Editorial Guidelines for Original Papers

The editors at JAPA offer the following guidelines for authors regarding Original Paper submissions: 

1. Does your submission clearly and concisely state the proposal or argument in your manuscript? 
2. Have you done a thoughtful and targeted review of the literature that is pertinent to your thesis? 
3. Original Papers should not exceed 11,000 words in length.

If you are struggling with answering any of these questions, we encourage you to return to the current draft of your text for further work. 

 Editorial Guidelines for Essays 

JAPA publishes different forms of writing that fall under the category of Essay: memoir, auto-theory, and long- and short-form pieces. Essays do not offer original research and are not categorized as Original Papers. 

Key features of an Essay include: 

1. In-depth creative exploration of a question, concept, or theme germane to psychoanalysis. 
2. Relevant scholarship that supports or enhances the paper's argument or theme. 
3. Writing that is well-organized and compelling. 
4. Essays should not exceed 8,000 words in length

Editorial Guidelines for Book Reviews and Book Essays 

JAPA Review of Books welcomes your submissions to our section. There are several ways that you can make a contribution: 

1. We would be pleased to hear from you if you have a book that you would like us to consider for review. You can email us at bookreviewsjapa@gmail.com and tell us about the book and why you think it is of interest to our readership. Please suggest three possible independent reviewers who have expertise in the topic and are excellent writers. 
2. If you submit a book review, whether solicited by us or unsolicited, we will review your manuscript and let you know whether it is accepted for publication, needs revision, or is not a fit for JAPA. Below are our criteria for Single Book Reviews and for Book Essays. 
3. If you do not have a particular book to review in mind but would like to be considered as a reviewer, email us at [email protected]. Submit a single-page writing sample that illustrates your reviewing style. This can be an excerpt from a previous review or a new piece specifically crafted for this purpose. 

 Review of a Single Book (approximately 2,000 words) 

Your review is a way to engage in dialogue with both the book’s author and its potential readership. The review should include a critical assessment of the book: what does the author provide that is new, noteworthy, or a significant contribution to literature in the field? Please do not write a chapter-by-chapter summary. Instead, structure your review in a way that will engage the reader’s interest in your writing as thoughtful commentary on the book and its topic. If you feel the author has missed something relevant to the topic, please elaborate on what is lacking. We look to the reviewer to engage in a constructive dialogue with the book, the reader, and the author that presents a new understanding of the topic or raises divergent viewpoints. For a solicited review, if you find that you have nothing positive to say about a book that you have agreed to review for us, please let us know before you begin writing; we may choose to reassign the book or not to run a review at all. 

 

Book Essay (two or more books; not to exceed 4,000 words) 

The writer of a book essay is asked to deepen a reader’s understanding of a topic common to two or more books. Your essay should show how the books work in conversation with one another, inform current thinking about their topic, shed light on a new idea, or introduce divergent views. The book essay format is intended to give the reviewer an opportunity to express a personal perspective while highlighting the book authors’ points of view. Please do not exceed 4,000 words; if you are reviewing several books for an essay and need more space, please confer with us as you work. 

 

General Considerations for Book Reviews and Book Essays 

• We encourage you to make your writing personal; use your own voice (for example, “I,” not “this reader”).  

• Invoke other books, creative works, or concepts when you feel these will help readers to understand the book you are reviewing or the topic of a book essay. Other works cited should be included in your reference list. 

• As you work on your manuscript, please let us know if you have questions about scope or format.  

• We would like to see a draft of solicited book reviews or book essays within four or five months of the date of assignment. 

• All manuscripts must be in APA Style (7th Edition), including all citations and references. https://apastyle.apa.org/ 

• Include your affiliations, preferred mailing address, and email in a footnote on the first page of your manuscript. (This is different from Original Papers, which are anonymized.) 

• All manuscripts must be in MS Word, double-spaced, and using a 12-point font. 

• Use footnotes only when absolutely necessary. Unlike Original Papers, book reviews and essays do not require abstracts, keywords, a title page or biographical statements. When submitting your manuscript, put "not applicable" in those boxes. 

• Once you send an initial draft to us, we’ll reply with any editorial suggestions, questions, or concerns we have. We ask that you respond with a new draft as quickly as possible so we can move your review or essay toward publication. 

 

We require that proper credit be given to anyone who has made a substantial contribution to any piece submitted to JAPA. According to Sage’s ethical guidelines: 

All parties who have made a substantive contribution to the article should be listed as authors. Any contributors with roles that do not amount to a substantive contribution 

should be listed in the Acknowledgements. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/credit 

 Peer Review 

Manuscripts submitted to JAPA are read for significance, originality, merit of argumentation, and quality of writing by three or more reviewers from the JAPA Board. Reviewers are allowed 6 weeks for peer review. A decision letter and reviewers' comments will be sent to the corresponding author. Please note that JAPA conforms to a double-anonymized peer-review process. We strive to come to a decision about a manuscript within twelve weeks of submission, but if undergoing full peer review, this time may be extended beyond the twelve-week timeframe to allow for editor review, obtaining reviewers, peer review, and decision.

