Guidelines for Authors

Manuscript will be carefully scrutinized for evidence of plagiarism, duplication and data manipulation; in particular, images will be carefully examined for any indication of intentional improper modification.

Any suspected misconduct ends up with a quick rejection and is then reported to the US Office of Research Integrity.

Ensure that your work is written in correct English before submissionProfessional 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 would benefit from a professional English language copyediting checking language grammar and style, you can find a reliable revision service at:

The Corresponding Author (multiple corresponding authors are not allowed) must submit the manuscript online-only through our Manuscript Submission System.

Declarations

All manuscripts must contain the following sections:

  • Ethical approval
  • Availability of data and material
  • Competing interests
  • Funding
  • Authors' contributions
  • Acknowledgments

Preparing your manuscript

All papers submitted to our journal must contain a section named “Significance for public health”, not exceeding 150 words. In this section, the authors are to describe the significance of the research reported in the article for, and/or its impact on, public health. In the “design and methods” section, the 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.

Authors are kindly invited to suggest at least 2-3 potential reviewers for their manuscript in the “Comments to the Editor” field (Step 1. Submission Process). Name, present affiliation and email address of each reviewer are required. Reviewers having compromising relationships with authors (such as co-authorship and belonging to the same affiliation) won't be considered.

Style

Manuscripts should be in either British or American English consistently throughout. Check for consistent spelling of names, terms, and abbreviations, including in tables and figure captions.

Each manuscript should be typewritten, double-spaced throughout; pages should be in A4 format and numbered, lines should be left numbered in continuum (10-digit numeric system). The manuscript can be submitted either in Word or PDF format.

A template for the manuscript formatting is available here. In case of not adhering to the journal requirements, the manuscript will be sent back to the authors for amendments.

 

Submission Procedure

The Corresponding Author (multiple corresponding authors are not allowed) must submit the manuscript online-only through our Manuscript Submission System.

The Authors' metadata must be duly completed, by adding “contributors” when needed. Metadata are crucial for the indexing of the paper and of authors, and for attribution of copyright to ALL authors.
Attention: Any submission received for a manuscript with more than one contributor, in which only one author has been inserted in the metadata, will result in immediate rejection, asking for a correct re-submission.

The author names and affiliations inserted in the online submission system will be those which will be published in PubMed and all other indexes. The Editorial staff is therefore not responsible for eventual inaccuracies or mistakes in the affiliations inserted during the submission process.

Journal Sections

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. 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.

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.

Letters: should 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.

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 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.

Editorials: are usually invited or addressed by editors about emerging or important issues in the field of public health.

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 numeral in superscript. References to personal communications and unpublished data should be incorporated in the text and not placed under the numbered References.

Permissions

In case extracts (text/figures/tables) from other copyrighted works are included, the author(s) must obtain written permission from the copyright holder(s) and credit the source(s) in the article, for example: ‘Adapted from Rath et al., J Public Health Res 2018;7:1379; with permission.' The editorial office of Journal of Public Health Research needs to receive a copy of the written permission before proceeding with publication. Please download here the ‘License and Disclaimer' agreement.

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, 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).

Authorship and Contributorship
All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship according to the ICMJE criteria. 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; and iv) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work. 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. Authors should provide a brief description of their individual contributions. Those who do not meet all four criteria should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading. Authors can find detailed information on the Publisher's web site.

Changes in Authorship
If authors request removal or addition of an author after manuscript submission or during the peer-review process, the journal editors should receive a letter clearly explaining the reason for the change.  Authors are also requested to sign and send to the Editors a statement of agreement for the requested change from all listed authors and from the author to be removed or added.
Please note that if your manuscript is accepted you will not be able to make any changes to the authors, or order of authors, of your manuscript once the editor has accepted your manuscript for publication.

No changes to the Authors or Corresponding Author can be made after publication of the article, either as an “Advance Online Article” or in the regular issue. Instead, a corrigendum may be considered by the journal editor.

Obligation to Register Clinical 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/about-icmje/faqs/clinical-trials-registration/). 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 responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2013. If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. An Informed Consent statement is always required from patients involved in any experiments. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.  Further guidance on animal research ethics is available from the World Medical Association (2016 revision). When reporting experiments on ecosystems involving non-native species, Authors are bound to ensure compliance with the institutional and national guide for the preservation of native biodiversity.