Instructions for authors
About the Journal
Behavioral Medicine is an international, peer-reviewed journal publishing high-quality, original research. Please see the journal's Aims & Scope for information about its focus and peer-review policy.
Please note that this journal only publishes manuscripts in English.
Behavioral Medicine accepts the following types of article: empirical articles, clinical or case studies, and systematic reviews.
Behavioral Medicine is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, which fosters and promotes the exchange of knowledge and the advancement of theory in the field of behavioral medicine, including but not limited to understandings of disease prevention, health promotion, health disparities, identification of health risk factors, and interventions targeting risk factors and disparities and enhancing health. The journal seeks to advance knowledge and theory in these domains in all segments of the population and across the lifespan, in local, national, and global contexts, and with an emphasis on the synergies that exist between biological, psychological, psychosocial, and structural factors as they relate to these areas of study and across health states.
Behavior Medicine publishes original experimental and observational research studies, quantitative and qualitative studies, evaluation studies, and clinical and case studies. The journal also publishes review articles, which provide systematic evaluations of the literature and propose alternative and innovative theoretical paradigms. The journal generally does not publish manuscripts based on pilot studies.
Behavioral Medicine emphasizes the interplay between theory and practice, the translation of knowledge to enhance health, and policy implications.
Open Access
You have the option to publish open access in this journal via our Open Select publishing program. Publishing open access means that your article will be free to access online immediately on publication, increasing the visibility, readership and impact of your research. Articles published Open Select with Taylor & Francis typically receive 32% more citations* and over 6 times as many downloads** compared to those that are not published Open Select.
Your research funder or your institution may require you to publish your article open access. Visit our Author Services website to find out more about open access policies and how you can comply with these.
You will be asked to pay an article publishing charge (APC) to make your article open access and this cost can often be covered by your institution or funder. Use our APC finder to view the APC for this journal.
Please visit our Author Services website or contact openaccess@tandf.co.uk if you would like more information about our Open Select Program.
*Citations received up to Jan 31st 2020 for articles published in 2015-2019 in journals listed in Web of Science®.
**Usage in 2017-2019 for articles published in 2015-2019.
Peer Review and Ethics
Taylor & Francis is committed to peer-review integrity and upholding the highest standards of review. Once your paper has been assessed for suitability by the editor, it will then be double_blind peer reviewed by independent, anonymous expert referees. Find out more about what to expect during peer review and read our guidance on publishing ethics.
Preparing Your Paper
Structure
Your paper should be compiled in the following order: title page; abstract; keywords; main text introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion; acknowledgments; declaration of interest statement; references; appendices (as appropriate); table(s) with caption(s) (on individual pages); figures; figure captions (as a list).
Word Limits
Please include a word count for your paper.
A typical paper for this journal should be no more than 25 pages, inclusive of:
Abstract
References
Style Guidelines
Please refer to these quick style guidelines when preparing your paper, rather than any published articles or a sample copy.
Please use American spelling style consistently throughout your manuscript.
Please note that long quotations should be indented without quotation marks.
Full length articles inclusive of references should not exceed 25 pages and should have no more than 5 tables and/or figures. Figures should be in black and white and be provided the highest quality figure format possible. Upload figures in their original source file with text in Times New Roman 9/10 bold. All figures should be in black and white. Brief reports should not exceed 10 pages inclusive of references. Brief reports should have no more no more than 1 table or figure.
The journal will accept co-first authors when appropriate. The decision on naming co-first authors will be made solely by the Editor-in-Chief, and authors will have to provide information to support such a request. Authorship details should be decided prior to submission of the manuscript. The journal does not accept co-corresponding author requests.
Responses to previously published articles should not exceed 2 pages inclusive of references and may not include any tables of figures.
Abstracts should be one unstructured paragraph with no sub-headings or statistics included. All empirical articles (full length and brief report) must include five sections with the following headers: INTRODUCTION, METHODS (NOT METHOD), RESULTS, DISCUSSION, and CONCLUSIONS (NOT CONCLUSION). Do not include any subheads in the INTRODUCTION or DISCUSSION.
