The State of Published Science in Clinical Neuropsychology's Lifespan Journals: A Mixed Methods Examination of Scope,...

Clinical neuropsychology is an evidence-based discipline that draws heavily from the field's peer-reviewed journal articles. However, our scientific understanding of the methods and content that comprise the articles published in clinical neuropsychology journals is quite limited.

A mixed methods approach was used to describe the aims, methods, and content of clinical neuropsychology's major lifespan journals. Six-hundred articles were randomly sampled from the 2020-2024 volumes of six lifespan clinical neuropsychology journals. All articles were coded across 42 dimensions, including article type, population, design, methods, ability domains, and miscellaneous topics (e.g., brain health). The aims/scope sections of the journals were subjected to qualitative analyses, to identify relevant themes.

The most common article content was observed in the areas of empirical/data-driven studies, cross-sectional and observational designs, older and neurological participants, cognitive testing of higher-order abilities, and psychometrics/methods. Results showed significant between-journal differences for some of these content areas at broadly medium effect sizes (e.g., experimental design, brain health topics). Qualitative analyses yielded five shared themes, suggesting that the lifespan clinical neuropsychology journals are interested in submissions on brain-behavior relationships, clinical applications, both clinical and healthy/typical populations, professional/guild matters, and multidisciplinary investigations.

The scientific content published within clinical neuropsychology's six primary lifespan journals varies in some dimensions, but largely focuses on cross-sectional, observational studies of psychometrics and higher-order cognition. The implications of these findings for future research in clinical neuropsychology are contextualized for authors, reviewers, and readers.