About Health and Quality of Life Outcomes

What is Health and Quality of Life Outcomes?

Health and Quality of Life Outcomes is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal offering high quality articles, rapid publication and wide diffusion in the public domain. The journal is included in MEDLINE, and all articles are listed in PubMed and PubMed Central (PMC).

Health and Quality of Life Outcomes aims to promote the dissemination of knowledge on the Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQOL) assessment within the scientific community.

Health and Quality of Life Outcomes considers original manuscripts on Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQOL) assessment for the evaluation of medical therapies or psychosocial approaches and studies on psychometric properties of HRQOL measures, including cultural validation of instruments. The journal will also consider reviews summarising the present state of knowledge concerning a particular aspect of HRQOL. Narrowly focused reviews are commissioned and edited by an expert in the field, and are written by specialists on each topic.

Content overview

Health and Quality of Life Outcomes considers the following types of articles:

• Research - reports of data from original research.
• Commentaries - short, focussed and opinionated articles on any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings.
• Reviews - comprehensive, authoritative descriptions of any subject within the scope of the journal.

Peer review policies

• Peer review in Health and Quality of Life Outcomes is designed to ensure that the research published is 'good science'.
• Health and Quality of Life Outcomes considers manuscripts spanning a wide range of scientific interests, as long as the results and conclusions are scientifically justified and not misleading.
• We recognise the importance of highlighting articles that contain the most interesting, important or significant research. Peer reviewers are asked to indicate which articles they consider to be especially interesting or significant. These articles will be given greater prominence within Health and Quality of Life Outcomes and greater external publicity.
• Submitted manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two external anonymous experts.
• Peer reviewers will have four possible options, for each manuscript:
  • accept without revision
  • accept after minor revision
  • accept after major revision
  • reject because scientifically unsound
• In deciding whether to accept or reject a manuscript, a reviewer asks him/herself whether the scientific community is better served by publishing or not publishing the manuscript. In the absence of compelling reasons to reject, Health and Quality of Life Outcomes advises that reviewers recommend acceptance, as ultimately the scientific community will judge the quality of an article, after its publication.
• When asking for revisions, reviewers have two possible goals: to ask authors to tighten their arguments based on existing data or to identify areas where more data are needed.
• Health and Quality of Life Outcomes normally allows authors a maximum of two revisions of a manuscript.
• Peer reviewers are asked to indicate if the manuscript is not sufficiently clearly written for publication. In such cases authors are asked to revise the manuscript, seeking, if necessary, the assistance of colleagues or a commercial editing service.
• We aim to publish research as quickly as possible. Our electronic submission process is designed to facilitate rapid publication.

Edited by Holger Schünemann, Health and Quality of Life Outcomes is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Health and Quality of Life Outcomes

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

Articles in Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 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:

Health Qual Life Outcomes 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Health and Quality of Life Outcomes does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

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

General journal policies

Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 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. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Health and Quality of Life Outcomes'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 Health and Quality of Life Outcomes will be available.

Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 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.