Submissions

Submission Preparation 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.

The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in the cover letter to the Editor).
The submission file is a Microsoft Word document file format for written submissions and PDF for artwork submissions.
The submission (when applicable) has clearly reported ethics review approval or ethical review exemption. Authors must be able to produce a letter of REB approval or exemption if requested.
The text is double-spaced; uses a 12-point font; includes page and line numbers; employs 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. Please note that APA formatting must be adhered to.
Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
Blinding: If submitting an original research manuscript, research note, or commentary please ensure all identifying information is removed from your submission. If personal information (e.g., Name, affiliations, institutions, references to self-publications) are not blinded your manuscript will be sent back to you.
All submissions require a cover letter that state the relevance to one UN Sustainable Development Goal and/or one Healthy Populations Institute Flagship Project. This cover letter should also give a brief overview of the manuscript for editors and include the names and email contact for at least 3 potential reviewers.
If submitting for consideration in a special issue or call, please state this in your cover letter.
Limits on resubmissions: If no revisions are submitted based on reviewers’ comments after 3 months your submission file will be archived. The editors ask that you resubmit as a new submission once you have made the edits. If manuscript requires more than 3 rounds of reviews, you may resubmit it as a new submission or choose to pull your submission to submit to another journal.
IMPORTANT: If revisions are requested, a letter in response to reviewer comments is required. The letter should clearly explain how each comment was addressed. The manuscript document should have all changes highlighted or track changes to indicate what changes were made. Revised documents must be readable with track changes/highlights or it will be returned to the authors.

Author Guidelines

Interested in submitting to this journal? We recommend that you review the About the Journal page for the journal's section policies, as well as these guidelines.

Authors need to register with the journal prior to submitting. If already registered with OJS, authors can simply log in and begin the five-step process. If the author has no existing OJS account, email hpj@dal.ca and we will set up your registration.

Submission eligibility criteria:

Submissions must relate to population health and/or health equity, best identified through connection with at least one UN Sustainable Development Goal and/or one Healthy Populations Institute Flagship Project. Authors should identify in their cover letter which Sustainable Development Goal and/or Flagship Project theme their work mostly closely aligns with, recognizing that health intersects with other aspects of inequality, injustice, discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion.
Submissions must relate to at least one of the competencies or guiding principles as outlined in the HPI Competency Framework (Capacity Enhancement; Cultural Safety; Critical Reflection; Community Empowerment & Engagement, Communication; Leadership; Agents of Change; Knowledge & Knowledge Translation; Research, Policy & Practice; Programming & Evaluation). Additionally, “Health” broadly refers to a state of physical, emotional, spiritual, or social well-being.
Any submissions can be authored or co-authored by a student (or group of students), established researchers, or non-traditional co-authors (e.g., Community Members, Elders, Mentors). HPJ encourages student-led submissions.
Acceptable submissions include: academic-style articles (e.g., original research, literature review, review protocols), commentaries, research notes, book reviews, infographics and visual artworks including photography, sculpture, beadwork, painting, illustration, etc., stories, and poetry.
Academic article submissions should aim to be ~4000 words (excluding figures, tables, references, and appendix). Each academic article must include a structured abstract not exceeding 250 words with the following sections: Introduction, Objectives, Methods, Results, Conclusion/Discussion.
Commentaries and Research Notes should aim to be ~1000 words (excluding references).
Book reviews should aim to be ~500 words (excluding references).
Visual artwork submissions must include 1-4 high resolution image(s) of your work and a 300-500-word description. Story submissions should aim to be ~2000 words, and poetry submissions should aim to be ~500 words.
Infographics can be submitted to accompany a full article or as an individual piece. If submitting individually, please include an abstract (~250 words) and references.
IMPORTANT: Submissions must be double-spaced, with page numbers and line numbers. APA formatting is preferred for in-text citations and the reference list.
IMPORTANT: All written submission should be submitted as Microsoft Word documents. All visual artworks (including infographics) must initially be submitted as PDFs.
IMPORTANT: Your submission must be blinded for review. The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc. With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file.

Submissions are open on an on-going basis and if accepted, will be assigned to and published in the scheduled next issue.

Research Note

Research Note submissions are meant to accommodate reflexive accounts from the perspective of the researchers about the research process as a whole. Therefore, research notes will, in most cases, reference an already published work. While process and learning focused, submissions must move beyond methods. As such, while a summary of the work that the research note is required for context, the main focus of a Research Note submission is to provide information about key considerations, limitations, unanticipated outcomes or learning that may have stemmed from the research process itself but was not a part of the already published work.

vary in length and format depending on the type of research the note is connected to.

Commentary

Commentaries should aim to be ~1000 words (excluding references).

Articles

Academic article submissions should aim to be ~4000 words (excluding figures, tables, references, and appendix). Each academic article must include a structured abstract not exceeding 250 words with the following sections: Introduction, Objectives, Methods, Results, Conclusion/Discussion.

Infographics

Infographics can be submitted to accompany a full article or as an individual piece. If submitting individually, please include an abstract (~250 words) and reference as supplemental documents.

Book Review

Book reviews should aim to be ~500 words (excluding references).

Book reviews undergo editorial review.

Artistic Work

Visual artwork submissions must include 1-4 high resolution image(s) of your work and a 300-500-word description.

Artistic submissions undergo editorial review.

Short Story and Poetry

Story submissions should aim to be ~2000 words, and poetry submissions should aim to be ~500 words.

Submissions will undergo editorial review.

Copyright Notice

The journal aims to reduce barriers to publishing and sharing research and inequalities to accessing information.This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. The open-access nature of the journal means that there will be no charge for authors or readers to use the journal. The journal has a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (CCBYNC) attribution which allows the author (and others) to share and distribute their full-text article in other public domains, such as Google Scholar or Research Gate.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.