Doing research without a university
Clinicians, counsellors, policy staff and people in recovery publish gambling research every year without an institution behind them. What they need, in the order they need it.
What an institution gives you, and the free substitute
| The institution provides | The substitute |
|---|---|
| Library access to journals | PubMed Central, OpenAlex and Unpaywall for free copies; preprint servers; emailing the corresponding author, who almost always sends the PDF |
| Database searching (PsycINFO, Scopus) | PubMed, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar cover most gambling research; for a formal review, a co-author with library access runs the proprietary databases |
| An institutional review board | An independent IRB (see below), a determination that the work is not human-subjects research, or a design that needs no review |
| Statistical software | R, Python, jamovi and JASP are free and accepted everywhere |
| A survey platform | Free tiers of the usual platforms, or an open-source platform run on your own server |
| An affiliation line | Your practice or organisation; no journal listed on the journals page requires an institution |
| Colleagues | A second coder, a co-author with an IRB, a methodologist; recovery organisations, state councils and professional associations are where they are found |
Ethics review
Three situations, three routes.
No human participants. Platform audits, content analyses of marketing, analyses of public aggregate data (search trends, regulator reports), document censuses, reviews and conceptual papers. No review is required; journals accept the statement "This study did not involve human participants; ethics approval was not required." Public transaction-level datasets of pseudonymous accounts usually qualify as not human-subjects research under US regulations (45 CFR 46.102(e)), but a journal editor can still ask for a formal determination, which an independent IRB will issue.
Consented case studies. A single consented case report is generally not research under the regulations, and some journals (Clinical Case Studies, Journal of Financial Therapy) accept consent to publish in place of approval. Others (Journal of Gambling Studies, IJMHA, Clinical Social Work Journal) require ethics approval even for case reports, so target the former. Written, revocable consent; de-identify and say what was changed; let the client read the manuscript.
Surveys and interviews. This is human-subjects research and needs review before data collection; retrospective approval is usually impossible. Independent IRBs (Solutions IRB, Pearl IRB, WCG, Advarra and others) review exempt and expedited protocols for roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in two to four weeks; verify current fees. A university co-author brings their IRB, library access and, at the higher-tier journals, better odds. Recruit through recovery communities, blocking-software user groups, treatment providers and state councils, never your own current clients.
Preregister, then deposit
The Open Science Framework is free, needs no affiliation, and timestamps a registration permanently; embargoes of up to four years are available if a plan should stay private during review. Addiction treats unregistered analyses as exploratory and other journals are following. After the study, deposit de-identified data, code and codebooks in the same project for a DOI; explain why transcripts or clinical data are not shared.
Identity and record
Register an ORCID before the first submission and use one author name everywhere. Keep a public list of your papers (OSF or your own site); reviewers and conference committees look.
Preprints
PsyArXiv and OSF Preprints (behavioural science), SSRN (law, economics), medRxiv (health) and Research Square are free and establish priority, which matters in fast-moving areas such as prediction markets. The journals on the journals page permit prior preprints unless marked otherwise.
Writing to a budget
Word limits at the main gambling journals run from 2,000 to 6,500 words; the journals page lists them. Reporting checklists (STROBE, PRISMA, COREQ, CARE, from the EQUATOR network) are free and reviewers expect them. Content analyses need a codebook, dual coding on a subsample and an agreement statistic.
Disclosure
Declare the practice, the product, the website or the consultancy that touches the subject of the paper, in every paper, in one standard sentence. A non-commercial interest is still declared. Omitting it is the one mistake that cannot be fixed later.
Conferences
Practitioner conferences accept clinician-led work readily and are where collaborators are met; the conference calendar has deadlines. Preliminary data from a registered study beats a promised study.
A realistic sequence
- A no-review study (audit, content analysis, public data) that can be finished in three months, preregistered on OSF.
- A practice or clinical paper (a treatment component, a consented case) for a clinical journal.
- The survey or interview study, with an independent IRB or a university co-author, preregistered, deposited.
Each one makes the next easier: a publication record, an OSF profile, a co-author, and a reason for a journal to take the fourth paper seriously.