The Clinical Neuropsychologist

About The Clinical Neuropsychologist

The Clinical Neuropsychologist — Journal Profile

The Clinical Neuropsychologist is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to the science and professional practice of clinical neuropsychology: the assessment of brain–behaviour relationships in patients, the validity of the methods used to assess them, and the standards by which practitioners are trained, credentialed and guided. It is published by Routledge, the Taylor & Francis journal imprint, on behalf of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology (AACN), of which it is the official journal. That society link gives the title a role few journals have: alongside original research, it is a recognised home for consensus statements and official position papers that practising neuropsychologists, courts, training programmes and credentialing bodies actually cite when they need to know what the profession’s considered view is.

The journal appears eight times per year. It was founded in 1987 under the title Clinical Neuropsychologist and took its current title, with the definite article, in 1995. The editor-in-chief is Yana Suchy of the University of Utah. Its current standard identifiers are print ISSN 1385-4046 and online ISSN 1744-4144; the ISO 4 abbreviation is Clin. Neuropsychol. The JournalsWorld record for this post lists three ISSNs — 0920-1637, 1385-4046 and 1744-4144. The first of these belongs to the journal’s earlier publishing history, before the current print ISSN was assigned; authors and librarians citing the modern journal should use the 1385-4046 / 1744-4144 pair shown on the Taylor & Francis journal pages, while the older number remains relevant when tracing volumes from the journal’s first years. This profile flags that distinction openly rather than silently dropping a number that appears in the site record.

A Journal With Two Jobs: Research and Professional Standards

Most specialty journals publish research and stop there. The Clinical Neuropsychologist does that and also serves as an official channel of the AACN, whose stated mission is to advance the profession of clinical neuropsychology through advocacy of outstanding educational and public-policy initiatives, including promotion of board certification through the American Board of Clinical Neuropsychology (ABCN) as the standard for competence in practice. The Academy’s purposes — excellence in patient care, high standards in psychological education, support for credentialing, and communication of scientific and scholarly information through meetings and publications — are the soil in which the journal’s non-research content grows. When the Academy convenes experts to settle a practice question, the resulting statement characteristically appears in this journal.

Two long-running examples show what that means in practice. The AACN consensus conference statement on the neuropsychological assessment of effort, response bias and malingering, first published in the journal in 2009, set out the profession’s position on validity assessment — the question of whether test results can be trusted as genuine measures of a patient’s ability. A 2021 update, produced through a further consensus conference organised in work groups covering definitions and differential diagnosis, performance validity assessment, self-report of symptoms, and research design and statistical issues, reaffirmed that validity assessment is an evidence-based literature on which practitioners can base their judgements when selecting and interpreting validity measures. Similarly, the AACN consensus statement on uniform labelling of performance test scores addressed something deceptively simple — the words clinicians attach to score ranges — sorting tests into groups (broad measures of cognitive ability; tests for specific signs and conditions; performance validity tests; and questionnaires and rating scales) and giving recommendations for the performance-based groups. Papers of this kind are among the most cited and most read in the journal precisely because they resolve everyday decisions for thousands of clinicians.

The journal likewise carries official positions developed with partner organisations. A well-known example is the statement on disclosure of neuropsychological test data, issued jointly from the clinical neuropsychology division of the American Psychological Association together with the Association of Postdoctoral Programs in Clinical Neuropsychology and the AACN, which worked through the ethical and practical considerations that arise when raw test data are requested, including in legal contexts. Content of this type — ethics, test security, forensic practice, training standards — is a standing part of the journal’s mission, not an occasional extra.

Scope: What the Journal Publishes

Assessment research and test development

The empirical heart of the journal is assessment: the development, validation and normative study of neuropsychological tests and batteries. Studies examine reliability, construct and criterion validity, sensitivity and specificity for particular diagnoses, and the quality of normative data across age, education, language and cultural groups. Because a neuropsychological conclusion is only as good as the measures behind it, this psychometric scrutiny is core science for the field, and the journal is one of its principal venues.

Validity assessment: performance and symptom validity

A signature theme is validity — whether an examinee’s performance and reported symptoms reflect genuine ability and experience. Research on performance validity tests, symptom validity measures, base rates of invalid performance in different settings, and the statistical logic of combining multiple validity indicators appears regularly, building on the consensus tradition described above. Forensic contexts, where incentives to exaggerate or minimise impairment can be strong, give this literature its urgency, but the same methods matter in clinics, where invalid data can mislead diagnosis and treatment.

