Papers submitted to the JournalofPublicHealthResearch that don’t comply with the following instructions will be returned to authors without peer-review.
Manuscripts must be written in English and should conform to standard rules of British English grammar and style. Authors whose native language is not English are strongly advised to have their manuscript checked by a language editing service, or by an English mother-tongue colleague prior to submission.
As an option, PAGEPress offers its own professional copyediting service.
Professional copyediting can help authors improve the presentation of their work and increase its chances of being taken on by a publisher. In case you feel that your manuscript needs a professional English language copyediting checking language grammar and style, you can find a reliable revision service at:
All papers submitted to our journal must contain a section named “Significance for public health,” not exceeding 150 words. In this section authors are to describe the significance of the research reported in the article for, and/or its impact on, public health.
Authors are kindlyrequired to suggest at least two potential reviewers (name, affiliation and e-mail) for their manuscript in the “Comments to the Editor” field (Step 1. Submission Process).
Style
The first page must contain: (a) title, name and surname of the authors; (b) names of the institution(s) where the research was carried out; (c) a running title of no more than 50 letters; (d) acknowledgments; (e) the name and full postal address of the author to whom correspondence regarding the manuscript as well as requests for abstracts should be sent; (f) three to five key words. To accelerate communication, phone, fax number and e-mail address of the corresponding author should also be included. The second page should contain: (a) authors’ contributions, i.e., information about the contributions of each person named as having participated in the study (http://www.icmje.org/#author); disclosures about potential conflict of interest.
Perspectives and Debates: articles should present new interesting or emerging public health topics that, starting from data based on practical research, can debate on all aspects of the subject, including perspectives about sociological impacts, economical evaluation, communication strategies, policy issues and ethical considerations. Requirements. Unstructured abstract, max. 250 words. Text must have a max. of 4000 words, 3 tables/figures in total and 30 references.
Original Articles should normally be divided into an abstract, introduction, design and methods, results, discussion and references. The abstract should contain about 250 words and must be structured as follows: background, design and methods, results, conclusions.
In the “design and methods” section, authors must clearly indicate the date, when their study was carried out. Papers that do not fulfill this requirement, will not be considered for publication.
A maximum of 20 authors is permitted, and additional authors should be listed in an ad hoc appendix. Requirements. Structured abstract, max. 250 words. Text must have a max. of 6000 words, 6 tables/figures in total and 40 references.
Brief Reports must provide conclusive findings: preliminary observations or incomplete findings cannot be considered for publication. They should be signed by no more than 10 authors. Brief reports should have a short abstract of no more than 150 words, a text of about 2000 words, a maximum of 3 tables and/or figures (total), and up to 20 references.Requirements. Unstructured abstract, max. 150 words. Text must have a max. of 2000 words, 3 tables/figures in total and 20 references.
Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses: no particular format is required for these articles. However, they should have an informative, unstructured abstract of about 250 words. Requirements. Unstructured abstract, max. 250 words. Text must have a max. of 8000 words; 6 tables/figures.
Lettersshould address specific scientific issues raised by papers published by JPHR within the previous 6 months. Authors of papers cited in the Letters will be given the opportunity to respond. Letters that are highly polemic will not be published. Letters are not peer reviewed and are published at the discretion of the JPHR editors. Conclusions and opinions expressed by the authors do not necessarily reflect the policies of JPHR. Requirements. No abstract is needed. Text must have a max. of 1000 words, and 3 references.
Editorials are usually invited or addressed by editors about emerging or important issues in the field of public health.
Study protocols articles should provide a detailed description of the hypothesis, rationale, methodology and expected results of the study. They will be considered for peer review only if the study has received ethics approval and a grant or a formal approval from an official funding body. Protocols of randomized controlled trials should follow the CONSORT guidelines and must have a trial registration number included in the text. Proof of both ethics and funding will be required and we recommend that authors provide the relevant documentation on submission as supplementary files. Study protocols without ethics approval will not be considered. Abstract must be structured in sections: Background, Design and methods, and Expected Impact of the study for Public Health. Requirements. Short abstract of no more than 250 words, text of about 3000 words, a maximum of 2 tables and/or figures (total), and up to 15 references.
