Research Reports, Brief Clinical Reports and Brief Articles

There is a great deal of exciting and innovative research currently going on in our field, and our Editorial staff would very much like the content of our journal to reflect such work.

With that in mind, we would like to remind authors (and potential authors) that our journal is happy to consider a very wide range of types of paper – as befits the breadth of vision of an inter-disciplinary journal.

Each issue of our journal contains a Target Article and associated Commentaries, and also several Original Articles.

We would like to draw attention to the fact that Neuro-Psychoanalysis has also published, and would like to continue to publish, other sorts of papers, often far more brief than those which fall into the Target Articles and Original Article category. Such brief papers are often of great interest to our readers, but tend not to be frequently submitted. We would like to encourage more of these submissions.

Clinical Reports

These will be case reports of patients, either in assessment or in psychotherapeutic treatment. They are likely to be (for example) cases of neurological patients with stroke, head injury, epilepsy, dementia or the like. Or they may be patients in whom a neuropsychoanalytic inference can be drawn on the basis of a pharmacological intervention, for example, changes seen after drug treatments (such as neuroleptics or SSRIs) which modify dopamine or serotonin levels.

We expect that such case reports will carry brief coverage of the associated clinical material (e.g. the medical background to the case, a description of the neuro-behavioural presentation), but will focus primarily on a description of analytic work, before offering a neuropsychoanalytic formulation of the case. We expect that such Clinical Reports will be in the 1 000 to 4 000 word range.

Brief Articles

While our Original Articles tend to be papers in the 5 000 to 10 000 word range, we will also publish papers that are under 5 000 words in length.

By virtue of their brevity, such papers will be focussed on relatively restricted questions. There are many issues that might be addressed in such a way. For example, papers might be the reports of smaller scale scientific experiments, perhaps extensions or refinements of previous work, or ‘failures to replicate’ that might not merit a longer Original Article. Brief Articles might also be reviews of fairly restricted theoretical issues, for example summarising the literature on a neuroscientific topic of interest to neuropsychoanalysis. Finally, such papers might also be speculative proposals in neuropsychoanalysis, suggesting ways in which a hypothesis (for example about the neural substrate of a psychoanalytic concept) might be tested.

Brief Research Reports

Papers in this section might include abstracts (including abstracts from the Open Research Day at our annual Conference), or reports of work in progress.

Please send all submissions to Pat Porter (pat.porter@neuropsa.org). When they are received, they will pass through the usual peer review process. Please refer to the ‘Notes for Contributors’ for details of the journal style.