About International Journal of Health Geographics

What is International Journal of Health Geographics?

International Journal of Health Geographics is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal fully dedicated to publishing quality manuscripts on all aspects of geospatial information systems and science applications in health and healthcare.

International Journal of Health Geographics aims to cover a wide range of interdisciplinary geospatial topics in a health/healthcare context, from spatial data infrastructure and Web geospatial interoperability research, to research into real-time Geographic Information Systems (GIS)-enabled surveillance services, remote sensing applications, spatial epidemiology, spatio-temporal statistics, and even cyberspace mapping. The journal is thus of interest to audiences from many different fields.

Health geographics improves our understanding of the important relationships between people, location (and its characteristics: for example environmental or socio-economic), time, and health; it therefore assists us in discovering and eliminating disease, in public health tasks like disease prevention and health promotion, and also in better healthcare service planning and delivery.

Currently health geographics papers are offered very little room, priority and recognition in peer reviewed journals dealing with medical informatics, public health, statistics or GIS in general. All such journals available today are not specifically focused on the broader spectrum of geospatial information science in health and healthcare, and are at best journals of social medicine, public health, planning and policy with an emphasis on the concept of place. International Journal of Health Geographics is filling this serious gap in existing journals by providing a credible central venue for researchers and practitioners to publish their health geographics research.

Content overview

International Journal of Health Geographics considers the following types of articles:

• Research - reports of data from original research or replica studies carried in new settings or different regions.
• Methodology - these articles present a new or enhanced method, test, procedure or technological approach. The article must describe a demonstrable advance on what is currently available. The method needs to have been well tested and ideally, but not necessarily, used in a way that proves its value.
• Review - comprehensive, authoritative, summaries of recent insights in specific research and practical areas, placing work reported over time into a broader context.

Peer review policies

• All articles submitted to International Journal of Health Geographics are reviewed by at least two experts with the aim of reaching a first decision within four to six weeks. Referees comments are passed in anonymous form to authors.
• For a manuscript to be published, it has to be relevant to the journal's scope, scientifically sound, coherent, and not substantially duplicating other published work.
• Peer reviewers have four options:
  • accept without revision
  • accept after revisions without expecting to check them
  • neither accept nor reject until author(s) make revisions
  • reject

Edited by Maged N Kamel Boulos, International Journal of Health Geographics is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in International Journal of Health Geographics

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central, MEDLINE, Thomson Reuters (ISI), CABI and Scopus.

Articles in International Journal of Health Geographics should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Int J Health Geogr 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, International Journal of Health Geographics does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from International Journal of Health Geographics, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to International Journal of Health Geographics using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

International Journal of Health Geographics is published by BioMed Central, an independent publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is Open Access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. International Journal of Health Geographics however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

International Journal of Health Geographics's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also in repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in International Journal of Health Geographics will be available.

International Journal of Health Geographics is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.