Open Access Pub · About the journal

Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

A peer-reviewed, open-access journal for research on the mental health of children and adolescents — how it develops, how it is understood and measured, and how young people are cared for. Research on 18- and 19-year-olds and the transition to adult care is included when an adolescent or developmental question remains central.

ISSN: 2643-6655
Access: Open access
License: CC BY 4.0, authors retain copyright
Publisher: Open Access Pub

Read the Aims and Scope

Purpose

Why this journal exists

Childhood and adolescence are the years in which most mental health conditions first take shape, and the years in which the same condition looks different from one age to the next.

A finding about attention, mood or behavior carries a different meaning at six, at twelve and at seventeen, because the capacities it rests on are still forming. Work in this field has to be read against development rather than apart from it, and a journal serving the field has to hold that requirement steady across very different kinds of study.

The Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry exists to give that work one openly accessible home: research on mechanism and development, on assessment and measurement, on treatment and care, and on the services, families and schools through which care reaches a young person.

The field the journal serves

One developing person, studied from several directions

Each of these is a vantage point on the same developing person. A study of a new measure is often also a study of development, and a treatment question becomes a services question as soon as it asks who the treatment actually reaches.

Development and mechanism

Trajectories of emotional, behavioral and cognitive development, risk and protective factors, and the neurobiological, genetic and family processes through which difficulties emerge, persist or resolve.

Assessment and measurement

Instruments and diagnostic methods built for young people: psychometric validation, cross-cultural adaptation, agreement between self-report and observer report, and measurement that keeps its meaning as a child grows.

Treatment and care

Psychotherapeutic, psychosocial and pharmacological interventions, together with the questions that follow them — for whom, at what age, with what monitoring, and on what evidence of benefit and of harm.

Services, context and prevention

How care is organized across services, the family, school and peer settings in which young people live, prevention and early identification, and the ethical questions particular to research with minors.

Readership

Who meets here

The readership is deliberately mixed, because the subject is larger than any one discipline.

Developmental and clinical researchers: who study how psychopathology emerges and changes across childhood and adolescence.
Child and adolescent psychiatrists and psychologists: who bring the clinical question the research has to answer, and who judge the evidence by the young people in front of them.
Epidemiologists and measurement specialists: who establish what is being counted, in whom, and whether an instrument means the same thing at different ages.
Services, policy and prevention researchers: who work on how care is delivered and on what can be done earlier.

Work published here is written to be read across those boundaries: methods set out fully enough for a specialist to assess, and conclusions stated plainly enough to be useful to someone who came to the question from another direction.

Editorial responsibility

What the journal undertakes

Research about young people carries obligations that the journal holds itself to as much as it asks of its authors.

How manuscripts are assessed

All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal’s scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review. Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.

Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal. Editorial decisions are independent of fees, services, membership, and editorial or reviewer roles.

Research with young participants

Research involving human participants requires approval from an institutional review board or equivalent ethics committee. For participants who are legally minors for the procedures studied, manuscripts report parental or guardian permission and age-appropriate assent as required by the approved protocol and applicable law. Participants legally able to consent for themselves, including eligible 18- and 19-year-olds, provide informed consent. Identifiable information is protected by the privacy safeguards the manuscript describes. Authors disclose conflicts of interest and funding sources.

The full requirements are set out on the Editorial Policies page.

Access, copyright and cost

Articles are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, and authors retain copyright in their own work. The article processing charge applies at one point only: after a manuscript has been accepted.

Current terms are published on the Article Processing Charges page.

Where to go next

Read further

Aims and ScopeThe journal’s own full statement of what it considers.
Editorial BoardThe editors responsible for the journal’s decisions.
Instructions for AuthorsPreparation and submission requirements by article type.
Editorial PoliciesEthics, authorship, peer review and corrections in full.
Submit PaperThe approved routes for sending a manuscript.