Authors
Family Medicine and Community Health (FMCH) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal focusing on the topics of primary care, family medicine, general practice and community health. FMCH strives to be a leading international journal that promotes ‘Health Care for All’ through disseminating novel, rigorous and pragmatic knowledge in these areas. FMCH publishes original research, systematic review, research methods and reporting, Communication and perspective articles through the lens of population health. FMCH’s focus on Asia Pacific section features reports of primary care and family medicine development in the Asia-Pacific region.
FMCH will prioritise publications in the following nine thematic areas:
- Global population health and primary care
- Patient-oriented outcomes research
- Social determinants of health and health inequity
- Primary care and community integration
- Digital technology and artificial intelligence in primary care
- Shared-decision making in primary care
- Multilevel and mixed-method research
- Quality improvement and value-based, patient-centred primary care
- Healthcare transformation and practice redesign
FMCH aims to serve a diverse audience including researchers, educators, policymakers and leaders of family medicine and community health. We also aim to provide content relevant for researchers working on population health, epidemiology, public policy, disease control and management, preventative medicine, disease burden and social risk factors. FMCH is an open access journal and does not impose any article processing charges (APC) or submission charges.
Editorial policy
Family Medicine and Community Health adheres to the highest standards concerning its editorial policies on publication ethics and scientific misconduct. The journal follows guidance produced by bodies that include the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), the Council of Science Editors and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). To view all BMJ Journal policies please refer to the BMJ Author Hub policies page, including information about our Editors’ roles and responsibilities.
Authors are required to submit a statement that their study obtained ethics approval (or a statement that it was not required and why) and that participants gave informed consent. Our Editors will consider whether the work is morally acceptable as determined by the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki. In addition to this, in line with General Medical Council guidelines, an article that contains personal medical information about an identifiable living individual requires patients explicit consent (in the format of a signed BMJ patient consent form) before we will publish it. Please find further details on BMJ research ethics policies (human participants and animals) and consent for publication; including a link to the downloadable consent form.
To make the best decision on how to deal with a manuscript, Family Medicine and Community Health needs to know about any competing interests authors may have; this includes any commercial, financial or non financial associations that may be relevant to the submitted article. Authors must download and complete a copy of the ICMJE Conflict of Interest disclosure form. In addition to this Family Medicine and Community Health ensures that all advertising and sponsorship associated with the journal does not influence editorial decisions, is immediately distinguishable from editorial content and meets all other BMJ guidelines. Please find more information about competing interests and a link to the form.
We take seriously all possible misconduct. If an Editor, author or reader has concerns that a submitted article describes something that might be considered to constitute misconduct in research, publication or professional behaviour they should forward their concerns to the journal. The publisher will deal with allegations appropriately following ICMJE and COPE guidelines. Corrections and retractions are considered where an article has already been published; corrections, expressions of concern or a retraction notices will be published as soon as possible in line with the BMJ correction and retraction policy.
Copyright and authors’ rights
As an open access journal, Family Medicine and Community Health adheres to the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of open access. Articles are published under a Creative Commons licence to facilitate reuse of the content and authors retain copyright; please refer to the Family Medicine and Community Health Author Licence. More information on copyright and authors’ rights.
When publishing in Family Medicine and Community Health, authors choose between two licence types – CC-BY-NC and CC-BY. As an author you may wish to post your article in an institutional or subject repository, or on a scientific social sharing network. You may also link your published article to your preprint (if applicable). What you can do with your article, without seeking permission, depends on the licence you have chosen and the version of your article. Please refer to the BMJ author self archiving and permissions policies page for more information.
Preprints
Preprints foster openness, accessibility and collaboration by allowing authors to make their findings immediately available to the research community and receive feedback on an article before it is submitted to a journal for formal publication.
BMJ fully supports and encourages the archiving of preprints in any recognised, not-for-profit server such as medRxiv. BMJ does not consider the posting of an article in a dedicated preprint repository to be prior publication.
Preprints are reports of work that have not been peer-reviewed; Preprints should therefore not be used to guide clinical practice, health-related behaviour or health policy. For more information, please refer to our Preprint policy page.
