How to Submit a Paper

The following is partially obsolete: APA is now instructing authors NOT to put the full text of their papers on the Internet. Here is the actual APA notice. Until further notice, therefore, only abstracts (not full papers) are accepted for the social cognition archive.

The archive is intended to alert interested readers to new and recent articles. Therefore, papers that have been submitted, newly accepted for publication, or recently published are the most valuable. To keep the archive current, references to older published papers will be removed from time to time. (Such papers are indexed in PsycLit and other available databases.) As of October 1997, papers published before 1996 are no longer listed.
Papers are welcome in any of five formats. In decreasing order of preference, they are:

  • 1. PostScript (*.ps). Pros: The author fully controls the appearance of the document on screen or paper -- it may include graphs, charts, images, even color in addition to text. Any modern word-processor can produce PostScript output. Most people should have access to a PostScript printer, and free viewers (e.g., ghostscript) that can display PostScript documents on the computer screen are widely available. Cons: Document may not be searchable (that is, you may not be able to search within the document for key words or phrases, though this depends on the nature of the PostScript code that was generated). Caution: Be sure the document does not call for any fonts besides the standard Times, Helvetica, Courier, and Symbol. It is a good idea to print the PostScript file on someone else's printer to be sure that it will work, before submitting it to the archive.

    2. Adobe Acrobat (*.pdf). Pros: The author fully controls the appearance of the document on screen or paper -- it may include graphs, charts, images, even color in addition to text. Free viewers that can display Acrobat documents on the computer screen and print them are available for DOS, Windows, or Mac (for details, click here). Documents are searchable. Cons: Extra software tools (besides a word-processor) are required to generate Acrobat documents, and they are not free.

    3. Plain ASCII text (*.asc). Pros: Any word-processor can produce plain ASCII output. Any printer can print it. Anybody can view it on screen. Document is searchable. Cons: Boring, ugly. No formatting is possible except for (e.g.) inserting blank lines between paragraphs.

    4. Abstract only, with link to full paper at the author's own site. Pros: The abstract is available on this archive so that people can find out about the paper, and then easily access the complete paper by clicking on its URL. The author can easily put an updated version of the paper in place. The author does not need to maintain a Web site; the paper can be made available by ftp or gopher instead. Cons: (Depend on format--PostScript, Acrobat, or ASCII--in which the author maintains the paper.)

    5. Abstract only, author mails hard copy. (The archive contains only a title and abstract, and an interested reader e-mails the author for a hard copy.) Pros: The author fully controls the appearance of the document on paper -- it may include graphs, charts, images, even color in addition to text. No special printer or software required for either author or reader. Cons: Document is not searchable. Extra burden is put on both reader and author to request and mail the document.

    Document formats of specific word-processors (*.DOC, *.WP, *.SAM) are not acceptable for the archive.

    To submit a paper or abstract for the archive, please send the following to Eliot Smith (esmith@psych.purdue.edu). The paper should be added to the archive within a few days, and an e-mail acknowledgement will be sent to you.
  • Your name and e-mail address
  • Complete paper citation and abstract IN ASCII FORMAT (particularly important for PostScript documents!)
  • The document (or URL) in one of the above formats. All the above formats can be sent directly through e-mail, but if you wish, you may compress the document (with pkzip please) and then uuencode it.

    To submit a link to your home page (or any other web site relevant to social psychology), just e-mail me the URL.

    To return to the Social Cognition Archive home page, click here.