Please read the guidelines in full before submitting your manuscript.
Manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned.
This Journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics.
The Journal recommends that authors follow the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals formulated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).
Sage is committed to upholding the integrity of the academic record. We encourage authors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ International Standards for Authors and view the author responsibilities section on the Sage Journal Author Gateway.
We also encourage you to familiarize yourself with our Editorial Policies and our Publication Ethics Policies.
Sage Publishing disseminates high-quality research and engaged scholarship globally, and we are committed to diversity and inclusion in publishing. We encourage submissions and peer review from a diverse range of authors and reviewers from across all countries and backgrounds. Read our diversity, equity, and inclusion pledge.
Please read the guidelines below then submit your manuscript here.
Access: Open Access
APC: See article processing charge information below
Accepts preprints? Yes
Identity transparency: Single-anonymized
i-Perception is an open access, peer-reviewed journal. All accepted articles are made freely available online immediately upon publication, are published under a Creative Commons license, and hosted online in perpetuity.
If, after peer review, your manuscript is accepted for publication, a one-time article processing charge (APC) is payable to cover the cost of publishing, paid by the funder, institution, or author. There is no charge for submitting a manuscript.
If, after peer review, your manuscript is accepted for publication, a one-time article processing charge (APC) is payable to cover the cost of publishing, paid by the funder, institution, or author. There is no charge for submitting a manuscript.
*The article processing charge (APC) is payable upon acceptance after peer review and is subject to value added tax (VAT) where applicable. If the paying author/institution is based in the European Union, to comply with European law, VAT must be added to the APC. Providing a VAT registration number will allow an institution to avoid paying this tax, except for UK institutions. Payments can be made in GBP or USD.
For general information on open access at Sage please visit the Open Access page.
Authors may be eligible for discounts to their APC via open access agreements that Sage has with participating institutions. Discounts depend on the terms of the agreement, find out if your institution is participating by visiting Open Access Agreements at Sage. Eligibility is determined by the corresponding author’s affiliation at acceptance matching an agreement.
Your article may be eligible for a full or partial waiver due to our participation in initiatives to increase accessibility to publication across the international academic community. More information about discounts and eligibility.
Your article must be within the scope of the journal and be of sufficient quality. If not, it will not be reviewed. Please read the journal’s Aims and Scope to see if your article is appropriate.
The manuscript must be your original work, you must have the rights to the work, and you must have obtained and be able to supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you, including figures, illustrations, tables, lengthy quotations, or other material previously published elsewhere.
View our Special Collections currently accepting submissions.
Manuscripts may be submitted as Standard articles, Short Reports, Registered Reports, i-Reviews, Journal Club (formerly, i-Comment), Short & Sweet, Replies or Methods papers.
Standard articles: These form the bulk of the content in both journals. They are open submissions on any aspect of perception involving any one or more sensory modalities. Sections should usually include (in order): abstract, introduction, methods, results (and discussion), and (general) discussion. The abstract is limited to 250 words. Authors are particularly encouraged to aim for brevity and, where possible, to submit content that is not essential to understanding the paper as supplementary materials. Authors should also write in a style that will be accessible to readers without expertise in the immediate subject area of the article.
Short reports: These should be to-the-point and aimed at a broad readership. The word limit is 4000 words, including the abstract (up to 150 words), figure captions, and references, but excluding acknowledgements. There is no limit on the number of tables and figures, but authors are advised to aim for no more than two or three. Short reports should be structured the same as standard articles, clearly labelled, and present one or two experiments or theoretical analyses that either (i) have broad, accessible appeal or (ii) are likely to have high impact and relevance within a subfield of perceptual/sensory science. Reviewers and editors should recognise that papers are likely to have less content than a standard article, and this should also speed up the review process.