Provenance and peer review
Family Medicine and Community Health submissions are predominantly unsolicited, all articles are subject to peer review. Family Medicine and Community Health operates double-anonymised peer review which requires authors to submit an anonymous version of their manuscript file (to be uploaded as the Manuscript File including abstract):
This file should be anonymous and should NOT include:
- Any author names (including file path in document footer)
- Author institution details
- Author contact details
- Acknowledgements
- Competing interests (if declared)
- Ethics approval statements that refer to your institution
- Please ensure tracked changes are switched off if previously used; this file will be automatically converted to PDF once uploaded through the online submission system and will be made available to the reviewers
When a paper has been submitted from the Editor, Deputy or Associate Editors’ departments, they have no role in the reviewing or decision making process, usually two external reviewer reports are obtained before an Original research or Review article is accepted for publication. This also applies to any Associate Editors who are authors, in which instance the reviewing process is handled by the Editor-in-Chief. For more information on what to expect during the peer review process please refer to BMJ Author Hub – the peer review process.
BMJ requests that all reviewers adhere to a set of basic principles and standards during the peer-review process in research publication; these are based on the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers. Please refer to our peer review terms and conditions policy page.
BMJ is committed to transparency. Every article we publish includes a description of its provenance (commissioned or not commissioned) and whether it was internally or externally peer reviewed.
Plagiarism is the appropriation of the language, ideas or thoughts of another without crediting their true source and representation of them as one’s own original work. BMJ is a member of CrossCheck by CrossRef and iThenticate. iThenticate is a plagiarism screening service that verifies the originality of content submitted before publication. BMJ runs manuscripts through iThenticate during the peer review process. Authors, researchers and freelancers can also use iThenticate to screen their work before submission by visiting www.ithenticate.com.
Reader responses, questions and comments to published content are welcomed by Family Medicine and Community Health; these should be submitted electronically via the journals website. Please find further details on how to publish a response and the terms and requirements.
Article transfer service
BMJ is committed to ensuring that all good quality research is published. Our article transfer service helps authors find the best journal for their research while providing an easy and smooth publication process. If authors agree to transfer their manuscript, all versions, supplementary files and peer reviewer comments are automatically transferred; there is no need to resubmit or reformat.
Authors who submit to the Family Medicine and Community Health and are rejected will be offered the option of transferring to another BMJ Journal, such as BMJ Public Health or BMJ Open.
Please note that the article transfer service does not guarantee acceptance but you should receive a quicker initial decision on your manuscript.
Contact the Transfer Editor at transfers@bmj.com
Data Sharing
Family Medicine and Community Health adheres to BMJ’s Tier 2 data policy. We strongly encourage that data generated by your research that supports your article be made available as soon as possible, wherever legally and ethically possible. We also require data from clinical trials to be made available upon reasonable request. To adhere to ICMJE guidelines, we require that a data sharing plan must be included with trial registration for clinical trials that begin enrolling participants on or after 1st January 2019. Changes to the plan must be noted in the Data Availability Statement and updated in the registry record. All research articles must contain a Data Availability Statement. For more information and FAQs, please see BMJ’s full Data Sharing Policy page.
At present there is no major repository for clinical data, but Dryad has declared its willingness to accept medical datasets. Authors can start the deposition process while submitting to any BMJ Journal. Dryad provides authors with a DOI for the dataset to aid citation and provide a permanent link to the data. Note that Dryad hosts data using a CC0 licence so authors should check that this is suitable for the data that they are depositing. The DataCite organisation has a growing list of other repositories for research data.
Patient and public partnership
We consider that patient and public involvement in healthcare is a core component of FMCH and the BMJ encourages active patient and public involvement in clinical research as part of its patient and public partnership strategy. To support the co-production of research, we request that authors provide a Patient and Public Involvement statement in the methods section of their papers, under the subheading ‘Patient and public involvement’.
We appreciate that patient and public involvement is relatively new and may not be feasible or appropriate for all papers. We, therefore, continue to consider papers where patients were not involved.
The Patient and Public Involvement statement should provide a brief response to the following questions, tailored as appropriate for the study design reported:
- At what stage in the research process were patients/the public first involved in the research and how?
- How were the research question(s) and outcome measures developed and informed by their priorities, experience, and preferences?
- How were patients/the public involved in the design of this study?
- How were they involved in the recruitment to and conduct of the study?
- Were they asked to assess the burden of the intervention and the time required to participate in the research?
- How were (or will) they be involved in your plans to disseminate the study results to participants and relevant wider patient communities (e.g. by choosing what information/results to share, when, and in what format)?
If patients or members of the public were not involved, please add the reason(s) written in your own words (e.g.) funding or training restrictions, access to software, COVID etc.; also, it may be that speaking to patients inspired this review if this was the case it is fine to add that although there was no direct PPI in this paper we did speak to patients about the study and we asked a member of the public to read our manuscript after submission.
