Open Access Pub · ISSN 2640-690X
About Journal of Family Medicine
Journal of Family Medicine is a peer-reviewed, open access journal of generalist care. It publishes research on the first assessment of undifferentiated illness, prevention and health maintenance across the life course, the management of long-term conditions, the person considered together with family and community, and the practice of family medicine itself.
Its purpose is to give the questions generalists face a scholarly record of their own, read by the family physicians, primary care teams, educators and researchers who work on them.
What family medicine holds together
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Breadth of care
Responsibility for the whole of a person’s health, across organs, diseases and episodes of illness.
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First contact
Questions that arise at the first presentation of a complaint nobody has yet named.
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Continuity
Years of continuing care in which several conditions, several treatments and one person are held together.
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Family and community
Health and illness understood in the context of the person, family and community.
The journal’s role
Much of the clinical literature is organized by organ, disease or procedure. Family medicine is organized around the person. It meets people before a diagnosis has been named, manages several conditions and treatments together, and continues that care over years and within households, drawing on biological, clinical and behavioral sciences.
Journal of Family Medicine gives that discipline a dedicated scholarly venue. It publishes work on generalist care and on the discipline itself — its education, its organization and the methods it uses to study its own practice — so that a generalist question can be asked, answered and cited among others of its kind.
The journal publishes quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods research, conceptual and theoretical work on the discipline, and studies that sit on the boundary between family medicine and public health, behavioral science, education or health policy.
Journal record
- Publisher
- Open Access Pub
- ISSN
- 2640-690X
- Publication history
- Publishing since 2018
- Access and license
- Open access under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Authors retain copyright. Copyright and license
- Peer review
- Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request.
- Persistent identifiers
- Crossref DOI registration Indexing and preservation
- Charges
- An article processing charge applies after acceptance Article processing charges
Where its questions arise
- General practice and family medicine clinics
- Community clinics and other first-contact services
- Rural and remote practice
- Households, families and caregivers
- Undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing education
- Primary care systems and national datasets
Work across clinical, community, laboratory and health-system settings is eligible when its question or contribution is substantively connected to family medicine.
Who the journal serves
Its readers are family physicians and general practitioners, primary care nurses and allied health professionals, educators and trainees, health services researchers, and those responsible for primary care policy.
Submissions are welcome from every country and every model of health care; a study conducted in a rural district hospital, a salaried practice or a national dataset is read on the same terms. The published record includes, for example, a study of antibiotic prescribing among clinical officers in Kiambu County, Kenya, and a framework for building a health care system through primary care in Grenada.
Editorial responsibility
The journal is led by an Editor-in-Chief and an international editorial board. Every member is listed by name, with their affiliation, country and a profile page, on the editorial board page, and each submission is handled by an editor drawn from that board.
How manuscripts are assessed
All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal’s scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review.
Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by two to three independent subject-matter experts, whose assessments inform the handling editor’s decision.
Decisions and independence
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
Editorial decisions remain independent of fees, memberships, optional services, and editorial or reviewer roles. Editors recuse themselves from decisions on their own submissions, which are handled independently.
Published standards
The journal’s standards for authorship, competing interests, consent and ethics approval, data availability, corrections and retractions apply to editors and reviewers as well as to authors, and are set out in its editorial policies.
Where to go next
From the journal’s purpose to its subject, its people and its requirements for authors.
Subject and fit
The journal’s subject range, what makes a manuscript belong here, and the forms of work it publishes.
Editors and standards
The editors responsible for the journal, and the policies that govern authorship, ethics, data and corrections.
Preparation and submission
Preparation requirements for each manuscript, and the submission routes available to authors.
Questions about scope before submission are welcome at the editorial office, [email protected].