ISSN

2038-9922 (PRINT)
2038-9930 (ONLINE)

Focus and scope

The Journal of Public Health in Africa (JPHIA) is a peer-reviewed, academic journal that focuses on health issues in the African continent. The journal editors seek high quality original articles on public health related issues, reviews, comments and more. The aim of the journal is to move public health discourse from the background to the forefront. The success of Africa’s struggle against disease depends on public health approaches.

Historic data

In 2010, the journal was launched under the initiative of Professor Yusuf Abdu Misau, University of Bauchi, Nigeria with PAGEPress as its first publisher. In 2013 and 2015, the Federal Neuropsychiatric/Hospital at the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria, took over leadership of the journal. In 2016, PAGEPress purchased the journal. In 2017, JPHIA was included in the Web of Science (WoS) Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) for the first time. In 2018, the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) signed an agreement with PAGEPress to make JPHIA its official journal. While PAGEPress continued to take responsibility for publishing, Africa CDC managed the journal's editorial oversight and peer review system. This initiative by Africa CDC aimed to contribute to increasing scientific knowledge and networking between Africa and the global community, ensure that African public health research is adequately and accurately reported by Africans, and encourage more African researchers to publish their research. Starting in 2019, the co-Editors-in-Chief of JPHIA have been Professor Nicaise Ndembi, the Institute of Human Virology in and the Senior Advisor for the Director General at Africa CDC, and Professor Vittorio Colizzi, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy and Evangelic University of Cameroon, Cameroon. See news item. In 2022, Africa CDC purchased JPHIA from PAGEPress. In 2023, JPHIA received its first Journal Impact Factor (JIF) from the WoS. As of December 2023, 12 issues, 180 articles, and two conference proceedings have been published in JPHIA. In 2024, JPHIA moved to an open access publisher based on the African continent, AOSIS in Durbanville, South Africa. Prof Nicaise Ndembi is the journal's Editor-in-Chief.

Publication frequency

The journal publishes one issue each year. Articles are published online when ready for publication and then printed in an end-of-year compilation. Additional issues may be published for special events (e.g. conferences) and when special themes are addressed.

Types of articles published

Read full details on the submissions guidelines page.

Open access

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access. Learn more about the journal copyright, licensing and publishing rights.

Review process

The journal has a double-blinded peer review process. Manuscripts are initially examined by the editorial staff and are sent by the Editor-in-Chief to two expert independent reviewers, either directly or by a Section Editor. Read our full peer review process.

Marketing

AOSIS has a number of ways in which we promote publications. Learn more here.

Membership

AOSIS is a member and/or subscribes to the standards and code of practices of several leading industry organisations. This includes the Directory of Open Access Journals, Ithenticate, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, CrossRef, Portico and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Learn more here.

All articles published in the journal are included in:

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• Google Scholar
• PubMed Central
• SCOPUS
• Web of Science Other Coverage, Emerging Sources Citation Index, ESCI

We are working closely with relevant indexing services to ensure that articles published in the journal will be available in their databases when appropriate.

The full text of the journal articles is deposited in the following archives to guarantee long-term preservation:

• AOSIS Library
• Portico
• SA ePublications,Sabinet
• South African Government Libraries

AOSIS is also a participant in the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) initiative. LOCKSS will enable any library to maintain their own archive of content from AOSIS and other publishers, with minimal technical effort and using cheaply available hardware. The URL to the LOCKSS Publisher Manifest for the journal is, https://publichealthinafrica.org/index.php/jphia/gateway/lockss. Please inform us if you are using our manifest as we would like to add your name to the list above.

A journal's Impact Factor was originally designed in 1963 as a tool for libraries to compare journals, and identify the most popular ones to subscribe to. It was never intended to measure the quality of journals, and definitely not the quality of individual articles.

The Impact Factor is a journal-level measurement reflecting the yearly average number of citations of recent articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher Impact Factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. Therefore, the more often articles in the journal are cited, the higher its Impact Factor.

The Impact Factor is highly discipline-dependent due to the speed with which articles get cited in each field and the related citation practices. The percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication varies highly amongst disciplines. Accordingly, one cannot compare journals across disciplines based on their relative Impact Factors.

We provide several citation-based measurements for each of our journals, if available. We caution our authors, readers and researchers that they should assess the quality of the content of individual articles, and not judge the quality of articles by the reputation of the journal in which they are published.