Confidentiality 

Authors must take appropriate measures to preserve confidentiality and protect patient anonymity within the ethical framework of the psychoanalytic profession (or of their own profession, if other than psychoanalytic). The publication of clinical material continues to be essential to the growth of individual analysts as well as to the advancement of the analytic profession as a whole. Yet, the need to communicate our clinical experiences complicates the ethical requirement to preserve the confidentiality of the clinical encounter. There exist several time-honored approaches to preserving confidentiality and to protecting the anonymity of the patient (and the privacy of anyone else involved), while maintaining the scientific integrity of a clinical publication: disguise, patient consent, the use of composites, the use of short clinical vignettes or of thumbnail sketches that can bring the clinical material alive while avoiding detailed disclosures entailed in traditional case presentations. 
 
Each approach has advantages and disadvantages. The method of preserving confidentiality must be chosen by the author on clinical considerations, and therefore tailored to the individual case (for a discussion of the specific set of issues generated by each approach see Gabbard, G. O. 2000. Disguise or Consent: Problems and Recommendations Concerning the Publication and Presentation of Clinical Material. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 81, 1071–1086; Kantrowitz, J. L. 2004. Writing about Patients: I. Ways of Protecting Confidentiality and Analyst's Conflicts over Choice of Method. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 52: 69-99; and Kantrowitz, J. L. 2006. Writing About Patients. Responsibilities, Risks, and Ramifications. New York: Other Press). 

 Authors are encouraged to carefully consider these alternatives when they prepare their manuscripts and to give precedence to clinical concerns. If extensive clinical material is used, the author should include a clear statement regarding the method used to protect the confidentiality and anonymity of those discussed. This statement should appear in a footnote on the first page of your paper in which clinical material is mentioned. 

Please note that, in accordance with current standards in psychoanalytic publishing, we require that, even if the author chooses to obtain explicit patient consent to use clinical material, the author must disguise the patient to the point that no one other than the author and the patient could identify the latter.

Manuscript Preparation Guidelines 

Manuscripts must conform to the style of the journal. 

 JAPA uses a double-anonymized peer-review process. All identifying information (author name(s), postal address, fax, e-mail address, phone number, as well as any acknowledgments) should be included on a title page uploaded separately into our submission system. Please also include on your title page a byline listing the current professional, academic, and institutional titles, positions and affiliations for all authors. In the case of more than one author, make sure the corresponding author is clearly indicated. Please also supply at least 10 well-chosen key words on your title page; these key words should also be included in the Abstract. Key words and title pages are not required for book reviews or book essays. 

 All identifying information should be anonymized within the manuscript, including in-text citations and author references. There should be no identifying information in your uploaded text. 

 Begin Original Papers with a one-paragraph abstract, not to exceed 200 words, summarizing the essential contributions of the paper. Original Paper submissions should not exceed forty double-spaced pages in length (about 11,000 words), including the abstract, and should be formatted as follows: 1½-inch margins, left and right; all copy double-spaced, including abstract, references, footnotes, and extracts; footnotes numbered consecutively and located at the bottom of the page of text on which the superscript number appears (initial footnotes referring to the title of the paper or author do not carry a number). All pages of the manuscript are to be numbered. 

 

All artwork, including charts, tables, figures, drawings, and photographs, is to be submitted to the publisher either as camera-ready copy or in a format that can be reproduced as a print-resolution graphical file. Final artwork in JAPA will measure no more than 4¼ inches in width and no more than 7 inches in height. The cost for any alteration in artwork will be borne by the author(s).  

 

JAPA is primarily a black and white print journal but color printing is available for a fee. The first color image is $800 and each figure thereafter is $200 each. 

 The author is responsible for obtaining written permissions for material such as figures, tables, art, and extensive quotes taken directly—or adapted in minor ways—from another source,  as is payment of any fees the copyright holder may require. Please provide your permission by uploading it to the submission system.  

 All manuscripts must be in APA Style (7th Edition), including all citations and references. https://apastyle.apa.org/ 

 

Manuscripts should be in Microsoft Word and submitted via https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/japa 

 Submit revisions the same way, with a draft number and date clearly indicated on each version. IMPORTANT: Your original files are available to you when you upload your revised manuscript. Please delete any previous versions of your manuscript before uploading a revision. Your text and figure file(s) will be converted into HTML so that they can be easily viewed with a browser on the Internet. They will also be converted into a PDF document so that they can be viewed and printed with Adobe Acrobat Reader. The files in the PDF document will be presented in the order specified.  

 Please note that only articles submitted to JAPA that are not under review at another journal, and that have not been previously published in print or electronically will be considered. 

We do not accept translations of previously published manuscripts unless solicited

 Editorial Office Contacts 

For questions or information regarding your manuscript contact: 

 Susan McNamara, MD 
Managing Editor, Book Review 
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 

bookreviewsjapa@gmail.com 

 Thank you for your interest in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association.