Registered Reports: These allow you to submit a prospective manuscript for a study that you have not yet run. The review is completed in 2 stages. At Stage 1 (before results) the manuscript will be assessed on the basis of how strong the hypotheses are and whether the methodology and design are robust and promising. At this point the paper can be accepted in principle or rejected. If accepted in principle then the final article should be accepted unless the final manuscript fails to conduct the study originally described. The Stage 1 manuscript should include: introduction - spelling out why the study is important; methods - including information to interpret whether the study is sufficiently sensitive to find a positive result (or to interpret a null result); analysis - detailing as fully as possible the analysis steps that will be used. We recognise that many submissions to the journal do not conform to a classical approach of making inferences based on group statistics. Therefore, we deliberately have no mandatory requirements for power analyses or evidence levels. However, a Stage 1 submission should lay out how evidence for or against a hypothesis will be assessed, and contain appropriate outcome-neutral conditions (e.g., manipulation checks, quality assurance, minimum curve-fit statistics, etc.) to evaluate whether results are conclusive. The Stage 1 submission may also include pilot data, but this is not required. You may write in the past tense, but must have an explicit statement at the top to make sure readers of the Stage 1 manuscript understand this. Stage 1 acceptance is conditional on the authors also submitting, immediately after Stage 1 acceptance, a formal registration to an appropriate repository such as the Open Science Framework (see https://osf.io/rr/). This preregistration can be kept private but must be accessible to the editorial team. At this point authors should also declare an approximate date by which they expect the study to be completed (this can be amended in consultation with the editors). At Stage 2 (after results), you should add the data and analyses previously described, and a discussion, so the final paper is similar to a Standard Article. Additional data and/or analyses, not included in Stage 1, can also be provided at this stage but these must be clearly distinguished from the a priori analyses. At the point of submitting a Stage 2 manuscript, the preregistered Stage 1 manuscript must be made public. The Stage 2 manuscript will then undergo peer review again. Failure to submit the Stage 2 manuscript by the deadline will result in withdrawal of the Stage 1 manuscript by the journal. Authors can also choose to withdraw an accepted Stage 1 manuscript. The journal will publish a note about withdrawn manuscripts, including a link to the preregistered Stage 1 submission. For queries about this format, please contact the Registered Reports editor Sam Schwarzkopf.
i-Perception is affiliated with the Peer Community In Registered Reports as a PCI-interested journal. The journal may offer in-principle acceptance for any Stage 1 manuscript within its disciplinary range but reserves the option for further peer review at Stage 2. Authors taking advantage of the PCI RR track should submit their Stage 2 Registered Report using our usual submission system. The manuscript must include the URL to the reviews and recommendation at PCI RR. The submission must also be accompanied by a cover letter stating that the authors are submitting via the PCI RR track, including a URL to the recommended preprint, and confirming that the manuscript is identical to the recommended preprint. To facilitate this process, authors may suggest Sam Schwarzkopf as recommender in their coverletter submitted to PCI:RR at Stage 1. For queries about this format, please contact the Registered Reports editor Sam Schwarzkopf.
Journal Club (formerly i-Comment): This section publishes journal club style articles that review recently published literature from any journal in the study of perception. This format is open to researchers at any stage of their career, but those at an early stage of their career (graduate students, post-docs) are particularly encouraged to submit to this section. Submissions can review articles published within the last two years. Submissions to this section could take the form of a concise and articulate summary of the most critical findings from an empirical article. More critical submissions, however, are also welcome: all too often the concerns raised by journal clubs in individual labs have no airing space in widely accessible publication formats. More speculative submissions, for example, that link an empirical article to a theoretical position, or field of research, not considered by the authors, are also encouraged. Articles should be no more than 1500 words. Submissions may contain figures. Please contact the Journal Club editor Vebjørn Ekroll with specific questions about content.
Short & Sweet (SAS): For this section, the conventional rules of publication are relaxed. Papers should report material that will appeal to sensory scientists, but for which detailed experiments, complex analysis, and well-worked computational models should not have been performed. The work should be easy to describe, have theoretical relevance, and appeal to a broad readership. The point(s) should not require much (or any) data or analysis, though the methodological details that are important for interpretation should be clear where appropriate (these details can be placed in figure legends if desired). A light-hearted approach is strongly encouraged and the work might be written to amuse or entertain. The word limit is 1200 words, including the abstract (up to 150 words), figure captions, and references, but excluding acknowledgements. To encourage brevity and informality, there should be no section headings apart from the abstract. Other than length and headings, one of the main differences between SAS and Short reports, is the quirky nature of SAS. These papers will usually be sent to just a single reviewer. Occasionally, a second reviewer might be asked at the editor's discretion. The journal aims to publish one SAS paper per issue.
