Journal of Family Medicine · ISSN 2640-690X
Submit your research to JFM
Journal of Family Medicine welcomes submissions throughout the year from researchers, clinicians, and multidisciplinary teams working across family medicine.
Regular submissions are accepted throughout the year. There is no deadline to meet and no queue to join.
What the journal is looking for
Questions worth a paper
Scientific fit rests on a substantive connection to family medicine care, research, education or the discipline itself, established by the research question or the contribution. Within that remit, fundamental and applied research, methodological development, replication and confirmatory studies are welcome.
The subjects below illustrate the journal’s range. A related question that is not named here is welcome all the same.
- First contact and undifferentiated illness — clinical reasoning, the assessment of acute illness, diagnostic and prognostic accuracy in community populations, referral.
- Prevention and health maintenance across the life course, from maternal and child health to the care of older people and palliative care in the community.
- Long-term conditions and multimorbidity — prescribing and deprescribing, polypharmacy, antimicrobial stewardship, treatment burden, continuity of care.
- Mental health and behavioral medicine as they present in general practice.
- The family, the household and the consultation, including caregiving and shared decision-making.
- Community, population and equity in primary care, in any health system.
- The discipline itself — education, organization, workforce, informatics and the methods used to study general practice.
What is not required
A manuscript does not have to report a novel finding, a positive result, a mechanism, an immediate clinical benefit, a particular study design, a particular setting or a particular population to be considered. Scientific fit is one question; how well the work is done and reported is assessed separately, on its own terms.
Descriptive, exploratory, replication and confirmatory studies are assessed on those terms, as is a qualitative study of a handful of interviews or an analysis of a national dataset.
Which formats
Original research, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, practice innovation reports, case reports and case series, and brief communications all carry published length limits. Narrative reviews, letters, editorials, commentaries and the journal’s other recorded formats are also accepted; agree the length with the editorial office first.
Sending it
Submission routes
Three routes are open. Use whichever suits you; they reach the same editorial office and the same review process.
- Primary route: ManuscriptZone, the publisher’s online editorial manager.
- Alternative route: the Journal of Family Medicine submission form, which opens with this journal already selected.
- Assisted route: the editorial office at [email protected].
Authors must use only one submission route for the same manuscript.
What happens after you send it
All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal’s scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review: 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.
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal, and remain independent of fees, memberships, optional services, and editorial or reviewer roles. An article processing charge applies after acceptance and at no earlier stage.
Before you submit
Two things worth doing first
Read an issue. The current issue and the archive show the range of work the journal publishes and the level at which it is reported.
Then write one sentence saying how your work connects to family medicine care, research, education or the discipline. If that sentence is easy to write, the manuscript is very likely in subject.