Article types accepted

Types of accepted articles and their specifications are given below. Word count for the main manuscript includes only the main body of text (i.e., not tables, figures, abstracts or references). All pages should be numbered. Manuscripts should be double-spaced. All abbreviations (other than those for units of measure) should be spelled out the first time they are used anywhere in the manuscript. Idiosyncratic abbreviations should not be used.

Research Articles*: Abstract no longer than 250 words, structured as follows: Background, Methods, Results, Conclusions

Main text should not exceed 3,500 words, with the following structure: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion. There is no limit on the number of figures, tables, or references.

Reviews / Meta-Analyses*: Abstract no longer than 250 words, structured as follows: Background, Methods, Results, Conclusions

Main text should not exceed 4,000 words, with the following structure: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion. There is no limit to figures, tables, or references.

Editorials**: Editorials may only be authored by the Editors or by authors invited by the Editors or proposed by the EPA board. No unsolicited editorial will be accepted. An editorial cannot exceed 1,000 words, with no more than 10 references and one table or figure. Editorials will not be subject to peer review. Authors will be expected to uphold standards of civility and professionalism in presenting their views. Editorials are required to cover topics on mental health policy and related topics, in accordance with the aim of the European Psychiatric Association.

Viewpoint*: Viewpoint articles may be submitted by any author. These may address important topics in psychiatry, public health or health policy, research, ethics, or health law. Viewpoints are not required to be linked to a specific article in European Psychiatry.

Viewpoints cannot exceed 1,500 words and 10 references, and may include no more than one figure or one table.

Viewpoints should be tightly focused on the topic they cover, and scholarly; in other words, viewpoints cannot rely on personal or idiosyncratic views unsupported by evidence. Viewpoints will be subjected to editorial review to ensure they meet these basic criteria, followed by peer-review.

EPA Policy Papers**: EPA policy papers may only be submitted by authors of the EPA board or by authors commissioned by the EPA board, and address any topic in psychiatry, public health or health policy, research, ethics, or health law that is important to the mission of the EPA. EPA policy papers cannot exceed 3500 words and should include an unstructured abstract that cannot exceed 250 words. Figures and tables should be limited to five each; references to 75. Policy papers should be tightly focused on the topic they cover, and scholarly. Policy papers will be peer-reviewed after being endorsed by the EPA board.

EPA Guidance Papers**: EPA Guidance Papers aim to improve the quality of mental health care in Europe by disseminating written information based on best evidence and psychiatric practice and to facilitate countries learning from each other in areas where guidelines are lacking.

EPA Guidance Papers are commissioned by the EPA Board and are written by experts in their field.

EPA Guidance Papers cannot exceed 3,500 words and should include an unstructured abstract that cannot exceed 250 words. Figures and tables should be limited to five each; references to 75. Guidance papers will be approved by the EPA Board and will be subjected to peer-review.

Comments: Comments can be made on any article published by the journal. They cannot exceed 750 words, with no more than five references. These are not submitted through the peer-review system but through the 'Comments' section of the article web-page on Cambridge Core. Comments do not have a DOI, are not indexed, and are not counted in citation statistics, but are online posts aimed at generating online discussion about papers published in European Psychiatry. Comments will not be subject to peer review in order to enable the free exchange of ideas, though will be moderated by the Editors. Authors will be expected to uphold standards of civility and professionalism in presenting their comments, particularly if critical.

To submit a comment, click on the 'Comments' tab on an article's Abstract/HTML page and choose 'Submit a Response'.

European Psychiatry no longer accepts case reports or case series and no longer routinely considers manuscripts on the psychometric properties, standardisation, translation or transcultural validation of psychiatric questionnaires, instruments or cognitive tests.

* All or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access. For authors not covered by an agreement, and without APC funding, please see this journal's open access options for instructions on how to request an APC waiver.

** No APCs are required for these article types.

Manuscript preparation

Language: Cambridge recommends that authors have their manuscripts checked by an English language native speaker before submission; this will ensure that submissions are judged at peer review exclusively on academic merit. Cambridge University Press partners with American Journal Experts to provide a high quality service to authors. More information can be found here. Use of this service is entirely voluntary and does not guarantee acceptance, nor does its use require authors to later submit to a Cambridge journal.

Papers can be submitted in either American or British English.

All papers submitted must contain line numbers.

Authorship

Authorship should be based on the following principles, as outlined by the ICMJE and in the Cambridge University Press Publishing Ethics Guidelines:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
• Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
• Final approval of the version to be published; AND
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

In the process of submitting the article through the submission system, the corresponding author is prompted to provide further details about contributions to the article using the CRediT taxonomy. People who have contributed to the article but do not meet the full criteria for authorship should be recognised in the acknowledgements section; their contribution can be described in terms of the CRediT taxonomy.

Our default position is that the corresponding author has the authority to act on behalf of all co-authors, and we expect the corresponding author to confirm this at the beginning of the submission process.

Author contact details: Provide full contact details for the corresponding author including email and mailing address. Full author names and academic affiliations are required for all co-authors.

Title page: The title page must include:

• The title of the article, which should be concise but informative
• Initials and last name of author (or appropriate style)
• Name of department(s) and institution(s) to which the work should be attributed
• Name, mailing address and email address of author responsible for correspondence about the manuscript
• A shortened version of the title consisting of no less than 45 characters (including spaces)

Abstract: Each paper must contain an abstract as detailed in the 'Types of Paper' section.

