Submission Guidelines

We regret that the journal Innovations in Global Health Professions Education is no longer publishing. All existing content will remain freely available, but new submissions will not be accepted.

Journal article types

Innovations in Global Health Professions Education (IGHPE) is open to a variety of types of article, and will entertain ideas for innovative formats. However, common article types would include:

Original research reports: Written by the researchers actually performed the piece of research described; such reports typically include original data not previously reported.

Systematic reviews/meta-analyses: A literature review that uses strict pre-established methodologies for finding original research papers and/or unpublished data, and analyzing the combined data from those resources.

Literature reviews: Surveys of existing literature that seek to describe the history, predominant themes, current state, or future directions of some area of research, practice, or scholarship.

Commentaries: Shorter items that discuss an issue with varying degrees of reference to the literature. Likely topics might include recent research or developments affecting health professional education.

Case studies: Descriptions of real-life individual situations or interventions within a given context

Content guidelines for submissions

In the interest of clarity, reports about educational innovations should have sufficient information about the following ten items:

1. Title and abstract. In the abstract, briefly state which kind of educational innovation—a one-time intervention, a program, a recurring measure, etc.—was developed. In which context was the innovation applied? It could be geographic or learner-specific, such as for students, nurses, GPs, medical specialists, paramedics, pharmacists, among others. What was the aim of the innovation and what was achieved? Please also provide keywords for your manuscript so that it can be retrieved easily through document databases, such as MEDLINE/PubMed. 

2. Background within health professions education. What is the theoretical background of the innovation? Why was it designed and/or applied? Are there reports that describe similar innovations?

3. Purpose. What are the learning objectives of the educational innovation? For example, is it a change in factual knowledge or clinical performance? How can achievement of the change be measured or quantified? Which behavior or activity of the health professionals is the innovation intended to influence and/or change?

4. Setting. What is the local/regional background of the innovation? What is its organizational background? Who are its stakeholders? Is the innovation part of a more comprehensive program? Who funded the innovation?

5. General conditions. Who planned the innovation? Who taught it? What was the composition of the group of learners (age, sex, educational background)? Were there alternatives to the design of the innovation, and why was one design selected?

6. Formats. What kind of educational resources were used for the innovation? Simulated patients, virtual learning environments, lectures, small group work? Is the innovation a new curriculum, software, or something else? Which and how many steps does the innovation have? How far can individual steps be changed without changing the other steps or the entire innovation?

7. Analytical methods. How were the changes by the innovation measured? Were statistical tools or software used? In which way? Did learners evaluate the innovation? If by questionnaires, which ones were used?

8. Situation analysis. What was the situation before the innovation, and how did it change afterwards? Which elements and stakeholders of the situation or location helped design and apply the innovation? What were the barriers to its successful conclusion?

9. Outcomes. Which outcomes of the innovation were observed? What kind of impact did these outcomes have on healthcare delivery? Was the innovation applied several times, and did it change because of ‘lessons learned’ after first-time application? Were there unexpected outcomes (harms as well as benefits), and did they influence the final design of the innovation? Were there organizational changes caused by the innovation?

10. Summary. What is the most important aspect of the innovation? What are the recommendations for other innovators? Which elements of the innovation have relevance beyond its specific context or on a global level? Which further innovations are possible because of the implementation of the reported one? What in particular contributes to the persistent change achieved by the innovation?

Publication ethics

The editorial team of IGHPE assists authors to publish their contributions through a transparent and timely process. Hereby the publication adheres to the Standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE, http://publicationethics.org/resources/international-standards-for-editors-and-authors), and its editors apply the Recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE, http://www.icmje.org/recommendations). We encourage authors to familiarize themselves with the guidelines of both organizations.

Publication policies

• Open Access. We at IGHPE pursue a full Open Access policy. Publication in IGHPE is free of charges, and upon acceptance, all publications are freely accessible on IGHPE’s website at www.innoHealthEd.com.
• Copyright policy. Contributions to IGHPE are published under a Creative Commons-Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) license which allows re-use of the work, provided due credit is given to its authors and IGHPE is mentioned as the platform that published the used material. For details, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0.

Submission guidelines

Before submission

• Plagiarism: Submitted manuscripts must not use wordings, sentences, or works of authors who do not occur in the manuscript’s authors’ list without giving credit by proper citation. For IGHPE we use iThenticate —all submitted manuscripts will be routinely checked against a database of existing publications to detect plagiarism.

