Author Guidelines

Please review and follow these author guidelines prior to submitting your manuscript to avoid any delays in processing.

Types of articles

Our journals accept the following types of articles:

• Original research article

• Narrative or systematic review articles

• Research brief*

• Practice brief*

• Commentaries*

• Other+

*These article types must not exceed 1,500 words not including title page, abstract, and references.

+The journal may publish other types of articles (e.g. book reviews, opinion editorials) for special issues, including for emerging topics.

Submission Guidelines

Below are general guidelines for submitting an original research article. Certain sections provide additional guidance on how to address them if your article is not an original research article.

The main manuscript document

Generally there will be an Abstract, Introduction, Methodology, Results, Discussion, Conclusion, Acknowledgments, Statements and Declarations section, and References. 

Be thoughtful about your article details. Your article title, keywords, and abstract all contribute to its position in search engine results, directly affecting the number of people who see your work.

Title: Your manuscript’s title should be concise, descriptive, unambiguous, accurate, and reflect the precise contents of the manuscript. A descriptive title that includes the topic of the manuscript makes an article more findable in the major indexing services. 

Abstract: Your abstract should be between 250-350 words and concisely state the purpose of the article, major findings, and conclusions. If your article is a research article, please be clear in stating your research aims, your study design and data analysis approach, results, and conclusion. If your article is focused on research that includes clinical trials, the trial registry name and URL, and registration number must be included at the end of the abstract. Submissions that do not meet this requirement will not be considered. 

Keywords: You are asked to provide between 6 - 8 keywords after the abstract. Keywords should be as specific as possible to the research topic as these will be important for search engines to find your article among the general audience.

Authorship and Acknowledgements:

We recommend the following criteria to determine article authorship:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND

• Drafting the work or reviewing it critically for important intellectual content; AND

• Final approval of the version to be published; AND

• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

If you are including an Acknowledgements section, this will be published at the beginning of your article. The Acknowledgments section should include all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship. We recommend that you obtain consent from non-author contributors who you are acknowledging in your manuscript.  

Writing assistance and third-party submissions: if you have received any writing or editing assistance from a third-party, for example a specialist communications company, this must be clearly stated in the Acknowledgements section and in the covering letter. If your submission is being made on your behalf by someone who is not listed as an author, for example the third-party who provided writing/editing assistance, you must state this in the Acknowledgements and also in your covering letter. Please note that the editor reserves the right to not consider submissions made by a third party rather than by the author/s themselves.

Statements and declarations: Your title page must include a section called "Statements and Declarations". In this section, please clearly state any conflicts of interest that any of the authors may have in this work, from project inception to manuscript preparation, any financial sources or funding report, and any other information that would be important for the Editorial Office to know. If a declaration is not applicable to your submission, you must still include the heading and state ‘Not applicable’ underneath. Please note that you may be asked to justify why a declaration was not applicable to your submission by the Editorial Office.

• Ethical considerations: Please include your ethics approval statements under this heading, even if you have already included ethics approval information in your methods section. If ethical approval was not required, you need to state this.

• Consent to participate: Please include any participant consent information under this heading and state whether informed consent to participate was written or verbal. If the requirement for informed consent to participate has been waived by the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board (i.e. where it has been deemed that consent would be impossible or impracticable to obtain), please state this. If this is not applicable to your manuscript, please state ‘Not applicable’ in this section.

• Consent for publication: Submissions containing any data from an individual person (including individual details, images or videos) must include a statement confirming that informed consent for publication was provided by the participant(s) or a legally authorized representative. Non-essential identifying details should be omitted.  Please do not submit the participant’s actual written informed consent with your article, as this in itself breaches the patient’s confidentiality. The IJPHK requests that you confirm to us, in writing, that you have obtained written informed consent to publish but the written consent itself should be held by the authors/investigators themselves, for example in a patient’s hospital record. The confirmatory letter may be uploaded with your submission as a separate file in addition to the statement confirming that consent to publish was obtained within the manuscript text. If this is not applicable to your manuscript, please state ‘Not applicable’ in this section.

• Data availability statement: We are committed to helping ensure you reach as many readers as possible, always in a spirit of openness and transparency. We encourage you to share your research to a public repository and cite this data in your research. You will need to publish a data availability statement with your article under this heading.

• References: Every in-text citation must have a corresponding citation in the reference list and vice versa. Corresponding citations must have identical spelling and year. The full article, including the references, must be formatted according to guidelines by the American Psychological Association (APA) 7th edition.

Supplemental material

Sage journals can host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc.) alongside the full text of the article. Your supplemental material must be one of our accepted file types.

The title page

Your title page should include: 

• Article title 

• The full list of authors including all names and affiliations.

• The listed affiliation should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a note at the end of the manuscript – please indicate this on the title page. 

• Everybody eligible for authorship must be included at the time of submission (please see the authorship section for more information).

• Contact information for the corresponding author: name, institutional address, phone, email 

• Acknowledgments section 

• Statements and Declarations section

• Any other identifying information related to the authors and/or their institutions, funders, approval committees, etc, that might compromise anonymity.  

Formatting

Manuscripts are required to be submitted in Microsoft Word. There is no need to follow any template as long as the authors have adhered to the author guidelines. However, please ensure your heading levels are clear, and the sections clearly defined. For all article types, ensure that the text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point Times New Roman font; employ italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.

When formatting your references, please ensure you check the American Psychological Association (APA) 7th edition reference style. Here is a quick link to the APA reference style.

Artwork guidelines

Illustrations, pictures and graphs, should be inserted directly in the main body of the article and be in the highest quality format that helps us to publish your article in the best way possible. Please follow the guidelines below to enable us to prepare your artwork for the printed issue as well as the online version.

• Placement: All artwork, figures/charts and tables should be included in the main text rather than at the end of the document.

• Color: Please note that images supplied in color will be published in color online

• Dimension:Check that the artworks supplied match or exceed the dimensions of the journal. Images cannot be scaled up after origination

• Fonts: The lettering used in the artwork should not vary too much in size and type (usually sans serif font as a default).

Image integrity

Figures should be minimally processed and should reflect the integrity of the original data in the image. Adjustments to images in brightness, contrast, or color balance should be applied equally to the entire image, provided they do not distort any data in the figure, including the background. Selective adjustments and touch-up tools used on portions of a figure are not appropriate. Images should not be layered or combined into a single image unless it is stated that the figure is a product of time-averaged data. All adjustments to image date should be clearly disclosed in the figure legend. Images may be additionally screened to confirm faithfulness to the original data. Authors should be able to supply raw image data upon request. Authors should also list tools and software used to collect image data and should document settings and manipulations in the Methods section.

Please ensure that you have obtained any necessary permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures, or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. Please state that you have obtained permission to reproduce directly within the main document wherever it is applicable.

Submission Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

• I certify that the manuscript represents valid work and each co-author participated sufficiently in the work to take responsibility for the content, and that all those who qualify for authorship are listed.

• The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).

• Read plagiarism policy of the journal and prepared the article according to it.

• Cover letter prepared separately in the Microsoft Word document format according to the template provided on the login page of website. All author related details are there in this file only.

• Article file (Abstract + Article text) prepared separately in Microsoft Word format according to the template provided in the login page of the website. This file doesn't contain any author related information like name, institute, email, mobile and address.

• All references are written according to APA style.

• Where available, DOI links for the references have been provided (including references of journal article).

• The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point Times New Roman font; employ italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.

• The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.