Psychometrika is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to fostering psychology as a quantitative rational science by examining statistical methods, discussing mathematical techniques, and advancing theory for evaluating behavioral data in psychology, education, and the social and behavioral sciences generally.
Authors should keep in mind that a manuscript that belongs to any of the following types is likely to be assigned a lower priority for publication in Psychometrika (unless the manuscript has important implications for the field):
- Manuscripts with a focus outside the domains of psychology, education and broader social sciences.
- Manuscripts that primarily are reviews of literature on a specific area of psychology, education or broader social sciences.
- Manuscripts that illustrate or compare existing psychometric tools using simulated or real data.
- Manuscripts that describe the development of new curricula or tests or questionnaires.
- Manuscripts that report routine investigations of the psychometric adequacy of specific tests or routine analysis of one or more education data sets.
- Manuscripts that only describe computer programs and do not include a methodological component.
Types of manuscripts accepted
- Theory and Methods
- Application Reviews and Case Studies
- Book Reviews
When submitting a manuscript, authors may request that their manuscript be considered for either Theory and Methodology or Application Reviews and Case Studies, however, the editors may recommend a different section after considering the manuscript.
Theory and Methodology - Empirical studies will be considered only if they involve new or particularly interesting uses of quantitative techniques. Articles about the development and/or results of specific tests will generally not be considered.
Application Reviews and Case Studies - Articles in this section present original research featuring novel methodological developments rooted in empirical data applications within psychology, education, and related social science fields. Methodological development should aim to deepen the substantive understanding of underlying phenomena. Additionally, manuscripts focused on software development are also welcome, provided they specifically emphasize software functionality and include source code and replication materials for empirical analyses. Submissions related to software development should highlight the integration of computational methods with statistical models, demonstrating practical applications through empirical data.
Book reviews are also accepted by the journal. More information can be found here.
Preparing your article for submission
Initial Theory & Methods or Application Reviews and Case Studies manuscripts should be compiled in the following order:
Cover page, including:
- Authors, including Corresponding Author designation, full contact details and affiliations, including country
- Acknowledgments (optional)
- Data Availability statement (optional)
- Financial Support (mandatory; see below)
- Competing Interests statement (mandatory; see below)
Anonymized manuscript, including:
- Abstract (200 words or less)
- Keywords (3-5 words)
The authors’ names must not appear in headers or in authors’ notes anywhere in the body. If you are citing your own work you should cite it normally. Further instructions for anonymizing your manuscript prior to peer review can be found here.
For revised manuscripts, please also include a response to reviewer comments, explaining how you addressed these.
Both LaTeX and Word submissions should be accompanied by PDF files, both during the review process and in final export.
Article length
Manuscripts should not exceed roughly 40 double-spaced pages written in 12-point font, including references, tables, figures, and not including appendixes. Longer manuscripts will be sent back to the authors with a request to revise. If you think that your manuscript deserves more than 40 pages because it deals with an exceptional topic, please contact the Editor-in-Chief before official submission.
Manuscript Style
The writing format of the manuscripts submitted to Psychometrika should follow the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA), 7th ed., 2020.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
Overleaf
Overleaf is a free online tool for writing and submitting scholarly manuscripts. An Overleaf template is available for this journal, which allows authors to easily comply with the journal’s guidelines. There is also a direct link to submit your manuscript from within the Overleaf authoring environment. Once you have completed writing an article in Overleaf, you can use the "Submit to Journal" button and select the appropriate link to be directed to this journal's manuscript submission system.
Benefits of using Overleaf include:
- An intuitive interface, in which authors can write in LaTeX or rich text and see a preview of their article typeset in the journal’s style
- Features enabling collaboration with co-authors (the ability to share, highlight and comment on versions of articles)
- Sophisticated version control
- Clean PDF conversion and submission into the journal’s online manuscripts system (supporting materials can also be added during this process)
Overleaf is based on LaTeX but includes a rich text mode. An author writing in Overleaf would need to have some knowledge of LaTeX, but could collaborate through the tool with an author who is not a LaTeX expert. Overleaf’s tutorial pages include a two minute video and an introduction to LaTeX course, and Overleaf also provides support for authors using the tool.
Authors can access Psychometrika's Overleaf template here.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Acknowledgements
Authors can use this section to acknowledge and thank colleagues, institutions, workshop organizers, family members, etc. that have helped with the research and/or writing process. It is important that any type of funding information or financial support to be listed under ‘Financial Support’ rather than Acknowledgements so that it can easily be tagged and captured separately.
Financial Support
Please supply all details required by any funding and grant-awarding bodies as a separate section of your manuscript, as follows:
For single agency grants: "This work was supported by the [Funding Agency] under Grant [number xxxx]."
For multiple agency grants: "This work was supported by the [Funding Agency 1] under Grant [number xxxx]; [Funding Agency 2] under Grant [number xxxx]; and [Funding Agency 3] under Grant [number xxxx.]"
Where no specific funding has been provided for research, please provide the following statement:
"This research received no specific grant funding form any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors."
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
ORCID
We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.
If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools
We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.
In particular, any use of an AI tool:
- to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
- to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
- to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
- must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission
Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Authors should specify the type of supplementary material they will be able to provide at the time of submission, and this information will be taken into account in the review process. This includes data and code. Data and code should be clearly documented to allow replication and verification of the results presented in the final version of the paper.
Submission Notes
• Supply all supplementary material in standard file formats - see general guidelines.
• Please include in each file the following information: article title, journal name, author names; affiliation and e-mail address of the corresponding author.
• To accommodate user downloads, please keep in mind that larger-sized files may require very long download times and that some users may experience other problems during downloading.
• In order to give people of all abilities and disabilities access to the content of your supplementary files, please make sure that the manuscript contains a descriptive caption for each supplementary material.
• Electronic supplementary material will be published as received from the author without any conversion, editing, or reformatting.
Naming and Numbering Files
• If supplying any supplementary material, the text must make specific mention of the material as a citation, similar to that of figures and tables.
• Refer to the supplementary files as “Online Resource”, e.g., “... additional data are given in Online Resource 4”.
• Name the files consecutively, e.g. “ESM_4.pdf”.
• For each supplementary material, please supply a concise caption describing the content of the file.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Artwork, Figures, and Other Graphics
For initial submissions, please include figures, tables, and footnotes in situ in the text. Tables, figures, and images must be cited in the text, and should be numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals as well as captioned. Tables should always be provided in an editable format (not as image files). In case of acceptance, all images will need to be submitted as separate figure files. For detailed information on figure preparation, please see the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.
Reproduction of copyright material: Authors are responsible for obtaining permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. A copy of the paperwork granting permission should be provided to the Cambridge production editor. You may be asked to pay a permissions fee by the copyright holder; any permissions fees must be paid for by the author. For an example of a permissions request form please see the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.
Data Availability, Ethics and Transparency policy requirements
Please review our ethics policies prior to submission as well as the journal's research transparency guidelines.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.