Replies: commenting upon an article published in i-Perception, may be considered for publication but the author should contact the editorial office to gauge suitability before submission. Replies should be shorter than the target article in length.
Methods: This section publishes papers specifically relating to any aspect of methodology in perceptual science, including experimental set-up, measurement techniques and analysis. Manuscripts focusing on innovations, developments or evaluations of existing methods will all be considered.
The journal conforms to the ICMJE requirement that clinical trials are registered in a WHO-approved public trials registry at or before the time of first participant enrollment as a condition of consideration for publication. The trial registry name and URL, and registration number must be included at the end of the abstract.
Your manuscript must follow the relevant EQUATOR Network reporting guidelines, depending on the type of study. The EQUATOR wizard can help identify the appropriate guideline. You will need to upload the appropriate checklist with your submission.
Other resources can be found at NLM’s Research Reporting Guidelines and Initiatives.
If your research involves animals, you will be asked to confirm that you have carefully read and adhered to the ARRIVE guidelines.
The preferred format for your manuscript is Word. You do not need to follow a template, but please ensure your heading levels are clear, and the sections clearly defined.
The LaTeX files are also accepted. A LaTeX template is available on the Sage Journal Author Gateway.
Your article title, keywords, and abstract all contribute to its position in search engine results, directly affecting the number of people who see your work. For details of what you can do to influence this, visit How to help readers find your article online.
Your manuscript’s title should be concise, descriptive, unambiguous, accurate, and reflect the precise contents of the manuscript. A descriptive title that includes the topic of the manuscript makes an article more findable in the major indexing services.
Please include an unstructured abstract between the title and main body of your manuscript that concisely states the purpose of the research, major findings, and conclusions. If your research includes clinical trials, the trial registry name and URL, and registration number must be included at the end of the abstract. Submissions that do not meet this requirement will not be considered.
For clinical trials, the trial registry name and URL, and registration number must be included at the end of the abstract.
Authors may choose to submit a Graphical Abstract that will be published in the online version of each manuscript. This is a concise, visual summary of the article’s main findings, and should capture the content of the article for the readers at a single glance.
Please download this template to create a Graphical Abstract. Authors should add text and graphics/icons as applicable for their content. Please do not include the entire abstract text, but rather present a brief summary of the key findings. We are unable to accommodate reprinted or attributional material within the Graphical Abstract. Graphical abstracts should be submitted as a separate file in the submission system by selecting “Graphical abstracts" from the drop-down list at the File Upload stage.
Please include a minimum of four keywords, listed after the abstract. Keywords should be as specific as possible to the research topic.
For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures, and graphs in electronic format, please read Sage’s artwork guidelines.
Figures supplied in color will appear in color online.
Please ensure that you have obtained any necessary permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures, or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. For further information including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please see the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Sage Journal Author Gateway.
The Title Page should include:
If you are including an Acknowledgements section, this will be published at the end of your article. The Acknowledgments section should include all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship. Per ICMJE recommendations, it is best practice to obtain consent from non-author contributors who you are acknowledging in your manuscript.
Writing assistance and third party submissions: if you have received any writing or editing assistance from a third-party, for example a specialist communications company, this must be clearly stated in the Acknowledgements section and in the covering letter. Please see the Sage Author Gateway for what information to include in your Acknowledgements section. If your submission is being made on your behalf by someone who is not listed as an author, for example the third-party who provided writing/editing assistance, you must state this in the Acknowledgements and also in your covering letter. Please note that the journal editor reserves the right to not consider submissions made by a third party rather than by the author/s themselves.
As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review and publication process, this journal has adopted CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy). CRediT is a high-level taxonomy, including 14 roles, which is used to describe each author’s individual contributions to the work.
You will be asked to list the contribution of each author as part of the submission process. Please include the Author Contributions heading within your submission after the Acknowledgements section. The information you give on submission will then show under the Author Contributions heading later at the proofing stage.
