Review process

Clinical Neuropsychiatry provides from 2024 open access under Creative Commons Non Commercial Attribution 4.0 International License to peer reviewed research as part of its commitment to readers and authors. We make all our research articles freely available online.

Peer review of manuscripts submitted by Clinical Neuropsychiatry‘s editorial staff and other contributions written by Clinical Neuropsychiatry‘s Editors also undergo external peer review. All articles reporting original research performed in Clinical Neuropsychiatry are independently peer-reviewed.

The Editors-in-Chief give a first judgement of every paper within the first weeks after its submission and, if they feel that its merits a further evaluation, it will be forwarded to one external referee for a more detailed review.

If we consider that Clinical Neuropsychiatry is not the appropriate journal, we will promptly inform the authors, so that they may submit their article elsewhere with no delay. The usual reasons for rejection at this stage are insufficient originality, the lack of a message that might be relevant to a general psychiatric audience, or the focus on topics far beyond the scope of our journal. Single-case studies. Studies without direct or indirect implications in the field of psychiatry and/or clinical psychology. Studies concerning the psychometric properties of already existing instruments. Unsolicited editorials and/or opinion articles.

Clinical Neuropsychiatry adopts a double blind peer review process. Reviewer doesn’t know the identity of the author, and vice-versa.

Reviewers provide their comments to the editors who make their final decision. We ask reviewers to sign their reports and declare any competing interests on all manuscripts they comment on.

To make editorial decisions for research articles we focus mainly on the research question: even when the overall subject is relevant and intruiguing we may reject the article if the study does not address a research question or if it does not add enough to the field of research on a given topic.

Of course, we also reject all papers with many flaws, poor statistical analyses or lack of ethical standards.

Decisions usually include one of: provisional acceptance (conditional on making satisfactory revisions), request revisions (when the article is rated interesting, but the information is not sufficient to reach a definitive decision, so that answering reviewers’ and editors’ queries will hopefully lead to a satisfactory revision), or rejection. We will send the authors a decision letter as soon as possible; usually within a couple of months, but longer if we have asked for an additional detailed report from statistician or another reviewer.

If our judgement was “revision”, we invite authors to return their articles within the subsequent month.