion" and upload the PDF file.

The manuscript will not be reviewed until this file is uploaded. 

4) SEND THE MANUSCRIPT AND AUTHORSHIP LETTER FILES TO THE JOURNAL’S WEBSITE

With the files already prepared, it is now a matter of managing the journal's web application (OJS application) to upload them and thus begin the review process (see section 1.4 of these Guidelines) in communication with the journal's editors. This process is described in detail in this PDF. If you have any questions, please send an email to analesps@um.es