Please include your ethics approval statements under this heading, even if you have already included ethics approval information in your methods section. If ethical approval was not required, you need to explicitly state this. You can find information on what to say in your ethical statements as well as example statements on our Publication ethics and research integrity policies page.
All papers reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must state that the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board approved the study, or waived the requirement for approval, providing the full name and institution of the review committee in addition to the approval number. If applicable, please also include this information in the Methods section of your manuscript.
Please include any participant consent information under this heading and state whether informed consent to participate was written or verbal. If the requirement for informed consent to participate has been waived by the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board (i.e. where it has been deemed that consent would be impossible or impracticable to obtain), please state this. If this is not applicable to your manuscript, please state ‘Not applicable’ in this section. More information and example statements can be found on our Publication ethics and research integrity policies page.
Submissions containing any data from an individual person (including individual details, images or videos) must include a statement confirming that informed consent for publication was provided by the participant(s) or a legally authorized representative. Non-essential identifying details should be omitted. Please do not submit the participant’s actual written informed consent with your article, as this in itself breaches the patient’s confidentiality. The Journal requests that you confirm to us, in writing, that you have obtained written informed consent to publish but the written consent itself should be held by the authors/investigators themselves, for example in a patient’s hospital record. The confirmatory letter may be uploaded with your submission as a separate file in addition to the statement confirming that consent to publish was obtained within the manuscript text. If this is not applicable to your manuscript, please state ‘Not applicable’ in this section.
The journal requires a declaration of conflicting interests from all authors so that a statement can be included in your article. For guidance on conflict of interest statements, see our policy on conflicting interest declarations and the ICMJE recommendations.
If no conflict exists, your statement should read: ‘The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article’.
All articles need to include a funding statement, under a separate heading, even if you did not receive funding. You’ll find guidance and examples on our Funding page.
The Journal is committed to facilitating openness, transparency and reproducibility of research, and has the following research data sharing policy. For more information, including FAQs please visit the Sage Research Data policy pages.
Subject to appropriate ethical and legal considerations, authors are encouraged to:
The journal follows the APA reference style. View the APA guidelines to ensure your manuscript conforms.
Every in-text citation must have a corresponding citation in the reference list and vice versa. Corresponding citations must have identical spelling and year.
Authors should update any references to preprints when a peer reviewed version is made available, to cite the published research. Citations to preprints are otherwise discouraged.
This Journal can host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc.) alongside the full text of the article. Your supplemental material must be one of our accepted file types. For that list and more information please refer to our guidelines on submitting supplemental files.
Authors seeking assistance with English language editing, translation, or figure and manuscript formatting to fit the journal’s specifications should consider using Sage Author Services. Visit Sage Author Services for further information.
As part of the submission process you will need to confirm that this is your original work, that you have the rights in the work, that this is for first publication in this Journal, that it is not being considered for/has not already been published elsewhere, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you.
Please see our guidelines on prior publication and note that the journal may accept submissions of manuscripts that have been posted on preprint servers.
The journal will consider submissions of manuscripts that have been posted on preprint servers.
Please enter the preprint DOI in the designated field when submitting your manuscript. We advise that you inform the Journal Editorial office about your posted preprint at submission.
Note that you should not post an updated version of your manuscript on a preprint server while it is being peer reviewed.
Submit your manuscript online via Sage Track.
IMPORTANT: Please check whether you already have an account in Sage Track before trying to create a new one. If you have reviewed or authored for the journal in the past year it is likely that you will have had an account created. For further guidance on submitting your manuscript online please visit ScholarOne Online Help.
Manuscripts should only be submitted with the consent of all contributing authors. The individual responsible for submitting the manuscript should carefully check that all those whose work contributed to the manuscript are listed as authors.
Ensure you upload all relevant manuscript files, including any additional supplemental files (including reporting guidelines where relevant).
Please view our authorship policies, which includes information on criteria for authorship, who should be the corresponding author and more.
Please note that AI chatbots, for example ChatGPT, should not be listed as authors. For more information see the policy on Use of ChatGPT and generative AI tools.
