About the Journal
Aims and Scope
The AIMS Scientific Journal publishes original, peer-reviewed scholarship in the mental sciences. It exists for a body of work that is often orphaned by disciplinary journals: research in which clinical understanding and empirical method inform one another. Psychoanalytic journals rarely accommodate neuroscientific evidence; neuroscience journals rarely accommodate clinical theory. This journal is addressed to authors working across that boundary.
Four strands define the scope:
- Psychoanalysis and applied clinical psychology — theory, technique, case-based research, and studies of the clinical process and its outcomes.
- Neuroscience and cognitive therapy integration — empirical and conceptual work relating neurobiological findings to psychotherapeutic practice, including studies of mechanism, and critical appraisal of premature or overstated translation.
- Public mental health — epidemiology, services research, prevention, access and equity, and the evaluation of population-level interventions.
- Ethics and global mental health policy — normative and empirical work on professional regulation, standards of training and supervision, cross-jurisdictional practice, and the governance of mental health systems.
Work that is purely promotional, that reports clinical claims without a method by which they could be disconfirmed, or that addresses none of the four strands, falls outside the scope and is declined at editorial screening without external review.
Peer Review Process
The journal operates double-anonymous peer review: authors and reviewers are not disclosed to one another at any stage.
Every submission is first screened by the editors for scope, ethical compliance, and basic methodological adequacy. A manuscript may be declined at this stage without external review; where that happens, authors receive the reason. Manuscripts that pass screening are sent to at least two independent reviewers with no institutional affiliation or recent collaboration with the authors. Where reviewers disagree materially, a third reviewer is invited; the final decision rests with the handling editor and is not determined by vote.
Reviewers are asked to assess significance, methodological soundness, clarity, adequacy of the literature, and the fit between the evidence presented and the claims made. Decisions are one of four: accept; accept with minor revisions; major revisions with a further round of review; or decline. The target interval between submission and first decision is eight weeks.
Editors handling a manuscript in which they have a competing interest recuse themselves and the submission is reassigned. Submissions authored by editors are handled by an editor outside their reporting line and are held to the same standard as any other.
Publication Frequency
The journal publishes on a continuous basis: each article appears as soon as its final editing is complete, without waiting for an issue to close. Articles are gathered into annual volumes for citation and indexing purposes.
Publication Ethics
The journal follows the COPE Core Practices. Authorship is determined by the ICMJE criteria: substantial contribution to the work, involvement in drafting or critical revision, approval of the version submitted, and accountability for its integrity. Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision alone do not constitute authorship.
All submissions are screened for similarity against published literature. Research involving human participants must state the approving ethics committee and its reference number, and must confirm that informed consent was obtained. Clinical material must be anonymised to the point at which the person cannot be identified, or accompanied by that person's written consent; where anonymisation and consent are in tension, consent governs.
Allegations of misconduct are investigated under the COPE flowcharts. Corrections, expressions of concern and retractions are published in a form that is linked bidirectionally with the original article and is never silently applied.
Archiving
The journal participates in the LOCKSS and CLOCKSS distributed archiving networks, which permit participating libraries to create permanent archives for purposes of preservation and restoration.
Publisher
The AIMS Scientific Journal is published by the American Institute of Mental Science, a programme of Society of Psychoanalytic, LLC, 9450 Southwest Gemini Drive, Beaverton, Oregon 97008, United States.
Editorial decisions are made independently of the Institute's certification and accreditation activities. Certification by AIMS confers no advantage in peer review, and publication in this journal confers no certification status.
