Psychology and Education Journals: Scope, Focus, and Guidelines

Psychology and education are intertwined disciplines that significantly influence human development, learning processes, and societal well-being. Scholarly journals in these fields serve as crucial platforms for disseminating research findings, theoretical insights, and innovative practices. This article explores the scope, focus, and guidelines of prominent journals in psychology and education, providing a comprehensive overview for researchers, educators, and practitioners.

Psychology and Education: A Multidisciplinary Journal (PEMJ)

Psychology and Education: A Multidisciplinary Journal (PEMJ) is an international, open-access, peer-reviewed platform committed to disseminating high-quality research that deepens the scientific understanding of psychological and educational processes. The journal serves as a venue for rigorous empirical studies, theoretical analyses, and innovative methodological contributions that advance knowledge across diverse educational and psychological contexts.

Multidisciplinary Perspective

Reflecting the increasingly interconnected nature of scientific inquiry, PEMJ embraces a multidisciplinary perspective that bridges psychology, education, and related fields such as sociology, linguistics, neuroscience, and the learning sciences. The journal particularly encourages studies that explore contemporary challenges, propose evidence-based interventions, and offer cross-cultural or interdisciplinary insights into human learning, behavior, and development.

Open Access and Accessibility

As an open-access publication, PEMJ provides free and unrestricted access to all its content. Users are permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, or use them for any lawful purpose, without seeking prior permission from the publisher or authors. PEMJ is committed to providing an accessible platform for scholarly research, sustained through a minimal publication fee.

Peer Review Process

All manuscripts submitted to PEMJ undergo a peer review process, typically completed within 20 days of submission. To ensure originality, manuscripts must maintain less than 20% similarity.

Journal of Educational and Developmental Psychology

The Journal of Educational and Developmental Psychology (ISSN 1927-0526; E-ISSN 1927-0534) is an international open-access journal published by the Canadian Center of Science and Education. It employs a double-blind peer review process to provide all researchers with an equal opportunity to share their ideas and thoughts. Published semi-annually in both print and online versions, this journal keeps readers abreast of the latest developments in educational and developmental psychology.

Focus and Scope

The journal features a special focus on educational psychology and developmental psychology ranging from pre-school to tertiary provision, and special education. The field of educational psychology includes the effectiveness of educational interventions, the psychology of teaching, and the social psychology of schools as organizations. The coverage of developmental psychology includes the following aspects:

Motor skills and other psycho-physiological processes
Cognitive development involving areas such as problem solving, language acquisition
Social, personality, and emotional development
Self-concept and identity formation

Journal Publishing Workflow and Ethics

The Journal of Educational and Developmental Psychology is dedicated to maintaining the highest level of integrity in the work published. The journal follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)'s Core Practices and has a policy of "Zero Tolerance on Plagiarism." All submissions are checked by iThenticate’s CrossCheck software before being sent to reviewers. The journal uses a double-blind system for peer review, ensuring that both reviewers and authors’ identities remain anonymous.

Journal Metrics

The journal's metrics provide insights into its impact and reach within the academic community.

Google-based Impact Factor (2021): 1.11. This metric is calculated based on citations in Google Scholar, using the same algorithm as Thomson Reuters' Journal Impact Factor (JIF).
h-index (December 2021): 29. The h-index measures both the productivity and citation impact of the journal's publications.
i10-index (December 2021): 87. The i10-index represents the number of publications with at least 10 citations.

European Journal of Psychology of Education (EUPE)

The European Journal of Psychology of Education (EUPE) is a quarterly journal dedicated to publishing high-quality papers that address the relevant psychological aspects of educational processes. These processes are examined within different institutional, social, and cultural contexts, emphasizing diversity in terms of participants, their educational trajectories, and their socio-cultural environments.

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Focus on Psychological Aspects of Education

EUPE strongly encourages authors to employ a variety of theoretical and methodological tools developed in the psychology of education to gain new insights by integrating different perspectives. The journal is open to all papers reflecting findings from original psychological studies on educational processes, as well as to exceptional theoretical and review papers that integrate current knowledge and chart new avenues for future research.

Journal of Educational Psychology®

The main purpose of the Journal of Educational Psychology® is to publish original, primary psychological research pertaining to education across all ages and educational levels. A secondary purpose of the journal is the occasional publication of exceptionally important meta-analysis articles that are pertinent to educational psychology.

Commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)

The journal supports equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in its practices. The APA Journals Program is committed to publishing transparent, rigorous research; improving reproducibility in science; and aiding research discovery. Open science practices vary per editor discretion. Each issue of Journal of Educational Psychology will honor one accepted manuscript per issue by selecting it as an “Editor’s Choice” paper.