For original research or education papers, please place the PPI declaration at the end of the methods. For other articles, we suggest adding a PPI statement before the results and the conclusion. If the Patient and Public Involvement statement is missing in the submitted manuscript, we will request that the authors provide it.
In addition to considering the points above, we advise authors to look at the guidance for best reporting of patient and public involvement as set out in the GRIPP2 reporting checklist.
The journal is also committed to patient and public involvement in the editorial process, including peer review and the generation of patient-authored contents.
Article processing charges
Family Medicine and Community Health is an open access journal which does not levy an Article Processing Charge (APC). There are no submission or page charges, and no colour charges.
ORCID
Family Medicine and Community Health mandates ORCID iDs for the submitting author at the time of article submission; co-authors and reviewers are strongly encouraged to also connect their ScholarOne accounts to ORCID. We strongly believe that the increased use and integration of ORCID iDs will be beneficial for the whole research community.
Please find more information about ORCID and BMJ’s policy on our Author Hub.
Rapid responses
A rapid response is a moderated but not peer reviewed online response to a published article in Family Medicine and Community Health; it will not receive a DOI and will not be indexed. Find out more about responses and how to submit a response.
Submission guidelines
Please review the below article type specifications including the required article lengths, illustrations, table limits and reference counts. The word count excludes the title page, abstract, tables, acknowledgements, contributions and references. Manuscripts should be as succinct as possible.
For further support when making your submission please refer to the resources available on the BMJ Author Hub. Here you will find information on writing and formatting your research through to the peer review process and promoting your paper. We encourage authors to ensure that research articles are written in accordance with the relevant research reporting guidelines. Please see the SPIRIT-AI Extension and CONSORT-AI Extension for AI trials where applicable. Please refer to the following reporting guidance: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27198112
You may also wish to use the language editing and translation services provided by BMJ Author Services. These services are paid for by the author and do not guarantee that your paper will be considered or accepted by the journal.
Original research
Original research articles address specific open-ended and closed-ended questions through both predetermined and emerging methods. The research question should be clearly defined and answered through the results of statistical and/or text analysis informed by health science and social science theory. The collected data could be both quantitative and qualitative data, but the legality and ethical considerations of data collection procedure are crucial.
Research reviews that systematically synthesise evidence (e.g. Systematic reviews, Meta-analysis, Scoping reviews, Mixed methods reviews, etc) should be submitted as Systematic reviews.
Original research papers should follow the basic structure of title, key point, abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion, references, and tables and figures as appropriate. Please find the FMCH manuscript strucuture checklist for original research here.
All original research articles should have a Patient and Public Involvement statement.
Supplementary and raw data can be placed online separately from the text, and we may request that you separate out some material into supplementary data files to make the main manuscript clearer for readers.
We recommend authors use the appropriate equator network reporting guidelines prior to submission such as:
Randomized trials: CONSORT Checklists
Observational studies: STROBE Checklists
Qualitative studies: COREQ Checklist
Mixed methods research: MMAT VERSION 2018
Quality improvement studies: SQUIRE 2.0 Checklist
Implementation studies: StaRI checklist
FMCH also encourages authors using SAMPL Guidelines to check basic statistical reporting.
Please include the key messages of your article after your abstract using the following headings. This section should be no more than 3-5 sentences and should be distinct from the abstract; be succinct, specific and accurate.
- What is already known on this topic – summarise the state of scientific knowledge on this subject before you did your study and why this study needed to be done
- What this study adds – summarise what we now know as a result of this study that we did not know before
- How this study might affect research, practice or policy – summarise the implications of this study
Systematic review
This article type includes all research reviews that systematically synthesise evidence (e.g. Systematic reviews, Meta-analysis, Scoping reviews, Mixed methods reviews, etc). Reviews gather research and summarize the best evidence and knowledge.
Review papers should follow the basic structure of title, key point, abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusion, references, and tables and figures as appropriate. Please include the research type in your title to make the nature of your study clear. Please find the FMCH manuscript structure checklist for reviews here.
Authors of reviews should follow the PRISMA checklist and flow diagram or the most the appropriate PRISMA extension, and upload their completed research checklist when submitting their manuscript. The flow diagram should be included in the main body of the text and the checklist should be provided as an additional file. Tables summarizing literature used in the systematic review should be included as appendix material.