For all empirical articles, indicate approval of the appropriate institutional review board (IRB) for all studies involving human participants and describe how participants provided informed consent in the manuscript.
Provide written permission from publishers and authors to reprint or adapt previously published tables or figures. As an author, you are required to secure permission if you want to reproduce any figure, table, or extract from the text of another source. This applies to direct reproduction as well as “derivative reproduction” (where you have created a new figure or table which derives substantially from a copyrighted source).
Please refer to these quick style guidelines when preparing your paper, rather than any published articles or a sample copy.
In General:
Double space all text, including quotations, lists, and references/notes.
Left justify only.
Leave a one-inch margin on all sides
Number pages
Use 12 point, Times Roman font for all body text.
Use double space
Please key all titles in initial caps/lowercase.
Only use one space between Even after periods, only use one space. Before saving your document, search for two spaces and if they occur, delete the extra space.
Turn justification If it is turned on it will introduce additional spaces.
Indent all new paragraphs
Use American spelling style consistently throughout your manuscript.
Use double quotation marks, except where “a quotation is ‘within’ a quotation”.
Long quotations should be indented without quotation marks.
Numerical Results:
Report all statistics (e.g. F, t etc.) and p values to 2 decimal places (hundredths place) except when p < .01 or p < .001
Never report p =.000
Report means, standard deviations, confidence intervals etc., to2 decimal places (hundredths place)
Report percentages, frequencies etc. to one decimal place (tenths place)
In text, percentages must be followed by (n) ex. 32.3% (n = 22)
Formatting and Templates
Papers may be submitted in Word or LaTeX formats. Figures should be saved separately from the text. To assist you in preparing your paper, we provide formatting template(s).
Word templates are available for this journal. Please save the template to your hard drive, ready for use.
If you are not able to use the template via the links (or if you have any other template queries) please contact us here.
In short, all manuscripts should adhere to the American Medical Association (AMA) style guidelines. In-text citations should be superscripted and should only appear AFTER terminal punctuation. They should not be regular numbers in parentheses/brackets or superscripted numbers appearing before terminal punctuation.
References
Please use this reference guide when preparing your paper.
Taylor & Francis Editing Services
To help you improve your manuscript and prepare it for submission, Taylor & Francis provides a range of editing services. Choose from options such as English Language Editing, which will ensure that your article is free of spelling and grammar errors, Translation, and Artwork Preparation. For more information, including pricing, visit this website.
Checklist: What to Include
Author details. All authors of a manuscript should include their full name and affiliation on the cover page of the manuscript. Where available, please also include ORCiDs and social media handles (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn). One author will need to be identified as the corresponding author, with their email address normally displayed in the article PDF (depending on the journal) and the online article. Authors’ affiliations are the affiliations where the research was conducted. If any of the named co-authors moves affiliation during the peer-review process, the new affiliation can be given as a footnote. Please note that no changes to affiliation can be made after your paper is accepted. Read more on authorship.
Should contain an unstructured abstract of 250 words.
You can opt to include a video abstract with your article. Find out how these can help your work reach a wider audience, and what to think about when filming.
Between 3 and 5 keywords. Read making your article more discoverable, including information on choosing a title and search engine optimization.
Funding details. Please supply all details required by your funding and grant-awarding bodies as follows:
For single agency grants
This work was supported by the [Funding Agency] under Grant [number xxxx].
For multiple agency grants
This work was supported by the [Funding Agency #1] under Grant [number xxxx]; [Funding Agency #2] under Grant [number xxxx]; and [Funding Agency #3] under Grant [number xxxx].
Disclosure statement. This is to acknowledge any financial interest or benefit that has arisen from the direct applications of your research. Further guidance on what is a conflict of interest and how to disclose it.
Data availability statement. If there is a data set associated with the paper, please provide information about where the data supporting the results or analyses presented in the paper can be found. Where applicable, this should include the hyperlink, DOI or other persistent identifier associated with the data set(s). Templates are also available to support authors.
Data deposition. If you choose to share or make the data underlying the study open, please deposit your data in a recognized data repository prior to or at the time of submission. You will be asked to provide the DOI, pre-reserved DOI, or other persistent identifier for the data set.
