About Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations

What is Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations?

Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal of epidemiologic research methods, applications, critical overviews, teaching tools, perspectives, and other analytic work.

Epidemiology, is a critically important field in informing clinical, policy, and individual health decisions. It is a young field, experiencing major fundamental advances every year, however the high social value of its results means the science is primarily devoted to producing immediate results. Yet existing journals almost exclusively publish reports of new epidemiologic study results, leaving few pages available for other contributions to the science and its applications. Such contributions, including policy applications of epidemiologic findings, new methodology, critical overviews of the field, re-analyses of previous findings, and methods for teaching and communicating, require thoughtful, critical scholarly discussion.

Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations provides a forum for such contributions - anything in or about epidemiology other than just reporting new study findings. Of particular interest are articles about policy, philosophy, and practices in the field, which do not relegate to commentary or discussion, but are treated as analytic work. Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations emphasizes articles that are accessible and of interest to a broad range of health researchers, teachers, practitioners, and policy makers, rather than those that appeal primarily to a few specialists in a particular subfield.

Content overview

Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations considers the following types of articles:

• Analytic Perspectives - articles, which can be epidemiology-based policy analysis, critical analyses of the field and its practices, or various contributions to methodology, philosophy, or other perspectives on the field. These articles should be based on analytic research (of any kind that does not fit a methods-results-discussion format); they will be evaluated on their analytic merits not as commentary. Analytic Perspectives include the article subtype Historical Perspective. If you wish to submit a Historical Perspective please submit the manuscript as an Analytic Perspective and ensure the title of the manuscript begins with "Historical Perspective:", for example, "Historial Perspective: The social determinants of disease".
• Commentaries - short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the journal's scope. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, and are often written by opinion leaders invited by the Editorial Board.
• Database articles - descriptions of a new database or a substantial improvement of an existing database (for example by an expansion of data to broaden the range of users, or by a major increase in functionality).
• Methodology articles: present a new experimental method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method. 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.
• Research - reports of data from original research.
• Software articles - descriptions of the source code for software applications, tools or algorithm implementations. Typically, an archive of the source code of the current version of the software should be included with the submitted manuscript as a supplementary file.

Peer review policies

Members of the Editorial Board will screen manuscripts submitted to Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations, to determine whether the scope and quality are appropriate for the journal. Peer review is conducted by a minimum of two reviewers, under editorial supervision. All submissions will be reviewed on their analytic merits. Teaching articles are reviewed based on innovativeness and usefulness of provided tools rather than novel analytic content. A third reviewer is used for certain submissions: an expert in the discipline for submissions with a disciplinary base outside health research, and a current student for teaching articles.

Edited by George Maldonado and Carl V. Phillips, Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations

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

Articles in Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations 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:

Epidemiol Perspect Innov 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

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

General journal policies

Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations 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. Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations'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 Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations will be available.

Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations 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.