Psychology Public Policy and Law

About Psychology Public Policy and Law

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law: Where Psychological Science Meets Courts and Legislatures

Psychology, Public Policy, and Law is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal published by the American Psychological Association (APA) in the United States. Its territory is the meeting point of three worlds that constantly use each other's findings, often without fully understanding each other's methods: psychological science, public policy and the law. The journal exists to evaluate, carefully and in both directions, what psychology can contribute to legal and policy questions, and what legal and policy demands should mean for psychologists. It is read by legal scholars and professionals and by public policy analysts as well as by psychology researchers and practitioners who work at that interface, in the APA's own description of its audience.

This profile is anchored to the Journals World record titled Psychology Public Policy and Law (post 363700, slug psychology-public-policy-and-law-2), which lists the American Psychological Association as publisher and the ISSN pair 1076-8971 and 1939-1528. Those identifiers match the APA's own journal page exactly. Readers should also know that Journals World carries a second, older record for the same journal under the punctuated title Psychology, Public Policy, and Law; that record is discussed in the duplicate note at the end of the verification section of this worker's report process, and the bibliographic facts in both records point to one and the same APA journal.

Quick Facts

• Full title: Psychology, Public Policy, and Law
• Abbreviation: Psychol. Public Policy Law
• Publisher: American Psychological Association, United States
• Print ISSN: 1076-8971
• Electronic ISSN: 1939-1528
• Frequency: Quarterly, beginning in February, according to the APA journal page
• First editor: Bruce Sales, from the journal's founding period in 1995
• Editor from 2025: Tess M. S. Neal, Iowa State University, according to the documented editor succession and her 2025 editorial in the journal
• Impact figures on the APA page: Impact factor 1.5 and 5-year impact factor 2.4, as listed by the publisher at the time of this review; a Journal Citation Reports listing for 2024 gives 2.0, so always cite the year and the source when quoting a figure
• Access: Subscription journal with an open-access option offered, according to the APA page
• Fields: Psychology and law, forensic psychology, public policy, legal studies

History and Editorial Succession

The journal began in the mid-1990s, with Bruce Sales of the University of Arizona as its founding editor from 1995 to 2000. Its creation recognised something that had become hard to ignore: courts were asking psychologists about eyewitness reliability, competence, risk and sentencing; legislatures were drawing on behavioural research when drafting policy on families, health and crime; and psychologists were discovering that legal and policy settings imposed their own rules of evidence, ethics and relevance on scientific work. A dedicated, peer-reviewed forum — with editorial guidance from both psychologists and lawyers — was the APA's answer.

The documented succession of editors-in-chief is: Bruce Sales (1995-2000); Jane Goodman-Delahunty (2001-2006), of Charles Sturt University; Steven Penrod (2007), of John Jay College of Criminal Justice; Ronald Roesch (2008-2012), of Simon Fraser University; Michael Lamb (2013-2024), of the University of Cambridge; and Tess M. S. Neal (2025 to the present), of Iowa State University. Neal marked the transition with an editorial in the first issue of 2025 reflecting on the journal's past and setting out its future direction, while noting that established elements of the journal would remain. The succession itself is a small history of the field: editors drawn from forensic psychology, developmental psychology and law-and-psychology programmes across three countries, each bringing the questions of their own research community into the journal's pages.

Scope: The Five Kinds of Article the Journal Exists to Publish

The APA describes the journal's remit in terms of theoretical and empirical articles that do five kinds of work, paraphrased here. They evaluate, critically, what psychology has contributed and could contribute to public policy and legal issues. They assess whether particular policy or legal alternatives are desirable in light of what psychological science actually knows. They identify research that is still needed where policy and legal questions have outrun the evidence. They present empirical studies whose findings make a significant contribution to applying psychological knowledge to policy or law. And they examine policy and legal questions that bear on the conduct of psychology itself, such as the protection of research participants and informed consent procedures.

Two scope boundaries deserve emphasis because they shape what editors will and will not take. First, the journal does not routinely serve as an outlet for primary reports of empirical research in the ordinary way; it does publish original empirical data, but empirical work is expected to make a significant contribution to public policy or the law, not merely to a laboratory literature. A technically sound study with no articulated legal or policy consequence is therefore a weak fit, however good its methods. Second, the conversation is explicitly two-way: an article may show how a legal rule distorts psychological practice, or how a policy assumption fails against developmental evidence, just as readily as it may show how a psychological finding should change a rule.

