About Population Health Metrics

What is Population Health Metrics?

Population Health Metrics is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal addressing all aspects of measurement of the health of populations.

Population Health Metrics will address issues relating to concepts, methods, ethics applications and results in the measurement of the health of populations. This will include areas of health state measurement and valuation, summary measures of level of population health, and inequality in population health, descriptive epidemiology at the population level, burden of disease and injury analysis, disease and risk factor modelling for populations, and comparative assessment of risks to health at population level. The journal aims to provide a platform for researchers in all these areas to share their findings with the global research community.

Many traditional epidemiology journals concentrate on causal studies and on quasi-experimental design. Studies reporting on descriptive epidemiology of major diseases, injuries and risk factors, and on the measurement of health at the population level are not well represented in traditional journals. Additionally there are conceptual, ethical and technical issues in the construction and use of summary measures of population health. While there are journals that accept papers in all these areas, they are scattered across a range of disciplines, and there is currently no journal whose primary scope encompasses measurement of population health as outlined above.

Content overview

Population Health Metrics considers the following types of articles:

• Research - reports of data from original research relating to methods or results within the scope of the journal.
• Review - comprehensive, authoritative, summaries of recent insights in specific research areas within the scope of the journal; these articles are usually written by opinion leaders that have been invited by the Editorial Board.

Peer review policies

• Peer review in Population Health Metrics is designed to ensure that the research published is 'good science'. To promote transparency and accountability, a policy of open peer review of submitted articles is adopted by the Journal.
• Submitted articles will generally be reviewed by two external experts. Reviewers advise the editors, who are responsible for the final decision to accept or reject a manuscript.
• Reviewers give detailed comments in the following areas to advise the editors and to give guidance to authors on revisions if needed: importance, originality, clarity and presentation, validity and scientific quality, study design and methodology, statistical standards, and justification of conclusions in terms of evidence presented.

Edited by Colin Mathers, Christopher JL Murray and Alan D. Lopez, Population Health Metrics is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Population Health Metrics

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central and Embase.

Articles in Population Health Metrics 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:

Popul Health Metrics 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Population Health Metrics does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Population Health Metrics, 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 Population Health Metrics using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Population Health Metrics 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. Population Health Metrics however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Population Health Metrics'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 Population Health Metrics will be available.

Population Health Metrics 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.