We welcome all public health scientists and practitioners to contribute to the journal. Authors may submit to JAPH under one of two submission tracks:

To join the Academy, please email [email protected]. In your message, include your full name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), country, area(s) of public health specialty, and a recent copy of your academic CV.

Standards for Academy membersiship are strictly enforced but applied equally to prospective members of all countries, subspecialties, political affiliations and scientific opinion. Academy members should be public health professionals with demonstrated publication history in their field. Whether or not a prospective member holds a present institutional affiliation, we expect our members to be of the level of a tenure-track professor or analogous point in their career.

Manuscript Requirements: Manuscripts must be within the journal’s scope of public health science, policy and practice. Submissions on topics outside of this scope will be rejected. All manuscripts must be written in a professional and respectful style, refraining from overly personal and emotional language.

Submission: All submissions should be sent to [email protected] and copied to [email protected]. For Academy member submissions, the submitting member must be a co-author, but not necessarily the first, senior or corresponding author. Please note that, unlike our other article types, Perspectives submissions from Academy members are assessed by the editorial staff before they can be accepted for publication. This ensures that all published work adheres to our stated Editorial Scope and maintains the identity of JAPH as first and foremost a publisher of academic science. Perspective articles are not peer reviewed.

Corresponding Author: After the submission is confirmed, the submitter may designate a co-author to be the corresponding author for subsequent interactions with the journal and post-publication inquiries. 

Author Contributions: All authors must have contributed significantly to the intellectual aspects of the research, in terms of conception, design, analysis and/or interpretation. Moreover, everyone who has made such contributions should be offered authorship. All authors must approve the final version of the manuscript, taking public responsibility for it.

Affiliation: Current affiliation(s) should be provided for all authors. Postal and email addresses are required for the corresponding author.

Manuscript Types

Research Articles present analyses of new data, new analyses of existing data and methodological advances. Research articles in our journal are published together with open peer-reviews and an author rejoinder. In some cases, research articles may be posted to the journal before the reviews have been recieved. Public peer reviews will then be added to the article page as they come in. In other cases, public peer reviews are published with the article simultaneously.

Literature Syntheses present a synthesis of a key research question based on a systematic literature review. It may be in the form of a systematic review, but it may also be a less formal evaluation of a more limited set of research studies on a particular topic. May include meta-analyses. Articles in this category may be accompanied by expert commentary from peer scientists whose work is referenced within or commented upon by the synthesis.

History of Public Health articles elucidate the rich and fascinating history of public health. In addition to a description of historical events, showcasing both successes and failures, please focus on lessons learned. Published together with open peer-reviews and an author rejoinder.

Open Peer-Reviews are published together with every published research article and literature synthesis. The authors of the original article are invited to respond, with 200-600 words per review.

Perspectives discuss important public health issues, from a practical, policy, methodological, ethical, educational or societal perspective.

External Article Reviews are in-depth evaluations of one or two influential public health articles published in journals other than JAPH. The authors of the original article are invited to respond in a Rejoinder of 200-1,200 words.

Language

Language: Manuscripts must be in English. Translations of the abstracts and/or the full manuscript may be provided as supplementary material, in any language.

Content of Research Articles

While not required, the recommended format is: Introduction – Data – Methods – Results – Discussion.

Introduction: Please describe the public health issue in a clear and concise manner, and how it is addressed by the article. Indicate what is already known, with reference to the literature. When there is a choice, you are encouraged to cite open access articles that can be read by anyone. 

Data: Describe not only what data was collected, but also how it was collected. If it is part of a larger project, you may summarize the data with reference to a peer-reviewed article with a more detailed description. If publicly available data is used, provide detailed information of where it can be obtained by other scientists. If you collected your own data, we strongly encourage you to make it available as supplementary material.

Methods: Whenever possible, point estimates should be accompanied by their compatibility (confidence) or credibility intervals. When presenting associations in terms of ratios of risks, rates or odds, whenever possible please also provide estimates of background absolute risks or rates against which to judge these ratios. Unless very small, report precise p-values rather than inequalities. For the correct use and interpretation of p-values and confidence intervals, see Greenland et al, “Statistical Tests, P-values, Confidence Intervals, and Power: A Guide to Misinterpretations”, in the The American Statistician, 2016. Avoid categorizing continuous data; if categories are used, give the precise boundaries of each category and the rationale for the category choices. Statistical analyses may be either frequentist or Bayesian.

Results: We welcome the publication of all well-conducted studies with adequate sample size, whether they show ‘statistically significant’ results or not, and there is no requirement to refer to ‘statistical significance’. We do expect the endpoints of interval estimates to be acknowledged and discussed. So-called negative studies are important to avoid duplicate research and as part of subsequent systematic reviews. Results should ordinarily be presented with two significant digits, such as 9.8 instead of 9.765 and 0.012 instead of 0.01 or 0.01234.  Graphs of positive quantities such as incidence rates should start the ordinate at 0 instead of some arbitrary y-value that visually amplifies fluctuations.