Legal psychology in practice

Within that remit, recurring territories include eyewitness identification and memory, interrogation and confession, jury and judicial decision-making, competence and criminal responsibility, risk assessment for violence and reoffending, forensic assessment methods, deception detection, and the treatment of vulnerable witnesses and defendants. The Journals World subject profile for this record highlights deception detection and forensic psychology, psychopathy, forensic psychiatry, sexual offending and legal processes — a fair sample of the applied end of the journal, provided it is read alongside the policy half of the title rather than as a purely clinical list.

Public policy through a psychological lens

The policy territory is equally broad: family and child policy, health-related regulation, education, ageing and retirement, and any setting where a rule rests on assumptions about how people perceive, decide, remember or change. Articles in this vein typically begin from a live policy choice, assemble the relevant psychological evidence, including its limits, and argue for or against alternatives in terms a policy analyst or legislator can use. Work that merely gestures at implications in a final paragraph rarely meets the journal's standard; the policy analysis is the article, not an afterthought.

Psychology under legal and policy scrutiny

A third territory turns the lens around: research ethics, participant protection, informed consent, professional regulation, and the legal conditions under which psychological services and research operate. This reflective strand is part of what distinguishes the journal from a purely forensic outlet, and it gives practitioners and researchers a peer-reviewed place to examine the rules governing their own work.

Publisher: The American Psychological Association

The APA is the largest scientific and professional organisation of psychologists in the United States, and its journals programme is one of the main channels through which psychological research reaches scholars, clinicians and policymakers. For this title the APA provides the journal's official page, its PsycNet platform for article records and DOIs under the journal's article prefix, and its established author services, including its style and ethics requirements. The journal benefits from that infrastructure in discoverability: its articles sit inside the same ecosystem as PsycINFO indexing, which is the discipline's principal bibliographic database and one of the natural discovery routes for its readers.

Editorial Approach and Peer Review

Manuscripts are peer reviewed, with editorial input that can draw on both psychological and legal expertise — a deliberate feature, since a paper at this interface can be methodologically strong and legally naive, or legally sophisticated and empirically thin. Authors should therefore write for a mixed expert readership: explain legal context that psychologists may not know, explain methods and effect sizes that lawyers may not routinely use, and define terms that the disciplines use differently, such as the differing senses of competence or reliability. The journal is a Transparency and Openness Promotion signatory context within APA publishing, and authors should consult the current APA instructions for the journal on reporting standards, data and materials sharing expectations, and disclosure, because those requirements are updated by the publisher rather than fixed in this profile.

Metrics, Rankings and How to Read Them

The APA's journal page lists an impact factor of 1.5 and a 5-year impact factor of 2.4, and places the journal in ranked lists for law, for health policy and services, and for multidisciplinary psychology. A 2024 Journal Citation Reports figure of 2.0 is reported in reference summaries of the journal. Those numbers are not contradictory once their years and sources are kept attached, and stripping a figure of its year is the commonest way journal metrics mislead. The Journals World record separately reports a high h-index for the title, reflecting a long tail of heavily cited work in forensic and legal psychology. For an author, the practical reading is that this is the established specialist journal of its interface field: its influence is concentrated among the scholars, courts-facing experts and policy analysts who actually use psycho-legal research, rather than spread across general psychology.

Publication Model and Access

The journal is published quarterly, beginning in February, in print and electronic editions identified by its two ISSNs. It operates as a subscription journal with an open-access option offered to authors through the publisher, in the APA's description. Specific charges, licence choices and any institutional agreements that may cover an author's costs are set by the APA and can change, and no fee figure is stated in this profile because none was confirmed as a current, universal amount in the sources reviewed; authors for whom cost matters should take the current figure from the APA's author pages for this journal at the time of submission. Readers without a subscription typically reach articles through university libraries, through PsycNet-linked access, or by purchasing individual articles from the publisher.

Audience

The journal names its own audience plainly: legal scholars and professionals, public policy analysts, and psychology researchers and practitioners working at the interface of the three fields. In practice that includes forensic psychologists who assess and testify, academic lawyers who teach evidence, criminal procedure or mental health law, social scientists who advise governments, and graduate students in psychology-and-law programmes for whom the journal is core reading. An article that speaks to only one of those groups in language the others cannot follow has missed the journal's purpose, and the most successful papers are routinely assigned in both psychology and law courses.

