Psychological Review publishes articles that make important theoretical contributions to any area of scientific psychology, including systematic evaluation of alternative theories. Papers mainly focused on surveys of the literature, problems of method and design, or reports of empirical findings are not appropriate.

There is no upper bound on the length of Psychological Review articles. However, authors who submit papers with texts longer than 25,000 words will be asked to justify the need for their length.

Psychological Review also publishes, as Theoretical Notes, commentary that contributes to progress in a given subfield of scientific psychology. Such notes include, but are not limited to, discussions of previously published articles, comments that apply to a class of theoretical models in a given domain, critiques and discussions of alternative theoretical approaches, and meta-theoretical commentary on theory testing and related topics.