Submissions

Author Guidelines

This document provides guidance to prospective contributors to the Journal of Exceptional Experiences and Health (JEEH). The document is structured in two parts: basic guidance, for contributors familiar with the academic publishing process; advanced guidance, providing additional information and links to resources that may be helpful to clinicians who are less familiar with academic publishing.

                                                        BASIC GUIDANCE

Originality

Submissions to JEEH must not have been published elsewhere in whole or in part (except for isolated sections or earlier conference versions), nor be under consideration for publication or in press elsewhere.

 Categories

 JEEH published articles in the following categories:

1. Research, whether quantitative, qualitative, or mixed, presenting original data, replication of studies, and re-analyses of collected data. This category includes experiments and correlational studies, as well as systematic single or multiple case studies, field research, historical analyses, and other forms of systematic inquiry.
2. Registered reports, in which authors send a full study design for peer review before collecting data (see Research, whether quantitative, qualitative, or mixed, presenting original data, replication of studies, and re-analyses of collected data. This category includes experiments and correlational studies, as well as systematic single or multiple case studies, field research, historical analyses, and other forms of systematic inquiry.
3. Theoretical papers, including implications of the theory and fit to the extant data.
4. Case reports, amounting to descriptive studies that document unusual experiences in a single individual (see useful links under additional guidance for details).
5. Methodological/analytical new proposals.
6. Summaries of important new books or reviews of a topic.
7. Invited debates on contentious issues.
8. Book reviews.
9. Letters to the editor about current issues or papers recently published in JEEH.

Fees

JEEH is an open access, free to publish journal. There are therefore no processing or publishing fees for authors. However, in order to ensure the long-term viability of the project, authors are encouraged to make a donation (link to the donation page).

 Format

Manuscripts must not exceed 10,000 words in length and must be anonymised. They must be submitted in Word format, using Times New Roman font size 12 at 1.5 line spacing. Manuscripts must follow the 7th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA, Washington) and be copyedited for spelling, grammar and content thoroughly before submission (see additional guidance for details).

Manuscripts must include: a title page; an abstract and a list of keywords; an introduction section; a methods section; ethical considerations (when appropriate); a results/analysis section; a discussion section; a description of the individual authors’ contributions; and references (see useful links under additional guidance for details).

                                                      ADDITIONAL GUIDANCE

Format of the articles

Title Page

The title page should include the title of the paper, the authors’ name and surname and their affiliation addresses and email addresses. The author to whom correspondence and proofs should be sent must also be specified.

Abstract and Keywords

An abstract, not exceeding 250 words, should be the second page of the manuscript and be organized, in the case of Research Articles, according to Objective, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. All abstracts should be followed by a maximum of 8 keywords, reflecting the essential topics of the article. These keywords will be used for information retrieval systems and indexing purposes.

 Introduction
Explain the current state of knowledge regarding the phenomenon under investigation and provide a rationale for the current research question and study design/strategy, for example, by identifying shortcomings or weaknesses in extant work or identifying natural extensions to it

Methods
The methods section should describe the design of the study, the setting, the participants and instruments involved, as well as the procedure. Provide sufficient detail to allow the work to be reproduced. Methods and instruments already published should be indicated by a reference and relevant modifications described. Research submission must clearly state which hypotheses (and analyses) were confirmatory and which exploratory. Although research pre-registration and use of data depositories are not currently required, they will be positively noted by symbols in the papers that use them. Research, particularly confirmatory, can be preregistered, for instance in https://koestlerunit.wordpress.com/study-registry or ttps://osf.io/prereg, Data can be registered in repositories such as https://data.world or open-data.spr.ac.uk.

Ethical Considerations

Papers reporting empirical studies requiring ethical approval must state which Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board provided it, and that informed consent was obtained. Provide the full name and institution of the review committee, in addition to the approval number.

Results/Analysis

Results should be clear and concise. The section may be broken into subsections with short, informative headings and a summarizing statement. All general analyses must be described appropriately (e.g., do not just write that IPA was employed), including how the validity and reliability of the methods/measures/translations were evaluated in past or the current paper. In the case of statistical analyses, descriptive values must be reported besides inferential ones, which should include, whenever possible, effect sizes and their confidence intervals. Results should be weighed not only based on statistical significance, for example by including additional analyses such as Bayesian approaches. P values should be given precisely whenever possible and effect sizes reported for every relevant analysis.