How to Submit

Start from the APA's page for the journal and its linked submission guidelines, which are the authoritative source for manuscript preparation, article types, length expectations and the submission portal route. Prepare the manuscript in APA style, with a title and abstract that state the legal or policy contribution explicitly, not only the psychological finding. In the manuscript itself, include a clear account of the legal or policy setting, the state of the psychological evidence including null and conflicting results, and the practical consequence that follows if the analysis is accepted. Empirical submissions must carry their policy or legal significance in the framing and discussion, because the journal's remit requires that significance rather than treating it as decoration. Declare conflicts of interest and meet APA ethics requirements, particularly where the work involves forensic populations, court-ordered assessment or other sensitive settings. Timelines for first decisions and any current calls for special issues are maintained by the publisher and are not stated here, because they change and were not fixed in the verified sources.

Similar Journals

Neighbouring titles help authors triangulate fit. Law and Human Behavior, the journal associated with the American Psychology-Law Society, is the closest companion and leans more heavily toward empirical legal psychology. Behavioral Sciences and the Law covers forensic practice, mental health law and assessment in a more clinical-practice register. Psychology, Crime and Law approaches the interface from criminology and criminal justice. Legal and Criminological Psychology serves a similar British and international community. For the policy half of the remit, journals of social issues and of policy analysis provide alternative homes where the legal element is secondary. Authors with a strong empirical study and a modest policy claim will often fit Law and Human Behavior better; authors whose contribution is the evaluation of a rule, a doctrine or a policy alternative will usually fit this journal better.

Reading the Journal Well: What Strong Articles Do

Strong articles in this journal share habits that a new reader can learn to spot and a prospective author can copy. They state the legal or policy question in its own terms before introducing any study, so a lawyer reader can see why the evidence matters. They are candid about the limits of the psychological literature: small samples, laboratory tasks that differ from courtroom or street conditions, and findings that have weakened under replication attempts are discussed openly rather than buried. They distinguish between what the evidence shows, what it suggests and what remains a value judgement for legislatures and courts, and they do not let a statistical result silently decide a normative question. Finally, they end with consequences that a named audience can act on — a court designing an identification procedure, a legislature weighing a family policy, an agency writing guidance, or a professional body revising an ethics rule. Articles that do those four things are the ones that get cited across the disciplinary boundary, assigned in both kinds of classroom, and quoted when real rules are debated. Articles that treat law or policy as a decorative application paragraph, by contrast, tend to be remembered, if at all, only inside their home subfield, which is precisely the outcome this journal was founded to prevent.

Special Issues and the Journal's Agenda-Setting Role

Like many APA journals, this title periodically gathers work around a single theme in a special issue or special section, edited or introduced by specialists in that theme. A documented example is the 2017 special issue on psycho-legal researchers' impact on policies and legal practices, introduced by the then editor, which took stock of where research had genuinely changed rules and practice and where it had not. Such collections matter beyond their individual articles, because they let the field audit itself in public: which findings have survived contact with courts and legislatures, which have been taken up selectively, and which important questions still have little evidence behind them. Readers researching a theme should check whether the journal has devoted a collection to it, since those issues often remain the fastest orientation to a debate, while authors should watch the publisher's pages for announced themes, because a manuscript that answers a live call still has to meet the same peer-review standard as any other submission.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law?

Print ISSN 1076-8971 and electronic ISSN 1939-1528, as listed on the APA's own journal page and in the Journals World record.

Who publishes it, and how often?

The American Psychological Association publishes it quarterly, beginning in February each year.

Who is the current editor?

Tess M. S. Neal of Iowa State University, from 2025, succeeding Michael Lamb of the University of Cambridge, who edited the journal from 2013 to 2024.

Does it publish empirical research?

Yes, including original primary data, but it does not routinely function as a general outlet for primary empirical reports: empirical work must make a significant contribution to public policy or the law.

Is it open access?

It is a subscription journal for which the publisher offers an open-access option to authors. Take current charges and licence terms from the APA's author pages, because no universal current fee was confirmed in the sources reviewed for this profile.

Why does Journals World have two records for this journal?

The site carries an older record under the punctuated title Psychology, Public Policy, and Law (post 16902) and this record (post 363700) under the unpunctuated form of the same title. Both list the same APA journal and the same ISSN pair, so they describe one journal, not two; the pair is flagged for the site's duplicate-merge process.

Verification Note

Facts were checked against the APA's official journal page for the title (ISSN pair, quarterly frequency, publisher's scope and audience description, listed impact figures and open-access offer), the journal's documented editor succession and the 2025 editorial record on PsycNet, and the Journals World records 363700 and 16902, which were both fetched directly. The twin record 16902 was verified directly at 251 words with no depth marker, so this profile proceeds on 363700 while the pair is reported as a duplicate flag.