Submission Guidelines

Prior to submission, authors should carefully read and follow the detailed submission guidelines. Manuscripts should be prepared according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association using the 7th edition and may be copyedited for bias-free language. The Journal of Educational Psychology publishes direct replications.

Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines

The Journal of Educational Psychology® uses a software system to screen submitted content for similarity with other published content. The system compares the initial version of each submitted manuscript against a database of 40+ million scholarly documents, as well as content appearing on the open web. APA endorses the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Guidelines by a community working group in conjunction with the Center for Open Science (Nosek et al. 2015). Empirical research, including meta-analyses, submitted to the Journal of Educational Psychology must meet the “disclosure” level for all eight aspects of research planning and reporting.

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Authors should include a subsection in the method section titled “Transparency and Openness.” This subsection should detail the efforts the authors have made to comply with the TOP guidelines, including statements about sample size determination, data exclusions, manipulations, and measures used in the study. Authors must state whether data and study materials are posted to a trusted repository and, if so, how to access them.

Preregistration and Open Science Badges

Articles must state whether or not any work was preregistered and, if so, where to access the preregistration. Starting in 2020, articles are eligible for open science badges recognizing publicly available data, materials, and/or preregistration plans and analyses. At submission, authors must confirm that criteria have been fulfilled in a signed badge disclosure form (PDF, 33KB) that must be submitted as supplemental material.

Registered Reports

The journal also invites submission of Registered Reports, particularly for intervention studies and secondary data analyses. Registered reports require a two-stage review process. Stage 1 is the submission of the registration, so-called Stage 1 manuscript, which includes introduction, theoretical framework, rationale for the study, hypotheses, experimental design, and methods (including an analysis plan). If the Stage 1 Registered Report manuscript receives an “in-principal acceptance (IPA)” it means that the study has the potential to be published if is performed exactly as proposed (also including the proposed statistical evaluation) regardless of the outcome of the study. In Stage 2, the full paper undergoes a second peer-review process, checking if the study protocol was implemented and if the reasons for potential changes were acceptable.

Authorship and Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT)

The APA Publication Manual (7th ed.) stipulates that "authorship encompasses…not only persons who do the writing but also those who have made substantial scientific contributions to a study." In the spirit of transparency and openness, the journal has adopted the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) to describe each author's individual contributions to the work. Submitting authors will be asked to identify the contributions of all authors at initial submission according to the CRediT taxonomy.

Manuscript Preparation

Manuscripts should be prepared according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association using the 7th edition and may be copyedited for bias-free language. The journal has adopted a policy of masked review for all submissions, which means that the identities of both authors and reviewers are masked. Manuscripts should generally not exceed 12,000 words (approximately 40 double-spaced pages in 12-point Times New Roman font), not including references, tables, figures, and appendixes.

Reporting Standards and Effect Sizes

Adequate description of participants and measures are critical to the science and practice of educational psychology; this allows readers to assess the results, determine generalizability of findings, and make comparisons in replications, extensions, literature reviews, or secondary data analyses. Appropriate indexes of effect size or strength of relationship should be incorporated in the results section of the manuscript.

Abstract and References

All manuscripts must include an abstract containing a maximum of 250 words typed on a separate page. Authors are encouraged to consult the APA Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods research. References should be listed in alphabetical order according to APA style.

Figures, Tables, and Equations

Use Word's Insert Table function when you create tables. Preferred formats for graphics files are TIFF and JPG, and preferred format for vector-based files is EPS. We strongly encourage you to use MathType (third-party software) or Equation Editor 3.0 (built into pre-2007 versions of Word) to construct your equations.

Computer Code

Because altering computer code in any way (e.g., indents, line spacing, line breaks, page breaks) during the typesetting process could alter its meaning, we treat computer code differently from the rest of your article in our production process. We request that runnable source code be included as supplemental material to the article. If you would like to include code in the text of your published manuscript, please submit a separate file with your code exactly as you want it to appear, using Courier New font with a type size of 8 points.

Supplemental Materials and Educational Impact Statement

APA can place supplemental materials online, available via the published article in the PsycArticles® database. Please submit a short statement of 2-3 sentences, entitled "Educational impact and implications statement." It should be inserted after the abstract on the revised manuscript file and should be written in plain English for the educated public.

Ethical Considerations

On occasion it may be appropriate to publish several reports referring to the same database. The author should inform the editor at the time of submission about all previously published or submitted reports and their relation to the current submission, so the editor can judge if the article represents a new contribution. APA expects authors to adhere to ethical standards in research and publication.

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