Submissions

Author Guidelines

Submission Guidelines

Submitted manuscripts should be PDF files prepared for anonymous review and must contain no identifying information (see Review below). 

Submissions need not conform to the journal’s style guide unless and until they are accepted for publication. There is no lower or upper word limit, but lengthier submissions should offer correspondingly greater scholarly value. Authors may have more than one manuscript under review. Submission of a manuscript implies that the work described has not been published before; that it is not under consideration for publication anywhere else.

Experimental Manuscripts

If your manuscript includes experimental studies, the following rules apply:

1. Pre-registration: Experiments must be pre-registered (preferably on OSF or other free, open-source platforms) in a manner that eliminates or minimizes degrees of freedom in data analysis.

2. Multiple Stimuli: Experiments must include at least three sufficiently distinct variations of vignettes or stimuli to ensure some degree of generalizability and to prevent stimulus hacking.

We strictly adhere to the principles of Open Science. All materials, code, data, and any other relevant information should be provided upon submission and made publicly available thereafter.

Temporary Exceptions to Open Science Requirements

We recognize that Experimental Philosophy's open science standards are particularly strict and may not yet be fully adopted by all journals you have considered as potential outlets. As a result, your manuscript may currently lack one of the requirements for consideration under our standards (for example, relying on a single vignette or lacking pre-registration).

To be as inclusive as possible and to allow authors to submit such manuscripts, we permit temporary exceptions to Rules 1 and 2 until May 30, 2026, under the following conditions:

Only one rule may be violated.
We will not consider experimental manuscripts in which the studies were neither pre-registered nor based on multiple stimuli.

If exactly one rule is violated, authors must:

• Provide a brief justification in the cover letter to the editor, and
• Supply evidence that the studies were conducted before the launch of Experimental Philosophy (relevant date: November 30, 2026).

Single-stimulus designs (e.g., one vignette).
If the empirical evidence in your manuscript is based on a single stimulus, we may still consider it for publication provided you are willing to conduct a follow-up experiment with additional stimuli if reviewers regard the paper as promising.

Lack of pre-registration.
If your experimental studies were not pre-registered, we may still consider the manuscript provided you are willing to run a pre-registered follow-up study if reviewers regard the paper as promising. We further encourage you to register your study nonetheless, indicating that data had already been collected and analyzed at the time of registration. This helps ensure that all information relevant for assessing the quality and reliability of your data is available (e.g., sample size rationale, exclusion criteria, and other analytic decisions).

Please note that meeting these conditions does not guarantee that section editors will send the manuscript out for review; it only ensures that the manuscript is eligible for consideration under this temporary exception policy.

Review Process

Experimental Philosophy employs a double-blind peer-review process. Authors submit an anonymized manuscript, which the managing editor sends to a section editor (authors may indicate the section to which their submission should be assigned—for example, philosophy of language, moral philosophy, etc.). The section editor decides whether the submission is desk-rejected or sent for external review.

All final decisions, including desk-rejections, acceptance and rejections following the review process, need to be approved by the editors-in-chief.  They will follow the section editors’ verdict except in extraordinary circumstances, such as negligence or bias on the part of a section editor or referees.

Authors are not identified to referees, and vice versa. Any attempt to identify the author(s) of a submission—such as by searching for the title online—is strictly prohibited. We expect the submission tool to technically allow for a triple-blind review process in the near future.

As authors, do not forget to remove identifying metadata (including in your pdf but also supplementary materials) and only include anonymized links to pre-registrations or supplementary materials. We recommend the Open Science Framework (OSF) – it is a free, open-source project management tool for researchers, acting as a collaboration tool and a long-term data repository.

When citing or referring to their own work, we encourage authors not to blind their own manuscripts but to refer to their own publications in the same way as they refer to other people’s work.

Rejections Without External Review

If the section editor believes the submission has less than a 50% chance of being eventually accepted, they reject the submission without sending it out to external referees. The section editor should do so within three weeks of submission, except for unusually long or difficult manuscripts.

While the section editor can provide feedback to the author(s) independent of the decision, this is not mandatory. The section editor only has to briefly justify the decision to reject without external review to the editors-in-chief. This justification will not be sent to authors.

External Review

If the section editor believes the submission has at least a 50% chance of being accepted, the section editor sends the submission to external referees. In this case, the referees should submit their recommendation to the section editor within four weeks, except for unusually long or difficult manuscripts. The section editor strives to recommend acceptance, minor revisions, or rejection.

The section editor should secure at least two referee reports. However, should one negative report be received before a second is received, the section editor may decide to reject the submission based on only one report, provided they share the referee’s concerns. Otherwise, at least two reports are required for a decision.

External referees are asked to recommend one of the following: accept, revisions, reject. In each case, the external referee has to justify their decision. Manuscripts should be suitable for publication after one round of revisions. If the referees or the section editor believe that further changes could improve the manuscript, these changes need to be flagged as optional.

The job of editors and referees is to evaluate submissions, not improve them. Additional feedback for the author(s) is welcome, but mandatory only when revisions are recommended. In this case, the external referee must specify which parts of the submission need revision and in what respects.

While a request for minor revisions does not guarantee acceptance, it should only be recommended if the section editor believes that a revised submission has at least a 90% chance of being accepted.

Resubmissions

The managing editor tries to assign resubmissions to the same section editor who handled the original submission. The section editor must secure at least one external referee report, preferably from the same external referee(s) who recommended revisions. The section editor must also read the resubmission.

If referees can identify any manuscript author, they are supposed to decline the review. Exceptions are only possible in very rare cases where referees have no conflict of interest and other experts in the field are unlikely to be found. Such exceptions need to be granted by the editors-in-chief.

Referees are supposed to recommend their final recommendation within four weeks of resubmission, except for an unusually long or difficult manuscript.

Experimental Philosophy only allows for one round of revisions. After a revised manuscript has been submitted, the section editor can only recommend accepting or rejecting it.

Accepted Manuscripts

Accepted papers must be adapted to the journal’s house style. Experimental Philosophy follows APA Style (7th edition). The final document should be a Word file (.docx). Due to the (open source) publishing system Experimental Philosophy employs, authors must use the (freely available) Zotero software to manage references (in the main text as well as in the reference section). The template that will convert any docx file into the final manuscript relies on Zotero and cannot add any references added otherwise.