Keywords: Each manuscript should be accompanied by 3-5 relevant keywords.

Acknowledgements: Any acknowledgements should appear first at the end of your article prior to your Conflicts of Interest declaration, any footnotes, and your References. You may acknowledge individuals or organisations that provided advice and support (non-financial). Formal financial support and funding should be listed in the following section.

Financial Support: Please provide details of the sources of financial support for all authors, including grant numbers. For example, "This work was supported by the Medical Research Council (grant number XXXXXXX)". Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma and space, and where research was funded by more than one agency the different agencies should be separated by a semi-colon, with "and" before the final funder. Grants held by different authors should be identified as belonging to individual authors by the authors' initials. For example, "This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (A.B., grant numbers XXXX, YYYY), (C.D., grant number ZZZZ); the Natural Environment Research Council (E.F., grant number FFFF); and the National Institutes of Health (A.B., grant number GGGG), (E.F., grant number HHHH). Where no specific funding has been provided for research, please provide the following statement: "This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors."

Conflicts of Interest: Authors should include a Conflicts of Interest declaration in their manuscript. Authors should title this declaration "Conflicts of Interest", and should place this declaration at the end of the text of their manuscript before the References are listed. If authors do not include this declaration, their submission will not proceed to peer review.

Conflicts of Interest are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on an author's presentation of their work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations. Authors should use the disclosure form of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) to generate the disclosure sentence they should include in their manuscripts. Authors should then save their completed ICMJE form for their own record.

If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting the manuscript must include Conflicts of Interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.

Example wording for a Conflicts of Interest declaration is as follows: "Conflicts of Interest: Author A is employed at company B. Author C owns shares in company D, is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H." If no Conflicts of Interest exist, the declaration should state "Conflicts of Interest: Author A and Author B declare none".

Supplementary Material: If the author has material that may be useful to the reader, but not essential to understanding the article, this can be supplied as supplementary material. Supplementary materials are peer reviewed but will not be copyedited or typeset, so they should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online — care should be taken to make them as comprehensible as possible. The supplementary material should be supplied as a separate file, and should be referenced in the article. Types of supplementary material include, but are not limited to, images, videos, podcasts, and slideshows. A statement should be added after the Conflicts of Interest statement to read:

Supplementary Material
For supplementary material accompanying this paper, visit cambridge.org/EPA.

The link will be replaced by your article’s DOI during the production process.

References: References are in Vancouver format (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. Fifth Edition. N Engl J Med 1997;336:309-16). In the text, references should appear as numbers between square brackets based on the order of citation. Indicate references by number(s) in square brackets in line with the text. The actual authors can be referred to, but the reference number(s) must always be given.

At the end of the manuscript, all references should be listed in numerical order corresponding to the order of citation in the text. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their references. All references cited in the text should be listed and all listed references should appear next to the corresponding text. References in tables and figures should also be numbered. The names of the journals should be abbreviated according to those used in the latest edition of Index Medicus. The volume, issue and first and last pages should be included. Abstracts should be marked as such. Papers that have been submitted or accepted but are not available online should not be cited. Papers in preparation should not be cited. References should include a DOI whenever possible, in the format https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07218.v3.

Examples follow. Please note the shortened form for the last page number (e.g., 51–9), and that for more than six authors the first six should be listed followed by 'et al.':

Reference to a journal publication:

[1] Van der Geer J, Hanraads JAJ, Lupton RA. The art of writing a scientific article. J Sci Commun. 2010;163: 51–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.Sc.2010.00372.

Reference to a journal publication with an article number:

[2] Van der Geer J, Hanraads JAJ, Lupton RA. The art of writing a scientific article. Heliyon. 2018;19: e00205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2018.e00205

Reference to a book:

[3] Strunk Jr W, White EB. The elements of style. 4th ed. New York: Longman; 2000.

Reference to a chapter in an edited book:

[4] Mettam GR, Adams LB. How to prepare an electronic version of your article. In: Jones BS, Smith RZ, editors. Introduction to the electronic age, New York: E-Publishing Inc; 2009, p. 281–304.

Reference to a website:

[5] Cancer Research UK. Cancer statistics reports for the UK, http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/aboutcancer/statistics/cancerstatsreport/; 2003 [accessed 13 March 2003].

Reference to a dataset:

[6] Koopman B, Zuccon G. A test collection for matching patient to clinical trials: V2; 2016 [Data file]. http://doi.org/10.4225/08/574CE878156EE

Artwork, figures and other graphics: All figures and tables should be supplied in separate files, with tables supplied as editable files only. Resolution: halftone images must be saved at 300 dpi at approximately the final size. Line drawings should be saved at 1000 dpi, or 1200 dpi if very fine line weights have been used. Combination figures must be saved at a minimum of 600 dpi. Cambridge recommends that only TIFF, EPS, or PDF formats are used for electronic artwork. For more detailed guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format please see the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.

Seeking permission to use copyrighted material

If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. As the author it is your responsibility to obtain this permission and pay any related fees, and you will need to send us a copy of each permission statement at acceptance. Please find more information here.