Article types accepted
Types of accepted articles and their specifications are given below. Word count for the main manuscript includes only the main body of text (i.e., not tables, figures, abstracts or references). All pages should be numbered. Manuscripts should be double-spaced. All abbreviations (other than those for units of measure) should be spelled out the first time they are used anywhere in the manuscript. Idiosyncratic abbreviations should not be used.
Research Articles*: Abstract no longer than 250 words, structured as follows: Background, Methods, Results, Conclusions
Main text should not exceed 3,500 words, with the following structure: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion. There is no limit on the number of figures, tables, or references.
Reviews / Meta-Analyses*: Abstract no longer than 250 words, structured as follows: Background, Methods, Results, Conclusions
Main text should not exceed 4,000 words, with the following structure: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion. There is no limit to figures, tables, or references.
Editorials**: Editorials may only be authored by the Editors or by authors invited by the Editors or proposed by the EPA board. No unsolicited editorial will be accepted. An editorial cannot exceed 1,000 words, with no more than 10 references and one table or figure. Editorials will not be subject to peer review. Authors will be expected to uphold standards of civility and professionalism in presenting their views. Editorials are required to cover topics on mental health policy and related topics, in accordance with the aim of the European Psychiatric Association.
Viewpoint*: Viewpoint articles may be submitted by any author. These may address important topics in psychiatry, public health or health policy, research, ethics, or health law. Viewpoints are not required to be linked to a specific article in European Psychiatry.
Viewpoints cannot exceed 1,500 words and 10 references, and may include no more than one figure or one table.
Viewpoints should be tightly focused on the topic they cover, and scholarly; in other words, viewpoints cannot rely on personal or idiosyncratic views unsupported by evidence. Viewpoints will be subjected to editorial review to ensure they meet these basic criteria, followed by peer-review.
EPA Policy Papers**: EPA policy papers may only be submitted by authors of the EPA board or by authors commissioned by the EPA board, and address any topic in psychiatry, public health or health policy, research, ethics, or health law that is important to the mission of the EPA. EPA policy papers cannot exceed 3500 words and should include an unstructured abstract that cannot exceed 250 words. Figures and tables should be limited to five each; references to 75. Policy papers should be tightly focused on the topic they cover, and scholarly. Policy papers will be peer-reviewed after being endorsed by the EPA board.
EPA Guidance Papers**: EPA Guidance Papers aim to improve the quality of mental health care in Europe by disseminating written information based on best evidence and psychiatric practice and to facilitate countries learning from each other in areas where guidelines are lacking.
EPA Guidance Papers are commissioned by the EPA Board and are written by experts in their field.
EPA Guidance Papers cannot exceed 3,500 words and should include an unstructured abstract that cannot exceed 250 words. Figures and tables should be limited to five each; references to 75. Guidance papers will be approved by the EPA Board and will be subjected to peer-review.
Comments: Comments can be made on any article published by the journal. They cannot exceed 750 words, with no more than five references. These are not submitted through the peer-review system but through the 'Comments' section of the article web-page on Cambridge Core. Comments do not have a DOI, are not indexed, and are not counted in citation statistics, but are online posts aimed at generating online discussion about papers published in European Psychiatry. Comments will not be subject to peer review in order to enable the free exchange of ideas, though will be moderated by the Editors. Authors will be expected to uphold standards of civility and professionalism in presenting their comments, particularly if critical.
To submit a comment, click on the 'Comments' tab on an article's Abstract/HTML page and choose 'Submit a Response'.
European Psychiatry no longer accepts case reports or case series and no longer routinely considers manuscripts on the psychometric properties, standardisation, translation or transcultural validation of psychiatric questionnaires, instruments or cognitive tests.
* All or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access. For authors not covered by an agreement, and without APC funding, please see this journal's open access options for instructions on how to request an APC waiver.
** No APCs are required for these article types.
Manuscript preparation
Language: Cambridge recommends that authors have their manuscripts checked by an English language native speaker before submission; this will ensure that submissions are judged at peer review exclusively on academic merit. Cambridge University Press partners with American Journal Experts to provide a high quality service to authors. More information can be found here. Use of this service is entirely voluntary and does not guarantee acceptance, nor does its use require authors to later submit to a Cambridge journal.
Papers can be submitted in either American or British English.
All papers submitted must contain line numbers.
Authorship should be based on the following principles, as outlined by the ICMJE and in the Cambridge University Press Publishing Ethics Guidelines:
- Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
- Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
- Final approval of the version to be published; AND
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
In the process of submitting the article through the submission system, the corresponding author is prompted to provide further details about contributions to the article using the CRediT taxonomy. People who have contributed to the article but do not meet the full criteria for authorship should be recognised in the acknowledgements section; their contribution can be described in terms of the CRediT taxonomy.
Our default position is that the corresponding author has the authority to act on behalf of all co-authors, and we expect the corresponding author to confirm this at the beginning of the submission process.
Author contact details: Provide full contact details for the corresponding author including email and mailing address. Full author names and academic affiliations are required for all co-authors.
Title page: The title page must include:
- The title of the article, which should be concise but informative
- Initials and last name of author (or appropriate style)
- Name of department(s) and institution(s) to which the work should be attributed
- Name, mailing address and email address of author responsible for correspondence about the manuscript
- A shortened version of the title consisting of no less than 45 characters (including spaces)
Abstract: Each paper must contain an abstract as detailed in the 'Types of Paper' section.
Keywords: Each manuscript should be accompanied by 3-5 relevant keywords.
Acknowledgements: Any acknowledgements should appear first at the end of your article prior to your Conflicts of Interest declaration, any footnotes, and your References. You may acknowledge individuals or organisations that provided advice and support (non-financial). Formal financial support and funding should be listed in the following section.
