Online submission

All manuscripts must be submitted to the email address submit.WCPRR@gmail.com. Every submission must include the following 2 separate files: 1) A cover letter summarizing the manuscript, 2) a manuscript with a title page that lists all authors and affiliations as a Word file.

Before a manuscript is submitted, please ensure that the submission complies with our Editorial policies. Please note that Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not meet our authorship criteria.

Submitting revisions

All revisions should be made in a Word file using Track Changes and then emailed to submit.WCPRR@gmail.com. The subject of the email should say “REVISION” followed by the manuscript number.

Editorial policies

The WCPRR accepts submissions that are relevant to Cultural Psychiatry. Submissions may therefore overlap with related fields, such as biomedicine, global health and mental health, anthropology, psychology, brain and biological sciences, and clinical practice.

Submission to WCPRR implies that the submission will not simultaneously be in review at another journal and that none of the material has been previously published unless the author(s) retain(s) or obtain(s) publishing rights. Failure to comply with these policies can result in a withdrawal or retraction of the submission.

The primary affiliation for each author should be the institution where the author is currently affiliated or where the majority of the work was done. If an author has subsequently moved, then multiple affiliations may be stated.

If the submission includes personal communications, please provide written permission from the correspondents.

Peer review process

After a submission is received, it will be assigned a tracking number and an Editor who will oversee the review process. The editorial team will decide if the submission should be reviewed. If it should, then the submission will be forwarded to reviewers. The authors will be contacted with either a letter of rejection or with feedback from the assigned reviewers. Please note that this process may take several weeks.

Changes to the manuscript may be requested for intellectual or academic purposes or so that the submission conforms to our style. The corresponding author will be sent proofs prior to online publication. No materials will be published with approval by the corresponding author. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to confirm that all other authors agree to publication. When the corresponding author approves publication, the WCPRR editorial team assumes that the corresponding author also has obtained permission from all other authors.

Cover letter

In 1-2 pages, the Cover Letter should summarize the significance of the submission. Please include relevant contextual information about the field, topic, or local culture and describe the intellectual contributions of the submission. If the submission reports study findings, then the main findings should also be summarized.

The following information about each author should also be included:

• Name and affiliation
• Job title or student status
• Country where the research was conducted (if the submission is a study)
• ORCID number (if available)
• Twitter handle (if applicable)

In the Cover Letter, authors should state the article type from the list below. The Cover Letter is required to clearly state any conflict of interests. Inclusion of copyrighted material or private correspondence must also be disclosed in the Cover Letter. Further documentation may be requested.

All authors are encouraged to obtain a ORCID number, which is freely available through this website: https://orcid.org/register.

Video abstract submission is also encouraged.

Suggesting reviewers

The Cover Letter should also provide the names and email addresses for at least 3 reviewers who you want to read your submission. If there are any reviewers who you do not want to read your submission, please also give their names and email addresses and indicate that they should be excluded from the review process.

Submission types

Original Research or Theoretical Articles

Accounts of cultural psychiatric research or clinical practice based on original, rather than confirmatory data. Typically, original research papers will present new data derived from a sizable series of subjects or patients and should be based on original rather than confirmatory data. Theoretical articles may describe a model or proposed a new approach.

Original research and theoretical articles should not exceed 8000 words, including an abstract of no more than 250 words, references, tables and figures.

Short Reports and Case Studies

Short reports are short research articles that report on a simple study or report only modest findings. Case reports are short papers that illustrate either a previously unrecognized disorder or a new aspect of a known condition. Ethical and legal considerations require the protection of a patient’s anonymity.

Short reports and case studies should not exceed 2000 words, including an abstract of no more than 150 words, references, tables and figures.

Study Materials and Protocols

Study materials (e.g., new scales, translations) and protocols (e.g., new experimental procedures) may be submitted along with a report of their methodical validation.

Validation reports should not exceed 5000 words (excluding the material or protocol), including an abstract of no more than 250 words, references, tables, and figures. The study materials or protocols can be any length, but conciseness is prioritized and itemized questions or lists of procedural steps are preferred.

Review Articles

Manuscripts should provide a review and synthesis of relevant literature. Review articles should not exceed 8000 words, including an abstract of no more than 250 words, references, tables and figures.

Review articles can be about one or several published or unpublished articles. Any professional articles that already has been published in a peer-review journal and unpublished articles in their original languages (that can be displayed as attachments) can be reviewed. The WCPRR is particularly interested in authors who are from countries in which publication of their work is difficult to achieve because of limited resources and lack of local or regional journals. The factors relevant for selection of review papers are as follows: the significance of the topics addressed; the importance for the readers to acquire the information (particularly for those who have limited access to journals); and representation of review articles from various geographic regions, language systems, and cultural backgrounds.

Book reviews

Books relating to cultural psychiatry or culture and mental health can be considered and selected for book review. For published books or articles which need permission from publishers/authors, proper procedure will need to be followed to obtain official permission for review. Authors must disclose whether they receive compensation for writing the review, including free copies of the book.

Review articles should not exceed 5000 words, including an abstract of no more than 250 words, references, tables and figures.

Summary Articles

This type of article is the summary of one or several articles, published or unpublished. It must be summarized (with no additional commentary) by the authors themselves and should not exceed 3000 words. The main purpose is to introduce our readers to papers written by authors around the world, which are relevant to cultural psychiatry. Therefore, the WCPRR will give preference to Summary Articles of works that are not available in English or not available online.

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor concerning local issues or communications about cultural psychiatry will be considered.