Supplemental online material. Supplemental material can be a video, dataset, fileset, sound file or anything which supports (and is pertinent to) your paper. We publish supplemental material online via Figshare. Find out more about supplemental material and how to submit it with your article.
Figures. Figures should be high quality (1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grayscale and 300 dpi for colour, at the correct size). Figures should be supplied in one of our preferred file formats: EPS, PS, JPEG, TIFF, or Microsoft Word (DOC or DOCX) files are acceptable for figures that have been drawn in Word. For information relating to other file types, please consult our Submission of electronic artwork document.
Tables. Tables should present new information rather than duplicating what is in the text. Readers should be able to interpret the table without reference to the text. Please supply editable files.
Equations. If you are submitting your manuscript as a Word document, please ensure that equations are editable. More information about mathematical symbols and equations.
Units. Please use SI units (non-italicized).
Using Third-Party Material
You must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in your article. The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your paper for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission. More information on requesting permission to reproduce work(s) under copyright.
Submitting Your Paper
This journal uses Taylor & Francis' Submission Portal to manage the submission process. The Submission Portal allows you to see your submissions across Taylor & Francis' journal portfolio in one place. To submit your manuscript please click here.
If you are submitting in LaTeX, please convert the files to PDF beforehand (you will also need to upload your LaTeX source files with the PDF).
Please note that Behavioral Medicine uses Crossref™ to screen papers for unoriginal material. By submitting your paper to Behavioral Medicine you are agreeing to originality checks during the peer-review and production processes.
On acceptance, we recommend that you keep a copy of your Accepted Manuscript. Find out more about sharing your work.
Data Sharing Policy
This journal applies the Taylor & Francis Basic Data Sharing Policy. Authors are encouraged to share or make open the data supporting the results or analyses presented in their paper where this does not violate the protection of human subjects or other valid privacy or security concerns.
Authors are encouraged to deposit the dataset(s) in a recognized data repository that can mint a persistent digital identifier, preferably a digital object identifier (DOI) and recognizes a long-term preservation plan. If you are uncertain about where to deposit your data, please see this information regarding repositories.
Authors are further encouraged to cite any data sets referenced in the article and provide a Data Availability Statement.
At the point of submission, you will be asked if there is a data set associated with the paper. If you reply yes, you will be asked to provide the DOI, pre-registered DOI, hyperlink, or other persistent identifier associated with the data set(s). If you have selected to provide a pre-registered DOI, please be prepared to share the reviewer URL associated with your data deposit, upon request by reviewers.
Where one or multiple data sets are associated with a manuscript, these are not formally peer-reviewed as a part of the journal submission process. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure the soundness of data. Any errors in the data rest solely with the producers of the data set(s).
Publication Charges
There are no submission fees, publication fees or page charges for this journal.
Color figures will be reproduced in color in your online article free of charge.
Copyright Options
Copyright allows you to protect your original material, and stop others from using your work without your permission. Taylor & Francis offers a number of different license and reuse options, including Creative Commons licenses when publishing open access. Read more on publishing agreements.
Complying with Funding Agencies
We will deposit all National Institutes of Health or Wellcome Trust-funded papers into PubMedCentral on behalf of authors, meeting the requirements of their respective open access policies. If this applies to you, please tell our production team when you receive your article proofs, so we can do this for you. Check funders’ open access policy mandates here. Find out more about sharing your work.
My Authored Works
On publication, you will be able to view, download and check your article’s metrics (downloads, citations and Altmetric data) via My Authored Works on Taylor & Francis Online. This is where you can access every article you have published with us, as well as your free eprints link, so you can quickly and easily share your work with friends and colleagues.
We are committed to promoting and increasing the visibility of your article. Here are some tips and ideas on how you can work with us to promote your research.
Article Reprints
You will be sent a link to order article reprints via your account in our production system. For inquiries about reprints, please contact Taylor & Francis at reprints@taylorandfrancis.com. You can also order print copies of the journal issue in which your article appears.
Queries
Should you have any queries, please visit our Author Services website or contact us here.