• Simultaneous submission and prepublication. Submitting your work to IGHPE excludes its simultaneous submission to another journal or publishing platform. Also, a work can only be published in IGHPE if no part of it or itself has been published before. This does not pertain to contributions for meetings (speeches, presentations, recorded interviews or discussions, and posters), but please indicate from which meeting or conference the material derived. Manuscripts will undergo a pre-publication check after submission.

• Informed consent. Authors must ensure that informed consent was acquired if human subjects are involved in their work. Research on human subjects must comply with the Declaration of Helsinki.

• Conflicts of interest. See ‘4. Preparation of the manuscript for submission’.

• Language. Contributions must be in English language. Accepted manuscripts will be professionally copy-edited before publication. However, major changes of manuscript structure or text are authors’ responsibilities.

Where to submit

Please register at http://innoHealthEd.com/index.php/ighpe/user/register and submit your manuscript online. The software will guide you through the submission process and help you ensure that all required information has been submitted. In case of problems, and if you would like to contribute to IGHPE’s blog at http://innovators.innoHealthEd.com, please contact the editorial office at info@innoHealthEd.com.

After submission

• Estimated time from submission to decision is four to six weeks if the contribution is accepted without revisions.

• Editorial process. A submitted manuscript will first undergo plagiarism and prepublication checks. Next, the manuscript or work will be initially screened for suitability to the journal. Afterwards, the managing editor will send the submission to a member of the editorial board, who will select two peer reviewers with expertise on the topic of the work. For more information on peer review, see IGHPE’s Peer Review Policy and Reviewer Guidelines of IGHPE.

• Fast-track publishing. Manuscripts of special interest or offering exciting approaches to a highly debated topic can be directly published after reviewing by a member of the editorial board.
• Acceptance for publication. For acceptance, both peer reviewers should recommend publication. If the peer reviewers suggest revisions, these will be returned to the authors; they can then submit a revised version of their work.

Preparation of a work for submission

Cover letter

Please submit your work with a cover letter. This should summarize the relevance of your work for health professions education and its suitability for publication in IGHPE.

Title page

Please submit your work with a title page. This should contain:

• the full title of the work. Titles should be clear and brief, conveying the message of the paper, 

• all authors’ names with full first name, middle initial(s) and last name of each author, including Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) number if existing,

• affiliations of all authors with full address details,

• information about previous presentations of the work or parts of it at meetings and conferencesources of funding and any support—for all authors—for the work in the form of grants etc.,

• disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. State whether any author has financial interests relevant to the work,

• name, address and e-mail address(es) of the corresponding author(s), 

• word count (including references, but not tables and legends) and number of tables, figures, and supplementary files, and

• author contributions—please state each author’s specific contribution to the work.

File format

Text files can have the following formats: DOC, DOCX, RTF. We accept most commonly used audio- and video file formats but prefer MP3 for audio- and MP4 for video files. Please feel free to ask the editorial office if you have questions about file formats. Also, graphic material should be submitted, like figures of a traditional article, as TIFF files with a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. Audio files can be in MP3, and video files in MPG, MOV, or MP4 formats.

Manuscript requirements

Headings

Do not use more than three heading levels for manuscript sections and sub-sections. Indicate heading levels clearly in the manuscript text. 

Figures and tables

Preferred format of figures is TIFF with a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. For line art, use PDF or EPS if possible. Number figures and tables independently in ascending order.

Layout

Use double spacing for the manuscript text; format the text in a single column aligned to the left (no multiple columns, no block format); use a standard font (such as Times New Roman, Cambria, Arial, Helvetica) and 12 pt. font size. Last, please assign line and page numbers to the text. Do not use footnotes.

Abbreviations

Define abbreviations upon first appearance in the text. We recommend submitting your text together with a list of abbreviations, which will appear on page 1 in the final publication. Abbreviations should only be used for terms appearing at least three times. Please minimize the use of abbreviations.

Nomenclature and units

Use always correct and standard, established nomenclature. For measurement numbers, SI (metric) units must be used.

References

Please use the ICMJE ‘Vancouver’ style for giving references as described at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/uniform_requirements.html. In the text, refer to literature source with continuous superscript numbers—^{1, 2, 3…}