Journal of Family Medicine · ISSN 2640-690X
Aims and Scope
Journal of Family Medicine publishes peer-reviewed research on generalist care — 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.
Open access CC BY 4.0 Peer reviewed Published by Open Access Pub
The aim
A journal for the generalist’s question
Family medicine takes responsibility for the whole of a person’s health, rather than for one organ, one disease or one episode.
Its questions arise in generalist care — at the first presentation of a complaint nobody has yet named, in households where illness is lived before it is managed, and across years of continuing care in which several conditions, several treatments and one person have to be held together. Family medicine draws on biological, clinical and behavioral sciences to understand health and illness in the context of the person, family and community.
Journal of Family Medicine publishes research that helps generalists, and the people who study, teach and organize general practice, do that work better. 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 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. Within that remit, fundamental and applied research, methodological development, replication and confirmatory studies are welcome. The evidence a manuscript needs follows from the claim it makes, not from its method: a descriptive account of practice is held to the standards of description, and a claim about causation, prediction or clinical effectiveness is held to the standards of that claim.
Subject range
What the journal is about
The subjects below illustrate the journal’s range. Related questions with a substantive connection to family medicine are also welcome.
First contact and undifferentiated illness
How a generalist reaches a working diagnosis while the presentation is incomplete. The journal publishes work on clinical reasoning and decision-making, the assessment of acute illness, diagnostic and prognostic accuracy in community populations, point-of-care and near-patient testing, safety-netting, referral thresholds, and the recognition of conditions whose earliest signs are seen first in general practice.
Prevention and health maintenance across the life course
Screening, immunization, risk assessment and health promotion; maternal, newborn and child health; adolescent care and the transition to adult services; adult preventive care; the health of older people, including frailty and function; and palliative and end-of-life care delivered in the community. Studies of how preventive activity is organized, offered and taken up belong here alongside studies of the interventions themselves.
Long-term conditions and multimorbidity
Diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory disease, persistent pain, and the situation in which several conditions are present at once — prescribing and deprescribing, polypharmacy, antimicrobial stewardship, treatment burden, rehabilitation, self-management support and the coordination of care between services. Continuity of care is one of the journal’s subjects, examined here as an open question and not assumed.
Mental health and behavioral medicine in general practice
Common mental disorders and psychological distress as they present to generalists; substance use and its consequences; collaborative and integrated care with mental health services; trauma-informed practice; perinatal and postpartum mental health; the mental health of caregivers and of veterans and their families; and the psychological care of people living with long-term physical illness.
The family, the household and the consultation
The journal’s title names the family, and the family is part of its subject. Work is welcome on caregiving and the burden it carries, illness as it is experienced in a household, intergenerational health, child and adolescent health in family context, reproductive and family planning decisions, and the consultation itself — the relationship through which family medicine works, together with the communication, shared decision-making and everyday ethics that shape it.
Community, population and equity in primary care
Primary care considered as a population service, including access and underservice, rural and remote practice, migrant and refugee health, the social determinants that shape what a consultation can achieve, community health workers and community-based programs, and the design, financing and strengthening of primary care systems in high-, middle- and low-income settings alike.
The discipline itself: education, organization and method
Undergraduate and postgraduate education in family medicine and continuing professional development; quality improvement, implementation and the organization of practice; the primary care workforce; digital health and clinical informatics relevant to primary care; measurement instruments and research methods developed for or adapted to primary care; and conceptual, historical and ethical scholarship on what general practice is and how it comes to know what it knows.
Scientific fit
What makes a manuscript belong here
Scientific fit rests on a substantive connection to family medicine care, research, education or the discipline itself. The five connections below help authors explain that relevance. In each case, the research question or contribution must establish the connection.
Connection one
Setting
The work examines questions relevant to generalist care in general practice, family medicine, community clinics or another first-contact primary care service.
Connection two
Population
The work examines the health, care or experiences of individuals, families or communities in relation to generalist care. Selected clinical populations can also be relevant.
Connection three
Question
The question is one a generalist has to answer. What is this presentation, what should be done when conditions coexist, when to refer, what to prescribe and when to stop.
Connection four
Relevance
Work in a specialty service, laboratory or population dataset addresses a question with a clear connection to family medicine research or care, including its biological, clinical or behavioral foundations.
Connection five
The discipline
The subject is family medicine itself — how it is practiced, taught, organized, financed, evaluated or understood.
Continuity, prevention and whole-person care are among the journal’s subjects. A single consultation, a cross-sectional survey, qualitative research and a national cohort can all contribute to this remit. Work across clinical, community, laboratory and health-system settings is eligible when its question or contribution is substantively connected to family medicine. Authors who are uncertain are welcome to describe the work to the editorial office before preparing a full submission.
Scope and assessment are different questions
The criteria above decide whether a manuscript falls within this journal’s subject. How well the work is done — the standard of evidence a particular claim requires, ethics approval and consent, reporting quality, data availability and the completeness of the record — is assessed separately, under the journal’s editorial policies and its instructions for authors.
Scope concerns the subject of the work; assessment considers whether the methods, reporting and claims are appropriate. Descriptive, exploratory, replication and confirmatory studies are assessed on those terms.
Forms of work
How the work reaches the page
Family medicine is reported in more than one form, and the journal’s published record reflects that. Whatever the format, a manuscript should make plain what question it addresses, how the work was done, and what a reader in general practice should take from it.
The forms below are examples. Preparation guidance is available in the instructions for authors; the editorial office can advise on format-specific questions. The published record is open in the archive.
- Original research Quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods studies, including trials, observational work, health services research and implementation studies.
- Reviews Narrative reviews that orient a generalist readership, and systematic and scoping reviews answering a defined question.
- Case reports Presentations that carry a lesson a generalist can use, reported with the clinical detail that makes the lesson checkable.
- Brief scholarly contributions Short reports, pilot and feasibility work, methodological notes, and reflective or conceptual pieces on practice.
Assessment
How manuscripts are handled
All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal’s scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review.
Review model
Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by two to three independent subject-matter experts.
Decision criteria
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
Independence
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.
Who assesses the work
Scope is applied by the editors and reviewers who serve the journal; their names, affiliations and profiles are listed on the editorial board page.
Next step
Bring your work to Journal of Family Medicine
If the test on this page fits your manuscript, the editors would like to read it. Reading the journal first is worth the time: the current issue and the archive show the range of work the journal has published and the level at which it is reported.
Primary route: ManuscriptZone. Alternative route: the Journal of Family Medicine submission form. Assisted route: the editorial office at [email protected], which also answers questions about scope before submission. Authors must use only one submission route for the same manuscript.