Clinical populations and differential diagnosis

The journal publishes studies of cognition and behaviour across the conditions neuropsychologists assess: traumatic brain injury, stroke and other cerebrovascular disease, dementia and mild cognitive impairment, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, brain tumours, developmental and psychiatric conditions, and the cognitive effects of medical illness and its treatment. The recurring question is differential: which patterns of performance distinguish one condition from another, from normal ageing, or from non-neurological explanations such as mood, pain, sleep or medication effects? Work that sharpens that discrimination — rather than merely documenting that patients perform worse than controls — fits the journal’s clinical purpose best.

Practice, training and professional issues

Surveys and analyses of how neuropsychology is actually practised — referral patterns, test usage, time and billing realities, tele-neuropsychology and remote assessment, supervision and training models, and the pathway to board certification — form another recognised strand. So do papers on cultural and linguistic fairness in assessment, on communicating findings to patients, families, physicians and courts, and on the business and ethics of practice. For trainees and early-career clinicians, these articles function as a map of the profession they are entering.

Reviews, meta-analyses and critical commentary

Systematic reviews and meta-analyses that consolidate evidence on a test, a condition or a validity question are welcomed, as are critical commentaries that challenge prevailing practice. In a field where a single influential paper can change how thousands of assessments are conducted, the journal’s willingness to host methodological argument is part of its value.

Metrics and Standing

According to the Journal Citation Reports as cited for the journal, The Clinical Neuropsychologist has a 2024 impact factor of 2.7. Readers should treat any single-year figure as a snapshot: the authoritative value for a given year is the one in that year’s Journal Citation Reports, and SCImago / Scopus-based indicators offer a parallel, Scopus-derived view of the journal’s citation standing. What the number signals, in context, is a solidly established specialty title — not a general-medicine giant, but a central journal in a defined professional field, whose consensus and validity-assessment papers accumulate citations well beyond what the headline figure suggests because they are cited in clinical reports, guidelines and court-facing literature as well as in other research papers. The journal is indexed in Scopus and in the major psychology and biomedical indexing services that cover its field; authors with institutional requirements should confirm the current indexing list on the publisher’s journal page, since database coverage statements are maintained there.

Peer Review and How to Submit

Submissions are made through the Taylor & Francis online submission system for the journal (journal code ntcn20 on tandfonline.com), and manuscripts undergo peer review by specialists in the relevant area of neuropsychology. Practical guidance for authors follows from the journal’s dual mission. Empirical papers should report validity and normative information with unusual completeness — sample composition, inclusion criteria, base rates and classification statistics where diagnosis is claimed — because the readership will use the results to make decisions about real patients. Papers proposing practice recommendations should distinguish clearly between evidence, expert consensus and opinion. Authors writing on validity assessment should situate their work against the AACN consensus statements the journal has published, since reviewers and readers will expect that engagement. Article categories, length limits, formatting and current editorial policies are maintained in the author instructions on the publisher’s site and should be checked there before submission; they are not restated here because they change more often than a profile can be revised.

Who Should Read — and Cite — This Journal

Practising clinical neuropsychologists are the core audience, in hospital, rehabilitation, private-practice and forensic settings. Clinical psychology trainees and postdoctoral fellows use the journal to learn both method and professional norms. Neurologists, psychiatrists, rehabilitation physicians and other referrers read it to understand what neuropsychological evidence can and cannot show. Researchers in cognitive neuroscience and psychometrics read it for the assessment literature. Lawyers and judges encounter its consensus statements when neuropsychological evidence is contested, which is one reason the journal’s practice guidance carries weight beyond academia. If your work concerns how brain disorders are measured in individual patients — as opposed to group neuroscience alone — this is one of the first journals in the field to know.

Relationship to Neighbouring Journals

Readers sometimes confuse the field’s similarly named titles. The Clinical Neuropsychologist is the AACN’s official journal, published by Routledge / Taylor & Francis. It is distinct from the Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology (the journal associated with the National Academy of Neuropsychology, published by Oxford University Press) and from the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, another Taylor & Francis title with a more experimental emphasis. Keeping those identities separate matters for citation, for submission choice and for understanding which society’s positions a given article represents — a distinction this profile maintains deliberately, because the JournalsWorld catalogue contains records for several of these neighbours as well.

Inside the Journal’s Signature Themes

Validity assessment as a professional obligation

No theme illustrates the journal better than validity assessment. Modern neuropsychology accepts that a test score is evidence, and evidence can be compromised: an examinee may be distracted, exhausted, uncooperative, exaggerating symptoms for advantage, or minimising difficulties to keep a job or a licence. The AACN consensus tradition published in this journal — first the 2009 statement on effort, response bias and malingering, then the 2021 update — established that checking validity is not optional politeness but a core part of competent assessment, and that practitioners should use validated performance and symptom validity measures and interpret them with attention to base rates and to the setting in which the evaluation occurs. Research articles in the journal continually extend that foundation: they test new validity indicators embedded in standard tests, compare cut-off scores across populations, examine how validity failure affects other conclusions drawn from the same battery, and study groups — children, older adults, people with genuine severe impairment — in whom validity measures must be used with particular care so that real disability is not mistaken for poor effort. A clinician who reads the journal regularly is, in effect, receiving continuing education in the evidentiary quality of their own work.

