Author Guidelines

These general guidelines serve as a supplement to the journal’s editorial style guide.  Please refer to both documents when preparing your manuscript for submission. 

HHR EDITORIAL STYLE GUIDE

  1. Open access fee

Health and Human Rights does not charge authors article processing fees unless authors can utilize an institutional open access publishing grant. Many institutions and research facilities have funding grants available to support publication in open access journals—some are listed in this  OA Directory. If authors cannot access OA grants, article processing fees are waived by HHR. Authors are asked whether they can pay this fee only  after  a Full Paper or Perspective Essay is accepted for publication, and inability to pay will not impact publication. If authors are able to use open access funds to cover article publishing fees, they will receive an invoice for US$2000.

Health and Human Rights does not charge an article submission fee.

  1. Criteria for authorship

An author is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a study. Authorship credit is based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) the drafting of the manuscript or critical revision of same for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.

When a large, multi-center group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript. These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship.

When submitting a group author manuscript, the corresponding author should clearly indicate both the preferred citation and all individual authors as well as the group name. Other members of the group will be listed in the acknowledgments (see “other contributors” below). The National Library of Medicine indexes the group name and the names of individuals that the group has identified as being directly responsible for the manuscript.

Additional considerations:

  • All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed.
  • Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.
  • Authorship should not be attributed solely on the basis of acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group.
  • A “guarantor” should be identified to take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article. The name of this person will be published.
  • The order of authorship on the by-line is a joint decision of the co-authors. Authors should be prepared to explain the order in which authors are listed.
  1. Other contributors

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section, including those who provide:

  •    purely technical help or writing assistance
  •    general support, such as a department chair
  •    financial and material support, such as grants, equipment, or drugs.

Other contributors may be listed under headings such as “clinical investigators” or “participating investigators,” and their function or contribution should be described—for example, “served as scientific advisors,” or “critically reviewed the study proposal.”

  1. Competing interests

All authors will need to complete Competing Interest statements regarding potential conflict of interests related to author commitments and project support. Authors should read the  Competing Interest Policy  prior to submitting their manuscripts and provide all relevant information at the time of submission.

  1. Word count

Please include a word count for the text only (excluding abstract, acknowledgments, figure legends, and references) as well as a separate word count for the abstract. Please see journal guidelines on the website for suggested word length.  Submitted manuscripts must not exceed 7,000 words, inclusive of abstract and references.

Perspective Essays must not exceed 3,000 words, including references. No abstract is required.

Letters to the Editor must not exceed 500 words.

Viewpoints must not exceed 1,500 words, including references.

6. Abstract

Full papers submitted for peer review must include an abstract. The abstract should reflect the content and findings of the article and emphasize new and important aspects of or observations related to the study. These are written in a narrative paragraph, and are not broken into sections. Abstracts must  not exceed 200 words.

Perspective Essays do not require abstracts.

  1. Figures and tables
  • Please state the number of figures, tables, and illustrations accompanying your submission so that editorial staff and reviewers can verify their receipt.
  • Supply figures in a format that can be edited so that we can regularize and edit spelling, the font and size of labels and legends, and the content and presentation of captions.
  • Illustrations must be of publishable quality.
  • Please include your data spreadsheet with figures prepared as charts and graphs.
  • If you are submitting a figure as an image file (e.g., PNG or JPG), do not include the caption as part of the figure; instead, provide the captions with the Word file of the main text of your article.
  1. Title of article

We recommend short, effective titles that contain necessary and relevant information required for accurate electronic retrieval of the work. Please also keep the following in mind:

  • The title should be comprehensible to readers outside your field.
  • Avoid specialist abbreviations.
  1. Style

Please refer to the  HHR style guide  when preparing your document for submission.  In preparing manuscript for submission, authors may refer to the  Chicago Manual of Style  for questions that are not answered by HHR editorial  guidelines.

  1. References

HHR reviews manuscripts with references formatted as endnotes. Please follow the references section in the style guide to ensure correct style and formatting. References must be formatted in HHR style prior to document submission. Note that endnotes are for citations only; HHR does not accept contextual footnotes.

  1. Ethics approval

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the  Declaration of Helsinki  and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A statement detailing this, including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number where appropriate, must appear in all manuscripts reporting such research.

12. Plagiarism 

The journal uses software to actively check for plagiarism and will not publish papers that have been published in part or full elsewhere.

Please submit manuscripts to the editors at  HHRSubmissions@hsph.harvard.edu.