The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:
Identity transparency: Single-anonymized
Reviewer interacts with: Editor
Review information published: None
Your manuscript will undergo an initial evaluation. If it does not conform to the requirements laid out in these guidelines, it will be returned to you for amendments prior to peer review. Manuscripts may be desk rejected without peer review at this point if they are out of scope for the journal or otherwise unsuitable.
After passing the initial evaluation, your manuscript will then be peer reviewed. You can log in at any time to check the status of your manuscript. We will notify you when a decision has been reached.
The journal operates a conventional single-anonymized reviewing policy in which the reviewer’s name is always concealed from the submitting author.
To ensure the integrity of the peer review process we assign reviewers and cannot accept author recommendations.
All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible, while maintaining rigor. Reviewers make comments to the author and recommendations to the Editor who then makes the final decision on all manuscripts, including those appearing in a special issue or special collection. The Editor or members of the Editorial Board may occasionally submit their own manuscripts for possible publication in the Journal. In these cases, the peer review process will be managed by alternative members of the Board and the submitting Editor/Board member will have no involvement in the decision-making process.
As a COPE member we engage with multiple forms of post-publication discussion in line with wider guidance from Sage: Commentaries, Critiques and Responses.
You can view our complaints and appeals policy here.
Read Sage's complete peer review policy.
The journal and Sage take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. Please read Sage's complete policy on plagiarism and the actions we may take.
After acceptance you will receive instructions via email inviting you to complete the Open Access process. This will include signing the appropriate Creative Commons license and, where applicable, paying the Article Processing Charge (APC) or assigning a bill payer. Once the APC has been processed, your article will be prepared for publication and can appear online within an average of 30 days. Please note that, where an APC is applicable, production work cannot be completed on your manuscript until payment has been received.
If the primary author is either working towards a PhD, or is no more than 5 years beyond their PhD viva date when the paper is first submitted, the paper may be entered for an Early Career Best Paper Prize. Please tick to confirm that you wish the paper to be considered, and provide details of PhD viva and supervisor together with a brief explanation of why you feel the author is a worthy candidate for this submission. Please note that it would be very difficult to show sufficient excellence for a prize within the confines of the Short and Sweet format. You will be advised whether or not your application was successful after acceptance of the paper. Prize-winning papers will be published in i-Perception for free and publicised by the journal. Candidate papers which are accepted for publication but are not awarded the prize may, if the author chooses, be transferred to Perception to avoid publication charges. This opportunity is open to any new submissions to i-Perception from eligible authors who have not previously received this prize.
Before publication we require the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. The journal publishes manuscripts under Creative Commons licenses.The standard license for the journal is Creative Commons by Attribution (CC BY-NC) which allows others to re-use the work without permission as long as the work is properly referenced.
For more information, you are advised to visit Sage's OA licenses page. Alternative license arrangements are available at the author’s request (e.g. to meet particular funder mandates).
If your manuscript was posted on a preprint server prior to acceptance, you must include a link in your preprint to the final published version of your published article.
Your Sage Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will be made available to the corresponding author via our editing portal, Sage Edit, or by email, and should be returned promptly to avoid delaying publication. Authors are reminded to check their proofs carefully to confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence, and contact details are correct, and that Funding and Conflict of Interest statements, if any, are accurate. This is the final opportunity to make changes to your manuscript. Further corrections will not be possible after publication. Changes to the author list are not permitted at this stage.
One of the many benefits of publishing your research in an open access journal is the speed to publication. With no page count constraints, your article will be published online in a fully citable form with a DOI number as soon as it has completed the production process. At this time it will be completely free to view and download for all.
Publication is not the end of the process. Between us, we can ensure that your article is found, read, downloaded and cited as widely as possible. Many of the most effective tactics are those you can do quickly and easily to your network of contacts and peers. Visit the Promote Your Article page on the Sage Journal Author Gateway for numerous resources to help you promote your work.
The Sage Journal Author Gateway has some general advice on how to get published, plus links to further resources. Sage Author Services also offers authors a variety of ways to improve and enhance your article including English language editing, plagiarism detection, and video abstract and infographic preparation.
If you have any questions about publishing with Sage, please visit the Sage Journals Solutions Portal.
You can view our complaints and appeals procedure.
You can direct any questions to the journal’s editorial office: