Writing Guidelines

1 Writing Guidelines

Below are writing guidelines for the Developmental Psychopathology Lab:

1. Follow APA style.
2. If you are unsure about grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc., follow the UI Editorial Study Guide, where it does not conflict with APA style.
3. Follow the style and author guidelines of the target journal; where the style of the target journal differs from APA style and/or the UI Editorial Study Guide, follow the style of the target journal.
4. Use EndNote or Zotero for reference management.
5. In empirical papers, include a correlation matrix with descriptive statistics for your model variables.
6. Provide and interpret effect sizes (e.g., rs, ds, betas), and not just statistical significance.
7. Report numbers to two decimal places; report p-values to three decimal places.
8. Know the difference between a “hypothesis” and a “prediction”—and use them correctly. A hypothesis is a proposed explanation. A prediction is “the expected result of a test that is derived, by deduction, from a hypothesis or theory” (Eastwell, 2014; archived at https://perma.cc/8EX4-8JYN). Here is an example of a hypothesis and the resulting prediction:
   “We hypothesize that poor language skills lead to physical aggression because they lead to difficulties in (a) using language as a self-regulatory tool resulting in dysregulated behavior, in (b) interactions with peers leading to peer rejection and resulting frustration, and in (c) communicating one’s needs and having one’s needs met leading to frustration and to resorting to other methods to achieve one’s goals. If the hypothesis is true, we predict that children with poorer language skills will show more physical aggression than children with greater language skills.”
9. Per APA style (4.22), “while” and “since” should be reserved strictly for their temporal meaning; for non-temporal meanings, use terms such as “whereas” and “because”, respectively.
10. Per author guidelines of Child Development (archived at https://perma.cc/7P53-DLVT), use “relationship” to describe social bonds between people, not variables; to describe associations between variables, use “association”, “relation”, “covariation”, or “correlation”.
11. Report relevant aspects of reliability (e.g., internal consistency, inter-rater, test–retest/cross-time stability and repeatability) and validity (e.g., convergent, discriminant, incremental, criterion-related) for the measures you are using, including based on evidence from prior studies and based on estimates in the present study—in particular, those that are most relevant to the particular population, context, purpose, etc.
12. When referring to reliability, validity, or stability, specify the aspect(s) of reliability/validity/stability you are referring to.
    • For example, it is important to distinguish between stability of people’s level on a construct across time, or of the mean, variance, or rank-order (individual differences) of a group’s scores on a construct across time, or the stability of the structure of a construct or of the strength of an effect.
13. Avoid “this”, “that”, “these”, and “those”. They are vague and make the reader work harder. Replace them with their referent.
14. Know the difference between a hyphen (-), minus sign (−), en dash (–), and em dash (—), and use them correctly (see here; archived at https://perma.cc/3XQ6-DBNW).
    • Unicode values (archived at https://perma.cc/Q9GM-SSCL) for each character:
      • hyphen (-): 002D or 2010
      • minus sign (−): 2212
      • en dash (–): 2013
      • em dash (—): 2014
15. When submitting a manuscript to a journal, submit any supplemental appendices as a PDF (not as a Word file).
16. When submitting a manuscript to a journal, follow the lab’s open science guidelines.

• For instance, see the section on “Manuscript Submission to a Journal.”
• When the manuscript is accepted for publication, follow the guidelines in the section on “When the Manuscript is Accepted for Publication”

---

---