Financial Support: Please provide details of the sources of financial support for all authors, including grant numbers. For example, "This work was supported by the Medical Research Council (grant number XXXXXXX)". Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma and space, and where research was funded by more than one agency the different agencies should be separated by a semi-colon, with "and" before the final funder. Grants held by different authors should be identified as belonging to individual authors by the authors' initials. For example, "This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (A.B., grant numbers XXXX, YYYY), (C.D., grant number ZZZZ); the Natural Environment Research Council (E.F., grant number FFFF); and the National Institutes of Health (A.B., grant number GGGG), (E.F., grant number HHHH). Where no specific funding has been provided for research, please provide the following statement: "This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors."
Conflicts of Interest: Authors should include a Conflicts of Interest declaration in their manuscript. Authors should title this declaration "Conflicts of Interest", and should place this declaration at the end of the text of their manuscript before the References are listed. If authors do not include this declaration, their submission will not proceed to peer review.
Conflicts of Interest are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on an author's presentation of their work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations. Authors should use the disclosure form of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) to generate the disclosure sentence they should include in their manuscripts. Authors should then save their completed ICMJE form for their own record.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting the manuscript must include Conflicts of Interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a Conflicts of Interest declaration is as follows: "Conflicts of Interest: Author A is employed at company B. Author C owns shares in company D, is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H." If no Conflicts of Interest exist, the declaration should state "Conflicts of Interest: Author A and Author B declare none".
Supplementary Material: If the author has material that may be useful to the reader, but not essential to understanding the article, this can be supplied as supplementary material. Supplementary materials are peer reviewed but will not be copyedited or typeset, so they should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online — care should be taken to make them as comprehensible as possible. The supplementary material should be supplied as a separate file, and should be referenced in the article. Types of supplementary material include, but are not limited to, images, videos, podcasts, and slideshows. A statement should be added after the Conflicts of Interest statement to read:
Supplementary Material
For supplementary material accompanying this paper, visit cambridge.org/EPA.
The link will be replaced by your article’s DOI during the production process.
References: References are in Vancouver format (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. Fifth Edition. N Engl J Med 1997;336:309-16). In the text, references should appear as numbers between square brackets based on the order of citation. Indicate references by number(s) in square brackets in line with the text. The actual authors can be referred to, but the reference number(s) must always be given.
At the end of the manuscript, all references should be listed in numerical order corresponding to the order of citation in the text. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their references. All references cited in the text should be listed and all listed references should appear next to the corresponding text. References in tables and figures should also be numbered. The names of the journals should be abbreviated according to those used in the latest edition of Index Medicus. The volume, issue and first and last pages should be included. Abstracts should be marked as such. Papers that have been submitted or accepted but are not available online should not be cited. Papers in preparation should not be cited. References should include a DOI whenever possible, in the format https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR07218.v3.
Examples follow. Please note the shortened form for the last page number (e.g., 51–9), and that for more than six authors the first six should be listed followed by 'et al.':
Reference to a journal publication:
[1] Van der Geer J, Hanraads JAJ, Lupton RA. The art of writing a scientific article. J Sci Commun. 2010;163: 51–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.Sc.2010.00372.
Reference to a journal publication with an article number:
[2] Van der Geer J, Hanraads JAJ, Lupton RA. The art of writing a scientific article. Heliyon. 2018;19: e00205. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2018.e00205
Reference to a book:
[3] Strunk Jr W, White EB. The elements of style. 4th ed. New York: Longman; 2000.
Reference to a chapter in an edited book:
[4] Mettam GR, Adams LB. How to prepare an electronic version of your article. In: Jones BS, Smith RZ, editors. Introduction to the electronic age, New York: E-Publishing Inc; 2009, p. 281–304.
Reference to a website:
[5] Cancer Research UK. Cancer statistics reports for the UK, http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/aboutcancer/statistics/cancerstatsreport/; 2003 [accessed 13 March 2003].
Reference to a dataset:
[6] Koopman B, Zuccon G. A test collection for matching patient to clinical trials: V2; 2016 [Data file]. http://doi.org/10.4225/08/574CE878156EE
Artwork, figures and other graphics: All figures and tables should be supplied in separate files, with tables supplied as editable files only. Resolution: halftone images must be saved at 300 dpi at approximately the final size. Line drawings should be saved at 1000 dpi, or 1200 dpi if very fine line weights have been used. Combination figures must be saved at a minimum of 600 dpi. Cambridge recommends that only TIFF, EPS, or PDF formats are used for electronic artwork. For more detailed guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format please see the Cambridge Journals Artwork Guide.
Seeking permission to use copyrighted material
If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. As the author it is your responsibility to obtain this permission and pay any related fees, and you will need to send us a copy of each permission statement at acceptance. Please find more information here.
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.
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.
CRediT taxonomy for contributors
When submitting a manuscript, the corresponding author will be prompted to provide further details concerning contributions to the manuscript using the CRediT taxonomy. CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) is a high-level taxonomy, including 14 designated options, that can be used to represent the roles typically played by contributors to scholarly output. All parties who have contributed to the scholarly work, but do not meet the full criteria for authorship, should be recognised with their contributions described in terms of the CRediT taxonomy.
Our default position is that the corresponding author has the authority to act on behalf of all co-authors, and we expect the corresponding author to confirm this at the beginning of the submission process. When preparing your manuscript you should also ensure that you obtain permission from all contributors to describe their contributions using the CRediT taxonomy.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their main manuscript file. 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”.
ORCID
We encourage 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 can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.
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.
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.
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.
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 – delivered in partnership with American Journal Experts. 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.