Discussion
The discussion section should explore the significance of the results of the work, and integrate them to previous work, rather than just reiterating them. Specific recommendations for further research should be specific (i. e., do not write only “more research is needed”). A combined Results and Discussion section may be appropriate.

Author’s Contributions

In order to evaluate the individual contributions of authors to the manuscript, they should be noted with a format similar to this: AB designed the study, organized the data collection, and drafted the first version of the manuscript. CD carried out the statistical analyses and was actively involved in revising the manuscript. EF participated in the data collection and helped revise the manuscript. All authors should read and approve the final manuscript. Contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgements section. (e.g., those only providing help with data collection, providing language help).

Declaration of Interests

All authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. If no conflict exists, please state that ”The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest.”

References

References must be prepared following APA style and rechecked carefully before submission. They should include DOIs, when available (authors should check their reference list for DOIs here: https://search.crossref.org/references). The URLs should be unformatted, not "live." Every reference cited in the text should be present in the reference list and vice versa. Citation of a reference as '”in press'” implies that the item has been accepted for publication. The author is responsible for obtaining permission, when necessary, to quote excerpts or figures from any previously published material and submit such permission with the manuscript.

Footnotes, Tables, and Figures

Endnotes are not considered good practice: footnotes, used sparingly, are more acceptable. Number them consecutively throughout the article. Tables and figures should be understandable without reference to the main text. The same information should not be reproduced in both tables and figures and should follow APA style. Each figure should include a single illustration and should fit within a single page. If a figure consists of separate parts, it is important that a single composite illustration file be submitted containing all parts of the figure. Tables and Figures must be embedded in the paper and also submitted as individual pdf, tiff, or jpg files. Title and notes of the Tables and Figures should be embedded in the file as regular text. 

Other important issues

Reporting standards

Authors of original research reports should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an impartial discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to ensure transparency and enable replication as appropriate.

Data access and retention

Authors may be asked to provide the raw data of their study as part of the editorial review process. It is good practice to ensure accessibility of research data to other researchers after publication (ideally via an institutional or subject-based data repository or other data centre), provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and legal rights concerning proprietary data do not preclude their release.

Originality, plagiarism, and acknowledgement of sources

Authors will submit only entirely original works and will appropriately cite or quote the work and/or words of others. Publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work should also be cited. Texts generated by AI are unacceptable. If AI was used during the development of the text, for instance in data analysis or visualization, the exact nature of AI involvement should be explained in the text.

Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication

Papers describing essentially the same research and analyses should not be published in more than one source. Manuscripts that have been published as copyrighted material elsewhere cannot be submitted. In addition, manuscripts under review by the journal should not be resubmitted to copyrighted publications.

Authorship of the paper

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. The corresponding author will submit with agreement on behalf of all co-authors.

Ethical Standards

Any study that uses newly collected data must provide specific information on an independent IRB/ethics review and approval, or an explanation of why the study was exempt from IRB review (referring to relevant IRB or Human Subjects guidelines). If the study uses previously collected data, it should have information on whether the data was open access and/or had received IRB approval to be used by others. The authors themselves cannot determine whether a study requires (or not) ethics approval.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

All authors should include a statement disclosing any financial or other substantive conflicts of interest that may be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project must be disclosed.

Fundamental errors in published works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal.

Useful links

American Psychological Association – Quantitative Research Design: https://apastyle.apa.org/jars/quantitative

American Psychological Association – Quantitative Research Design: https://apastyle.apa.org/jars/qualitative

American Psychological Association – Mixed-methods Research Design: https://apastyle.apa.org/jars/mixed-methods

American Psychological Association – Style Guidelines: https://apastyle.apa.org/

Center for Open Science - Peer review before results are known to align scientific values and practices: https://www.cos.io/initiatives/registered-reports

Writing a scientific article: A step-by-step guide for beginners https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878764915001606

Overview on writing case reports: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336051690_An_overview_of_writing_a_case_repor