ISSN

2071-2928 (PRINT)
2071-2936 (ONLINE)

Focus and scope

The African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine (PHCFM), launched in 2008, is the official journal of WONCA (World Organization of Family Doctors) Africa Region and the PRIMAFAMED (Primary Care and Family Medicine) network. It provides a platform for scholarly exchange between family medicine and primary health care researchers and practitioners across Africa. It provides a contextual and holistic view of family medicine and primary health care as practised across the continent. The journal is indispensable to primary health care practitioners, family medicine specialists and academics with an interest in the African continent and offers an engaging insight into the growth of these disciplines from a distinctly African perspective. PHCFM seeks to publish innovative research, reviews, country profiles, short reports, editorials and opinion pieces on all aspects of primary health care and family medicine in the African context. Within the fields of family medicine and primary health care, research can focus on health promotion, disease prevention, therapeutics and clinical medicine, disability and rehabilitation, palliative care and pain management, district health services and systems, community-orientated primary care, sexual health, rural health care, oral health, emergency care, and the education and training of professionals and health workers.

Historic data

AOSIS launched the African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine (PHCFM) in 2008. The official launch of this exciting journal took place at the Primafamed 'Improving the quality of family medicine training in Sub-Saharan Africa' conference (www.primafamed.ugent.be), held in Kampala, Uganda, on 17 to 21 November 2008. As the first journal of its kind in Africa, PHCFM serves as a repository for cutting-edge, peer-reviewed research in all fields of primary health care and family medicine. The journal boasts a strong international editorial board comprising African and international scholars. In 2012, the Southern African Sexual Health Association endorsed PHCFM as its official mouth-piece. Because new articles are published online on a rolling basis, the journal content will be available immediately and freely ('Open Access') at www.phcfm.org. It is also available in hard copy to subscribers at the end of each yearly volume. Start up funding for the African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine (PHCFM) was supplied by the Flemish Interuniversity Council (VLIR), Department of University Cooperation for Development, through the project VLIR-ZEIN 2006 PR320, with financial support from the Belgian government, Directorate General for Development Cooperation. 

PHCFM is the official journal of:

• WONCA (World Organization of Family Doctors) Africa Region.

• The Southern African Sexual Health Association (SASHA) endorsed PHCFM as its official mouthpiece to develop sexual health as an academic discipline under the control of leading experts in the field. 
• PainSA endorsed PHCFM as its official mouthpiece to develop pain management and palliative care as an academic discipline under the control of leading experts in the field.

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:

• African Index Medicus
• Cabells Journalytics
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• EBSCO Host
• Embase
• GALE, CENGAGE Learning
• Google Scholar
• Hinari
• Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, Level 1
• ProQuest
• PubMed / MEDLINE
• PubMed Central
• SciELO SA
• 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://phcfm.org/index.php/phcfm/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.