Health Psychology Bulletin

About

Focus and Scope

The aim of Health Psychology Bulletin (HPB) is to make health psychology research accessible to a wide audience as well as a global population of researchers and scholars. HPB means to achieve this aim by publishing high quality research within health psychology, in a manner consistent with the state of the art insights in the scientific process, such as open access publication, full disclosure, and a two-tiered, open peer review procedure with citable reviews. HPB explicitly welcomes both direct and conceptual replications, null findings, and reports of failed manipulations, descriptions and tutorials explaining new tools, analyses, and operationalisations (e.g. measurement instruments, reaction time tasks, stimuli, intervention components, or interventions), as well as empirical papers and reviews.

The scope of HPB is health psychology, behavioral medicine, health communication, and health promotion.

Publication Frequency

The journal is published online as a continuous volume and issue throughout the year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in getting content publically available.

Special collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of the normal issue, but also within a separate collection page.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. There is no embargo on the journal’s publications. Submission and acceptance dates, along with publication dates, are made available on the PDF format for each paper.

Authors of articles published remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons license agreement.

Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories. For a list of generic and subject specific repositories that meet our peer review criteria, see here.

Archiving Policy

The journal’s publisher focuses on making content discoverable and accessible through indexing services. Content is also archived around the world to ensure long-term availability.

This journal is indexed by the following services:

In addition, the journal is available for harvesting via OAI-PMH.

To ensure permanency of all publications, this journal also utilises CLOCKSS, and LOCKSS archiving systems to create permanent archives for the purposes of preservation and restoration.

If the journal is not indexed by your preferred service, please contact us or alternatively by making an indexing request directly with the service.

In addition, we aim to have HPB indexed in PsycINFO, PubMed Central, and Web of Science. PsycINFO indexing will be requested when 20 articles have been published; PubMed Central indexing when 50 articles have been published; and Web of Science indexing can be requested once HPB has published at least 12 articles a year for two consecutive years. Therefore, the speed with which HPB will be indexed more widely is a function of the number of submissions (and ultimately, publications) HPB receives.

If the journal is not indexed by your preferred service, please let us know by emailing support@ubiquitypress.com or alternatively by making an indexing request directly with the service.

Journal statistics

Core journal statistics for the 2021 volume:

Submissions received¹	5
Reviews requested²	66
Reviews received³	25
Total Rejections⁴	2
...of which, Desk rejects⁵	0
Acceptances⁶	11
Acceptance rate⁷	85%
Time from submission to publication⁸	230 days

Definitions
¹Number of new articles received by the journal
²Number of peer review invitation emails that were sent out
³Number of completed peer review reports received
⁴Total number of articles rejected (including desk rejects)
⁵Number of articles rejected prior to peer review
⁶Number of articles that received a 'Accept for publication' decision
⁷Number of acceptances, as a percentage, against the total number of final decisions
⁸'Mean' average from submission to publication for all publications in the volume. In 2020 this was skewed by a number of very old papers - we expect the figure to be much smaller for the 2021 volume.

Distinction from other journals

In order to achieve its aims, Health Psychology Bulletin (HPB) operates differently from most established journals. Most established journals aim to publish findings that are considered novel or ‘of outstanding scientific importance’. This has created a bias where papers reporting novel or sensational patterns are preferred over replications and null findings, which as a consequence are rarely published. In addition, most journals do not yet require authors to publish data alongside their papers, let alone analysis scripts and resources such as questionnaires. These publishing practices slow down scientific progress. HPB is designed to address these issues. These are the main characteristics that set HPB apart from most other journals:

HPB does not reject papers based on the outcomes of a study. To minimize the likelihood of editors and reviewers being biased by the outcomes, the review process is two-tiered: authors first submit only the introduction and methods sections (regardless of whether data collection has been completed). Only after the methodology has been approved as valid (i.e. consistent with the research questions, adequate operationalisations, etc.; note that this can take one or more rounds of revision), the results and discussion sections are submitted. This second reviewing phase allows for revising/optimizing the analyses and adjusting any claims in the discussion that are not consistent with the data. Note that once a paper has been accepted after the first phase, it can only be rejected in the second phase if the authors refuse to adjust their analyses and/or conclusions to fit with what their data allow.

HPB recognizes that scientific progress occurs to a large degree through systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and that in the future, datasets may prove useful in ways currently unforeseen. Therefore, in addition to not rejecting papers on the basis of the outcomes, novelty or scientific importance is not a factor in publication decisions for HPB. Instead, HPB applies the perspective that once data have been gathered, the invested resources (usually public funds and researchers’ and participants’ time and energy) mean that the scientific community has the responsibility to publish those data. HPB facilitates taking that responsibility.

HPB has a Full Disclosure policy. This means that all papers have to be accompanied by a Replication Package and an Analysis Package. The Replication Package contains what other researchers will need to replicate the study: study protocols, stimuli, questionnaires, source code of computer tasks, etc. The Analysis Package contains what other researchers will need to replicate the analyses: the datafile, analysis scripts (e.g. SPSS syntax or R scripts), and any output the researchers stored during their analyses. Although authors can request dispensation from this principle if Full Disclosure is impossible or unethical, the aim of HPB is to generally enforce Full Disclosure. This will facilitate learning from each other, scientific collaboration, and spotting errors in analyses, while simultaneously making it much harder to falsify data.

The peer review procedure is double-blind, and unblinded when a decision is reached. HPB employs this procedure aiming to attain the best of both worlds. It is hoped that the blinding procedure will facilitate objective reviews, preventing reviewers from being either excessively negative when they review authors they dislike or being excessively positive when they review an authority in their field. At the same time, it is hoped that the fact that the reviews will become unblinded after the decision has been taken will further enhance reviewer integrity, preventing reviewers from abusing their anonymity by being unreasonable, for example when a paper falsifies their pet theory.

In the future, HPB aims to implement a number of innovations, such as complementing the pre-publication reviews with post-publication reviewing and making reviews citable.

Advertisement policy

The journal only displays advertisements that are of relevance to its scope and will be of interest to the readership (e.g. upcoming conferences). All advertising space is provided free of charge and the editor and publisher have the right to decline or withdraw adverts at any point.

If you wish to propose a potential advert then please contact the editorial team. All adverts are displayed in the right column of the journal and will need to fit a 120 pixel wide space. All advert images will have to be provided to the publisher.

Annotation and post-publication comment

The journal platform permits readers to leave comments on the publication page, via the Disqus service. Readers will need a Disqus account to leave comments. Comments may be moderated by the journal, however, if they are non-offensive and relevant to the publication subject, comments will remain online without edit.

The journal platform also includes in-browser annotation and text highlighting options on full text formats via hypothes.is. Readers will require a hypothes.is account to create annotations, and will have the option to make these publicly available, available to a group, or private.