Discussion: Do not repeat the results from the result section. Instead, focus on how the results should be interpreted, with strengths, weaknesses and uncertainties. Please do not use statistical significance or lack thereof as a substitute for clinical or public health significance or lack thereof. Rather than dichotomized declarations of a positive or negative finding or claiming that there is or is not an effect, describe the estimated magnitude of the effect as indicated by the range of the interval estimate. For a more thorough discussion of this advice, see the article by Greenland, Mansournia and Joffe on how “To Curb Research Misreporting, Replacing Significance And Confidence By Compatibility”, in Preventive Medicine, 2022. If your research article is the report of a single study, please avoid making policy recommendations. If your paper is intended to provide policy guidance, please do a literature synthesis with a thorough and balanced review of relevant studies, along with harm and benefit considerations for all outcomes that could be affected by proposed interventions or policies.

Content of Literature Syntheses

While not required, PRISMA is the recommended format for systematic reviews (Liberati et al., PLoS Medicine, 2009). In the introduction, describe the public health issue being evaluated, and any previously published review articles.

Please specify the procedures by which the literature was searched, and the specific criteria used for selecting articles to include in the review. For systematic reviews, the supplementary material should include a detailed tally of the quality assessment for each article reviewed.

Overall point estimates should be accompanied by interval estimates as well as interval estimates for each individual study.

Discussion of results should consider differences between the reviewed studies with respect to study population, exposure and outcomes. When discussing public health importance, please consider the range of possible effect sizes that are compatible with the literature synthesis.

Content of History of Public Health Articles

The structure of history articles may vary depending on the topic, but we recommend starting with an introduction and ending with a discussion outlining lessons learned.

Content for All Manuscript Types

Abstract: Each research article, history of public health and literature synthesis must have an abstract with 100 to 400 words. Perspectives and external article reviews should have an abstract with 100 to 200 words. The abstract does not count towards the article word limits.

Key Words: Please provide 4 to 6 keywords describing diseases, exposure, data and/or methods, such as for example ‘lung cancer’, ‘malaria’, ‘vaccines’, ‘smoking’, ‘electronic health records, ‘cohort study’ or ‘sequential analysis’.

Abbreviations: All abbreviations should be spelled out the first time they are used.

Measurement Units: Use the international system of units (SI).

Figures and Tables: Each figure and table should be self-contained, with a short title and explanatory legend, so they can be understood without reading the text. They should be numbered in the order in which they appear in the article. Figures and tables do not count towards the word limit.

References: Please use the citation style guide from the National Library of Medicine, with a number for each reference in citation sequence, and Vancouver style in the reference section. The references do not count towards the word limits.

Acknowledgements: Funding sources should be declared if any aspect of the research received external funding that is not from the author’s institute of employment. Professional writers must be acknowledged in accordance with EMWA guidelines. An acknowledgement of individuals must have their permission.

Competing Interests: For each author, please declare any conflicts of interest related to the topic of the manuscript, whether financial or non-financial. This may include present or past employment, stock ownership, consulting engagements, acting as an expert witness, corporate or non-profit board memberships, serving on governmental or non-governmental advisory boards, and membership in lobbying or advocacy organizations. Include competing interests of spouses and other close family members. If there are no conflicts of interests to declare, that should be stated for each author.

Supplementary Material: Authors may submit supplementary materials at the time of submission. This could for example be the data being analyzed, detailed case definitions, sensitivity analyses, survey forms, photographs, computer code or translations into other languages. Supplementary material should be labelled with capital letters, A, B, C, etc. Figures and numbers should be numbered with a capital letter and then numbered chronologically within each document. Any commonly used file format may be utilized.

Peer-Review Process

Peer-Reviews: Research articles, literature syntheses and articles on the history of public health are published together with open peer reviews so that readers can read both at the same time. Perspectives are not peer reviewed.

Author Rejoinder: Based on peer reviews, authors are invited to write an optional author rejoinder addressing the comments and suggestions made by the reviewers. If received within one week, the author’s rejoinder will be published together with the article and the peer reviews. Otherwise, the rejoinder will be published soon after it is received.

Revised Manuscript Versions: Authors have the option to submit and publish a revised version of their manuscript at any time. Some reviewer comments are best addressed in the author rejoinder, and a revised version is then unnecessary. New manuscript versions should only be used to make corrections to data description, analyses, results or interpretation.

Reviewer Closure: If the authors write a rejoinder, or submit a revised version, the reviewers are encouraged to write a short reviewer closure that opine whether the authors properly address the concerns raised in the reviews.