About Human Resources for Health

What is Human Resources for Health?

Human Resources for Health is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal covering all aspects of planning, producing and managing the health workforce - all those who provide health services worldwide.

Human Resources for Health aims to disseminate research on health workforce policy, the health labour market, health workforce practice, development of knowledge tools and implementation mechanisms nationally and internationally; as well as specific features of the health workforce, such as the impact of management of health workers' performance and its link with health outcomes. The journal encourages debate on health sector reforms and their link with human resources issues, a hitherto-neglected area.

The development, deployment and evaluation of the health workforce are complex processes that require multidisciplinary collaboration in areas such as: analysis of needs; planning; evaluation of programmes; economic evaluation; political and policy analysis; demographics and statistics; effectiveness of teaching methods; and processes for improving motivation and productivity. There is no other specialist journal in which this analytical agenda can be debated and disseminated to the broader community of human resources scientists. This journal invites contributions from all the associated disciplines. It particularly welcomes articles concerning health workforce issues in developing countries.

Content overview

Human Resources for Health considers the following types of articles:

• Research - reports of data from original research.
• 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.
• Hypotheses - short articles presenting an untested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence; they should outline significant progress in thinking that would also be testable.
• 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.
• Reviews - comprehensive, authoritative descriptions of any subject within the journal's scope; these articles are usually written by opinion leaders that have been invited by the Editorial Board.

Peer review policies

Human Resources for Health has adopted a policy of open peer review: authors' and reviewers' identities are known to each other. Submitted manuscripts are generally reviewed by two external experts. The journal takes into account authors' suggestions for reviewers to invite, and those to exclude. The peer reviewers' role is to recommend acceptance - either with or without revision or resubmission - or rejection. Reviewers evaluate both the substance of manuscripts and the clarity of the writing; they can choose whether to check the revisions they recommend. The Editor-in-Chief makes the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of manuscripts.

Although published only in English, Human Resources for Health does as much as it can to provide editorial support to authors whose primary language is not English.

Edited by Mario Dal Poz, Human Resources for Health is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Human Resources for Health

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

Articles in Human Resources for Health 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:

Hum Resour Health 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Human Resources for Health does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

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

General journal policies

Human Resources for Health 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. Human Resources for Health however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Human Resources for Health'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 Human Resources for Health will be available.

Human Resources for Health 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.