The format of articles submitted to Prevention & Treatment will be in accord with the style detailed in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. Authors accustomed to submitting to the journals of the American Psychiatric Association should take note of this, as the publication style of the American Psychological Association differs in several substantial ways, for example, citations and references.
Articles appearing in Prevention & Treatment will be indexed in the PsycINFO database.
How to Submit a Manuscript
Manuscripts must be submitted electronically. Actual manuscript files can be sent as email attachments to admin@apa.org or FTP'ed to server ftp.apa.org with username treatment and password submit2. If you are ready to submit a manuscript to be considered for publication in Prevention & Treatment, please complete the electronic submission form and send your manuscript by one of the methods listed above. Email admin@apa.org if you need additional instructions or other submission options.
The following will be the general format for empirical articles. It should also be used for the structured abstract.
Structured Abstract
Readers will be notified by frequent and timely reminders when a new article is posted by Prevention & Treatment. They will then have the option of calling up either the abstract or the article or both. Because of this, and because of the relative lack of space limitations, we are calling for a fairly full abstract (up to 500 words), which will approach the length of a mini-article, as many readers will be content with this and not wish to inquire about all the technical details concerning methodology, measurement, statistical analysis, and so forth.
Outline
In general, the following outline should be followed, briefly for the structured abstract, and expansively for the article proper:
Introduction: This should consist of a statement of the major questions addressed and their importance. This is followed by a brief review of the pertinent literature and a statement as to how the current article addresses residual questions and ambiguities that the literature has not dealt with. Citations of the literature must be scholarly and not pro forma, with hypertext markup language (HTML) as a useful device for relevant passages and figures or tables of cited articles.
HTML is the language of the World Wide Web. Numerous online guides and instruction manuals are available including NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML.
It is the hypothesis section of the introduction that is usually most poorly presented. The hypotheses should be stipulated in a detailed fashion relevant to the nature of the study. The distinction between hypothesis-generating studies and hypothesis-testing studies should be clear. It is recognized that some studies serve both these functions. However, even hypothesis-generating studies should have a well-formulated focus.
Method: This should be a detailed summary of the methods chosen and, in particular, why these methods were chosen as opposed to other methods. Enough information for replication must be available. The methods should preferably be standardized, reliable, developed against a normative population, and have clinical relevance. The occasions of measurement, the means of measurement, blinding procedures, and tests of blinding must be specified. If there is an assessment of the reliability of measurement within the study, the means should be specified or appropriate references given. Training of observers, technicians, and so forth should be specified. Most of this material is not required for the abstract. Under Method, there should be a subsection on statistical analysis. Each hypothesis should be directly tied to a specified statistical analysis. The null and alternative hypotheses are specified. The project sample size and allowable rate for nonevaluable subjects is specified. Calculations are presented concerning the power of estimated effect sizes and the alpha level (one-tailed or two-tailed) selected.
It is desirable that the most important raw data, appropriately labeled, from which the statistics are calculated be available as a downloadable file accessible via hypertext link, enabling reader re-analysis.
Descriptive statistics sufficient to enable independent recalculation of inferential statistics must also be presented. For analysis of covariance, for instance, this will involve supplying the appropriate covariance and dispersion matrixes at least in hypertext. Most of this material is unnecessary for the abstract.
Results: The Results section should be organized in parallel to the hypotheses so that at the end of each section the results of each hypothesis-testing procedure become apparent. Exploratory results are then presented. The author is encouraged to present succinct summary tabulations, raw data, and analyses, as well as more extensive documentation in hypertext for technical review. Both effect size and clinical significance must be addressed.
Discussion, Synthesis, and Summary: The results are summarized and placed in the context of a more detailed literature review. Agreements with the literature are cited. Disagreements with the literature are discussed in detail. This naturally leads to a discussion of the weaknesses of the study or the literature.
The implications of the findings—practical, synthetic, and theoretical—are reviewed. The implications of the study for future studies and areas of exploration are discussed. The implications of therapy studies for prevention should always be discussed. Because of the relative lack of limitation of article length, a thorough discussion of the pros and cons of the study and its implications is welcomed.
Citations and References: References should be cited in text as follows: "The results replicated those of a previous study (Knoth & Mair, 1991)," or "The procedure was a modification of Krettek and Price's (1989) and Smith et al.'s (1977) . . . ." Multiple references should be cited in alphabetical order: "Earlier investigations (Abbott, 1988; Hunt & Aggleton, 1983; Winocur, 1985) . . . ." Each listed reference should be cited in text, and each text citation should be listed alphabetically in the reference section. The following examples illustrate the style to be used for a journal article, a book, and a chapter in a book, respectively:
Jacobson, N. S., & Hollon, S. D. (1996b). Prospects for future comparisons between drugs and psychotherapy: Lessons from the CBT-versus-pharmacotherapy exchange. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64, 104–108.
Kazdin, A. E. (1993). Research design in clinical psychology (2nd ed.). New York: Harper & Row.
Franklin, M. E., & Foa, E. B. (1997). Cognitive–behavioral treatments for obsessive compulsive disorder. In P. E. Nathan & J. M. Gorman (Eds.), Treatments that work (pp. 337–355). New York: Oxford University Press.
Continuing Posting of Commentary and Discussion
It should be understood that many articles will be accompanied by detailed commentaries. The authors also may submit a rebuttal. The rebuttal and commentaries will typically be reviewed only by the editors. The articles, commentaries, and rebuttals, as well as other relevant articles will be archived together and retrievable with each other. Hypertext will be used to the highest degree possible so that the reader may call up from the article relevant data sets, relevant passages cited, and available abstracts or pertinent parts of referenced articles. In addition, each article will be assigned its own email list where non-peer-reviewed commentary and debate can take place. Further, authors have the opportunity of conducting electronic forums with regard to their articles, with the hope of generating relevant manuscripts for peer review.