Frequent Asked Questions

You are eligible to submit if you conducted the majority or entirety of your research during your undergraduate degree. If you have already graduated, you may submit within three years of completing your degree. Submissions are welcome from graduates of any discipline—your undergraduate degree does not need to be in psychology, as long as your work constitutes a psychology study.

To ensure that our reviewers have the capacity to review your work, we request that final submissions (regular paper and Stage 2 registered report manuscripts) are 8000 words or under. Your abstract, not counted in the total word limit, should be 250 words or less. Figure legends, sub-headings and tables are also not included in this limit.

We operate a double-blind peer review process, meaning that the authors and reviewers will be anonymous to each other. Following publication, for transparency reasons, we offer reviewers and authors the option of making their names public alongside their reviews.

We’re looking for work that is original, impactful, and relevant, with clear potential for future research. For regular submissions, pre-registration is not required, but it is highly encouraged and viewed favourably. We also strongly encourage authors to share their data, materials, and analysis scripts on the Open Science Framework (OSF) or other openly accessible repositories (e.g. GitHub), if they feel comfortable doing so.

You can submit your dissertation work or any work that you worked on during your undergraduate degree- e.g., outputs from internships, research assistantships or entirely independent work (provided it has undergone ethical approval at your HEI).

Of course! We welcome submissions from teams of undergraduate authors, provided all contributors are informed and in support. Please note that the majority of the work must have been carried out by undergraduate students. Postgraduate students and academic staff may be involved, but only in a supervisory or advisory capacity.

TBC. Please keep an eye on when our submissions open and close on our website and Instagram.

Absolutely not! We are committed to being an accessible journal and are run by a team of volunteers.

Our reviewers are PhD student volunteers. We endeavour to find PhD students whose areas of study most closely map onto the topics your submission covers. If you are a current PhD student/postdoc and are interested in being a potential reviewer, please contact us at upabjournal@gmail.com.

Scientific Rigour & Methodological Appropriateness: Are the research design, methods, and analyses appropriate and well-reasoned given the undergraduate context, and are they described with sufficient clarity to allow the reader to understand and evaluate the work, and to allow other researchers to replicate it? Originality & Engagement: Does the work demonstrate originality at an undergraduate level, for example, through thoughtful research questions, extensions or replications of existing work, novel combinations of ideas, or clear synthesis of the literature? Relevance & Conceptual Significance: Does the work engage with psychologically meaningful questions, and is the relevance of the research question clearly articulated within its theoretical or empirical context? Interpretation & Future Directions: Are the conclusions generally supported by the results, and does the discussion appropriately relate the findings to existing literature while identifying reasonable directions for future research? Clarity & Quality of Presentation: Is the manuscript clearly written and well structured, with arguments, methods, and results presented in a coherent and accessible manner?