Labels, language and the words patients carry away

The consensus work on uniform labelling of performance test scores shows the journal’s attention to a quieter kind of influence. Two clinicians can give the same patient the same score and describe it with different words — “impaired”, “low”, “below expectation” — and those words follow the patient into medical records, classrooms, insurance decisions and courtrooms. By sorting performance-based tests into groups and recommending consistent labels for score ranges, the statement published here aimed to make reports across the profession comparable and less likely to mislead non-psychologist readers. Articles on report writing, feedback to patients and families, and communication with referring physicians continue that concern with language as a clinical instrument.

Test security and the ethics of disclosure

Neuropsychological tests work only while their contents are not public property: a memory test whose answers circulate online stops measuring memory. The joint position statement on disclosure of neuropsychological test data published in the journal worked through the resulting tensions — between examinees’ and attorneys’ requests for raw data, psychologists’ ethical duties, copyright and test security, and the competence of whoever receives the data to interpret it. Subsequent discussion in and around the journal has had to reckon with the internet era, in which test materials can be photographed, shared and coached at scale. These papers are read far outside the profession because they explain, in principled terms, why neuropsychologists guard their instruments and what safeguards should accompany any release.

Training, competence and the road to board certification

The Academy that owns this journal exists in large part to promote board certification through the ABCN as the standard of competence, and the journal’s professional strand supports that mission: studies of training models at doctoral, internship and postdoctoral-residency levels; surveys of how practitioners were trained and what they actually do; and analyses of workforce questions, from subspecialty development in paediatric, geriatric and forensic neuropsychology to the integration of neuropsychologists into medical teams. For a trainee deciding where to apply, or a programme director revising a curriculum, these articles provide the field’s shared evidence about itself.

Equity in assessment

A further standing concern is fairness: tests and norms developed on one population can misclassify another. The journal publishes work on assessment across languages and cultures, on education and literacy effects, on appropriate normative comparisons, and on the development of measures for under-served groups. This literature has practical teeth — a misapplied norm can change a diagnosis, a compensation decision or a child’s school placement — and the journal’s combination of psychometric rigour and practice guidance makes it a natural venue for it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Clinical Neuropsychologist?
A peer-reviewed journal of clinical neuropsychology, published eight times a year by Routledge (Taylor & Francis) as the official journal of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology.

What are its ISSNs?
Print ISSN 1385-4046 and online ISSN 1744-4144 for the current journal. The JournalsWorld record also lists 0920-1637, an earlier ISSN from the journal’s first publishing period; current citations should use the 1385-4046 / 1744-4144 pair.

When was it founded?
In 1987, as Clinical Neuropsychologist; it adopted its current title in 1995.

Who is the editor-in-chief?
Yana Suchy (University of Utah), per the journal’s published information.

What is its impact factor?
2.7 for 2024, according to the Journal Citation Reports as cited for the journal. Consult the current JCR edition for the latest figure.

What kinds of papers does it publish?
Original assessment and clinical research, validity-assessment studies, test development and normative work, reviews and meta-analyses, practice and training studies, and official consensus and position statements, notably those of the AACN.

Where do I submit?
Through the journal’s Taylor & Francis submission site (tandfonline.com, journal code ntcn20), following the author instructions published there.

A Note for Librarians and Catalogue Users

For catalogue accuracy, cite the journal under its current title with print ISSN 1385-4046 and online ISSN 1744-4144, and treat the 1987–1994 run under its original title, Clinical Neuropsychologist, with its earlier ISSN 0920-1637 as listed in the site record. The title is a Taylor & Francis journal (code ntcn20) published by Routledge on behalf of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology; holdings, back-file access and subscription terms are administered through Taylor & Francis channels.

Summary

The Clinical Neuropsychologist (print ISSN 1385-4046, online ISSN 1744-4144; earlier ISSN 0920-1637 also appears in the site record) is the official journal of the American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology, published eight times a year by Routledge / Taylor & Francis since 1987 under its original title and since 1995 under its current one. It combines empirical assessment research — test development, norms, validity assessment and differential diagnosis — with the consensus statements and professional guidance that shape daily neuropsychological practice, giving it an influence on clinics, training and courtrooms that extends well beyond its citation metrics, including a reported 2024 impact factor of 2.7.