Meta-synthesis similar to quantitative systematic reviews and statistical meta-analyses, qualitative synthesis – relying on a diverse set of techniques (e.g. meta-ethnography, meta-study, thematic synthesis), have the potential to overcome the limitations of small-scale qualitative studies and promote a greater understanding in a particular area. Requirements. Unstructured abstract, max. 250 words. Text must have a max. of 8000 words and 6 tables/figures.
References should be prepared strictly according to the Vancouver style, which is present in EndNote); for details see the URL: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html. Where available, URLs for the references should be provided directly within the Word document. References must be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are first cited in the text, and they must be identified in the text by arabic numerals. References to personal communications and unpublished data should be incorporated in the text and not placed under the numbered References.
Manuscript acceptance
Manuscripts are accepted for publication according to their scientific interest and their relevance to a Public Health journal. They are accepted on unquestionable Editor’s opinion supported by a written evaluation by at least two anonymous referees.
Manuscripts that require revisions are returned by the journal to the corresponding author for improvement.
The revised manuscript, edited in .DOC format, should be resubmitted electronically to the Editor-in-Chief (on jphres.org) within 4 weeks from the date of receipt by the author. If the revised manuscript is returned to the journal after the allotted time, it will be considered a new submission.
Peer-review policy
All manuscripts submitted to our journal are critically assessed by external and/or in-house experts in accordance with the principles of peer review (http://www.icmje.org/#peer), which is fundamental to the scientific publication process and the dissemination of sound science. Each paper is first assigned by the Editors to an appropriate Associate Editor who has knowledge of the field discussed in the manuscript. The first step of manuscript selection takes place entirely in-house and has two major objectives: i) to establish the article’s appropriateness for our journals’ readership; ii) to define the manuscript’s priority ranking relative to other manuscripts under consideration, since the number of papers that the journal receives is much greater than it can publish. If a manuscript does not receive a sufficiently high priority score to warrant publication, the editors will proceed to a quick rejection. The remaining articles are reviewed by at least two different external referees (second step or classical peer review). Manuscripts should be prepared according to the Uniform Requirements established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) (http://www.icmje.org/#prepare).
Authorship: all persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship according to the ICMJE criteria (http://www.icmje.org/ethical_1author.html). Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Authorship credit should only be based on substantial contributions to i) conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data; and to ii) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and on iii) final approval of the version to be published. These three conditions must all be met. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Any part of an article critical to its main conclusions must be the responsibility of at least one author. Authors should provide a brief description of their individual contributions.
Obligation to Register Clinical Trials (http://www.icmje.org/#clin_trials): the ICMJE believes that it is important to foster a comprehensive, publicly available database of clinical trials. The ICMJE defines a clinical trial as any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or concurrent comparison or control groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. Medical interventions include drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, etc. Our journals require, as a condition of consideration for publication, registration in a public trials registry. The journal considers a trial for publication only if it has been registered before the enrollment of the first patient. The journal does not advocate one particular registry, but requires authors to register their trial in a registry that meets several criteria. The registry must be accessible to the public at no charge. It must be open to all prospective registrants and managed by a non-profit organization. There must be a mechanism to ensure the validity of the registration data, and the registry should be electronically searchable. An acceptable registry must include a minimum of data elements (http://www.icmje.org/#clin_trials). For example, ClinicalTrials.gov (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov), sponsored by the United States National Library of Medicine, meets these requirements.
Protection of Human Subjects and Animals in Research: when reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the committee responsible for human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 (as revised in 2008). In particular, PAGEPress adopts the WAME policy on Ethics in Research (http://www.wame.org). Documented review and approval from a formally constituted review board (Institutional Review Board – IRB – or Ethics committee) is required for all studies (prospective or retrospective) involving people, medical records, and human tissues. When reporting experiments on animals, authors will be asked to indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.
Copyright Notice
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Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms: 1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. 2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. 3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