Letters critical of an article published in the WCPRR must be received within 8 weeks of the article’s publication. Letters received after the deadline will not be considered for publication; those considered will be sent to the authors for reply. Such letters must include the title and author of the article and the month and year of publication.

Brief letters (maximum of 500 words, including references; no tables or figures) will be considered if they include the notation “for publication.”

Images in Cultural Psychiatry

In addition to the regular articles/reviews above mentioned, WCPRR has established a special section devoted to: Images in Cultural Psychiatry. Accordingly, authors can forward to the Editor a visual image they consider to be of particular importance for understanding a specific topic in cultural psychiatry.

The photo/ picture must be accompanied by a text (maximum 3000 words) including:

• A clear and concise description of the image.
• The author’s subjective reason why the image has a strong impact on him/her and, by inference, on other scholars of cultural psychiatry
• An emic description of the meanings embedded in and attributed to the image, as understood by the population that created the image.
• An etic explanation of the epistemological value of the image for contemporary western psychiatry.

Manuscript Formats

The manuscript text and figures should be a single Microsoft Word file. All figured should be numbered and positioned in the relevant part of the text. Each figure caption should include a title and contain a legend.

Research Articles, Review Articles, and Short Reports

Background

Articles should include a background section that contextualizes the work within Cultural Psychiatry. The WCPRR disseminates global perspectives in mental health. Therefore, significance and contribution of the submission to Cultural Psychiatry and within the local culture should be clearly stated for readers who are not familiar with these contexts.

Methods

Research articles including Methods sections must be described in enough detail that the work can be reproduced by reading the article.

Results

Submissions reporting Results should be clear about the analysis processes. Authors should start whether statistical plans were decided before (a priori) or after (a posteriori) data collection began. Power analyses are encouraged. The cutoff p-value for significance should be stated, even when it is p<0.05. APA guidelines should be followed for statistical reporting.

Discussion

The Discussion section should explain why the results are relevant to Cultural Psychiatry.

References

References are listed in alphabetical order using APA format.

Author contributions

Authors should have made an intellectual contribution to the study. Author agreements must be honored. If there are no author agreements, then it is the discretion of the corresponding author who qualifies for authorship following local or departmental conventions. Please use initials to specify each author’s contribution. For example, “W.W.F. performed the statistical analysis.

Acknowledgements

Please thank anyone who helped with the submission but who does not meet criteria for authorship.

Funding

Please declare funding using one of the two following formats:

• This study was funded by [funder name] [grant number where applicable]. The funder played no role in study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of data, or the writing of this manuscript.
• This study received no funding.

Conflict of interests

A conflict of interests is when an author receives a benefit from writing or publishing the submission. For example, they may receive money or a non-monetary gift or favor. Another example is working for a company that specializes in the development or promotion of certain products or procedures. Authors must state whether or not their is a conflict of interest using one of the two below formats. Please note that, if there is a conflict of interest, the Editor and Reviewers will consider whether it is still appropriate to publish the article. If the conflict of interest may be coercive, the submission will not be accepted for publication.

• Author [initials] declares the following conflict of interests: [describe the circumstances]. All other authors declare no conflicts of interests.
• All authors declare no conflicts interests.

Data availability

Open data is encouraged. Please state where the data can be found or if it is unavailable using one of the three following formats:

• The data from the current manuscript are included in this published article or repository [include link to the data].
• The data from the current manuscript are not publicly available due to [explain reason] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
• No datasets were generated.
  

Code availability

Open code is encouraged. Please state where the data can be found or if it is unavailable using one of the three following formats:

• The code from the current manuscript are included in this published article or repository [include link to the data].
• The code from the current manuscript are not publicly available due to [explain reason] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
• No code was written.

Supplementary information

Supplementary materials will be considered on case-by-case basis.

Video Abstracts

Video abstracts will be hosted on YouTube used for dissemination to various social media websites, which may include Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and others.

Figures and Tables

Copyrighted materials cannot be published by the journal without permissions. Authors are responsible for obtaining and submitting permission to publish any figures or illustrations that are protected by copyright. Authors must indicate if an image is copyrighted in the Cover Letter.

Figures should be mentioned in the text and numbered in the order of occurrence. Figure captions should be in the same font as the main document. Provide images in RGB color and at 300 dpi or higher resolution.

Tables should adhere to APA format and should be created using the Table function in Microsoft Word.

Any abbreviations or symbols that appears in the figure/table or its caption should be defined in a legend. Each legend should total no more than 250 words.

Human Rights

All submissions must comply with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 (as revised in 2000 and 2008) and should state that “This work complies with the Declaration of Helsinki”. This journal does not publish animal studies.

Copyright

All published papers are open access. Online access and download is free of charge. However, copyrights remain exclusively the property of the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry. By submitting a manuscript, the authors agree that the copyright is transferred to the publisher (WACP) if and when the article is accepted for publication.

Ethics and Informed Consent

When reporting experiments, authors must describe how ethical approval was acquired in accordance with local laws, regulations, and guidelines and must state that all participants gave informed consent.

Inclusivity Statement

The WCPRR aims to include authors globally. Some of our submission guidelines may be unfamiliar to authors. Please contact us if you have questions: submit.WCPRR@gmail.com

Open Access Publishing

The WCPRR is the official journal for the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry (WACP). The WCPRR is a Diamond Open Access publication, which means that there are never any fees for authors or readers. All publication charges are paid for by the WACP.

Submit

Manuscripts should be submitted to:
Fatemeh Bagheri, Assistant to the Editor-in-Chief
submit.WCPRR@gmail.com