All systematic reviews should have a Patient and Public Involvement statement.
Word count: up to 5,000 words
Structured Abstract:up to 350 words
Tables/illustrations: maximum 8 tables and/or figures
References: up to 50, follows the Vancouver style
Research methods and reporting
Methodology is the strategy, plan of action, process or design lying behind the choice and use of particular methods and linking the choice and used of methods, to the desired outcomes. Research methods generally involve the forms of data collection, analysis, and interpretation that researchers propose for their studies. FMCH is dedicated to providing methodological references for primary care researchers by publishing these papers.
Research methods and reporting papers should follow the structure of title, abstract, introduction, main content, discussion, conclusion, references, and tables and figures as appropriate. Please find FMCH manuscript structure checklist for Research methods and reporting papers here.
Please include the key messages of your article after your abstract using the following headings. This section should be no more than 3-5 sentences and should be distinct from the abstract; be succinct, specific and accurate.
- What is already known on this topic – summarise the state of scientific knowledge on this subject before you did your study and why this study needed to be done
- What this study adds – summarise what we now know as a result of this study that we did not know before
- How this study might affect research, practice or policy – summarise the implications of this study
Word count: up to 6,000 words
Unstructured abstract: up to 350 words
Tables/illustrations: maximum 8 tables and/or figures
References: up to 50, follows the Vancouver style
Focus on Asia Pacific
Focus on Asia Pacific articles are academic reports or commentaries focussing on the latest development of primary care, family medicine, general practice, and community health research and discipline.
Please include the key messages of your article after your abstract using the following headings. This section should be no more than 3-5 sentences and should be distinct from the abstract; be succinct, specific and accurate.
- What is already known on this topic – summarise the state of scientific knowledge on this subject before you did your study and why this study needed to be done
- What this study adds – summarise what we now know as a result of this study that we did not know before
- How this study might affect research, practice or policy – summarise the implications of this study
Word count: up to 2,500 words
Unstructured Abstract: up to 250 words
Tables/Illustrations: maximum 5 tables and/or figures
References: up to 30, follows the Vancouver style
Communication
Communication articles describe and discuss an important issue in primary care, family medicine, general practice, and community health research. It integrates theoretic knowledge, practice-based experience, and objective evidence in a scholarly way, to gain and share deep insight.
Word count: up to 3,000 words
Unstructured abstract: up to 250 words
Tables/Illustrations: maximum 5 tables and/or figures
References: up to 30, follows the Vancouver style
Letter
The editor encourages submissions of important and topical observations or original exploratory research as a letter to the editor
Word count: up to 600
References: up to 10, follows the Vancouver style
Editorial
These are commissioned only articles. These articles focus on the frontier of primary care, family medicine, general practice, and community health development. Original papers should not be submitted under this category.
Word count: up to 1500 words
Tables/illustrations: up to 2
References: up to 8
Perspective
Perspectives are brief articles which discuss important topics in primary care, family medicine, general practice, and community health research and discipline in a scholarly and readable style.
Word count: up to 1,500 words
Abstract: none
Tables/illustrations: up to 5
References: up to 10, follows the Vancouver style
References: up to 10, follows the Vancouver style
Correspondence
Correspondence should be related to a recent article published in Family Medicine and Community Health. Original data may be included if it is relevant and gives added weight to the comment on the previously published article.
Word count: up to 500
References: up to 10, follows the Vancouver style
Supplements
The BMJ Publishing Group journals are willing to consider publishing supplements to regular issues. Supplement proposals may be made at the request of:
- The journal editor, an editorial board member or a learned society may wish to organise a meeting, sponsorship may be sought and the proceedings published as a supplement.
- The journal editor, editorial board member or learned society may wish to commission a supplement on a particular theme or topic. Again, sponsorship may be sought.
- The BMJPG itself may have proposals for supplements where sponsorship may be necessary.
- A sponsoring organisation, often a pharmaceutical company or a charitable foundation, that wishes to arrange a meeting, the proceedings of which will be published as a supplement.
For further information on criteria that must be fulfilled, download the supplements guidelines.
When contacting us regarding a potential supplement, please include as much of the information below as possible.
- Journal in which you would like the supplement published
- Title of supplement and/or meeting on which it is based
- Date of meeting on which it is based
- Proposed table of contents with provisional article titles and proposed authors
- An indication of whether authors have agreed to participate
- Sponsor information including any relevant deadlines
- An indication of the expected length of each paper Guest Editor proposals if appropriate