EDITORIAL

 

Editorial

 

 

Cristiane Silvestre de Paula

Editor-in-Chief

 

 

Dear readers,

After nearly two years facing the Covid-19 Pandemic, we lost many lives, we still must beat the Omicron variant, but we are beginning to see an improvement in the situation in Brazil and the world. The journal Psychology: Theory and Practice (Psicologia: Teoria e Prática) also faced many challenges during this period, but we started the year 2022 expecting better days.

Among our advances during this quarter, I would like to highlight changes in our editorial board (section editors). We are grateful for the tireless contributions of the editors who stayed with us for a long time but had to step aside. Because of that, we decided to diversify and expand our section editors, considering the current needs of the journal. Currently, we have 14 section editors highly qualified in their fields of knowledge, with representation from four out of the five Brazilian regions. This expansion has helped speed up the process, while this renewal has generated an update of the scope of our five sections available on our web pages.

Intending to keep the synchrony of our team, we hold bi-monthly meetings to discuss: the challenges of each section, the strategies to speed up the publication process guaranteeing the quality of the journal, and maintaining the transparency of our actions, always through joint decision-making. Among those, we have decided to accept no longer theoretical papers that do not fulfill the requirements for systematic or scoping reviews. Exceptions are comments by invitation (Invited Commentary) that we have regularly published under the authorship of specialists in topics of interest to local and international Psychology. In this first volume of 2022, we are honored to publish an Invited Commentary led by colleagues from the University of Minho, Portugal, about early childhood neuroscience.

Along with this article, our volume presents 15 articles on the following current and relevant themes in the Psychology's field: 1. the establishment of evidence of the validity of instruments in Brazil and abroad; 2. mental health, behavior, reading, and writing in children and adolescents with and without intellectual disabilities, during or outside the period of the Covid-19 Pandemic; 3. studies with vulnerable populations, such as those exposed to violence, substance users, living with HIV and racial issues; 4. in addition to other issues such as an intervention model for coping with the fear of childbirth and the experience of a bereaved mother as a result of Covid-19.

A novelty of this quadrennium was the availability of checklists for authors who submit systematic reviews and scope reviews, while the checklists of quantitative and qualitative articles are still in the preparation phase. These checklists, available in the submission system, aim to help authors prepare manuscripts and, consequently, help editors in the processing phase.

The online publication of papers in a continuous flow was one of the greatest recent achievements of our editorial board. In this volume and future ones, authors and readers will notice the speed of publication, which has always been one of our priority goals.

To maintain and improve the quality of the manuscripts accepted for publication in the journal Psychology: Theory and Practice, we have updated the evaluation form provided to the reviewers. This action has helped the immeasurable work of the reviewers, clarifying the criteria and parameters of our journal to maintain the excellence required by our current Qualis A2 classification in Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes).

I share one of the challenges we have been facing to ensure the quality of manuscripts published in English. In this sense, we have updated on our web pages the rules on how to submit manuscripts directly in English and the step-by-step translation of submitted manuscripts in Portuguese. We also renovate the list of companies and qualified professionals who translate and revise the accepted manuscripts, ensuring the quality of all articles accepted for publication.

Thus, I conclude this editorial by thanking the work of the editors, reviewers, and administrative team of the journal Psychology: Theory and Practice for their efforts that have led to the growth of our journal. I would also like to thank the authors for their interest in publishing in our journal and the readers who read us seeking to update themselves based on scientific information. To disseminate qualified and accessible knowledge, most articles in the journal are bilingual (Portuguese and English); all of them are free of charge, and they have no submission fee.

Happy 2022 to all.