About Asia Pacific Family Medicine

What is Asia Pacific Family Medicine?

Asia Pacific Family Medicine, the official journal for the Asia Pacific Region of WONCA, is an open access journal aiming to provide a forum for the dissemination of high quality regional research and to enhance the standards of family medicine by focusing on best practice.

Family medicine embraces the disciplines of primary care, general practice and community medicine. It is a discipline that emphasizes comprehensive and continuous care of referred patients, and for non-referred, undifferentiated problems irrespective of patient age, gender or ethnicity and is usually centred within the community but may embrace some hospital settings. Medial care in this environment addresses the bio-psycho-social nature of illness, providing holistic care for the total patient irrespective of their problem. The journal welcomes practical, relevant articles covering the broad range of interests within the field of family medicine.

To browse articles published in the journal prior to its move to BioMed Central click here.

Content overview

Asia Pacific Family Medicine considers the following types of article:

• Research: reports of data from original research.
• Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the scope of the journal. These articles are usually written by opinion leaders that have been invited by the Editorial Board.
• Book reviews: short summaries of the strengths and weaknesses of a book, evaluating its overall usefulness to the intended audience.
• Case reports: reports of clinical cases that can be educational, describe a diagnostic or therapeutic dilemma, suggest an association, or present an important adverse reaction. All case report articles should indicate that informed consent to publish the information was granted from the patients or their guardians.
• Case studies: descriptions of a major healthcare intervention, usually from a public health perspective. Case study articles should include a rigorous assessment of the processes and impact of the intervention as well as recommendations for future interventions.
• Commentaries: short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the journal's scope.
• Short reports: brief reports of data from original research.

Peer review policies

All articles submitted to Asia Pacific Family Medicine will be sent to at least two recognised experts in the field of the submitted manuscript for peer review. Statisticians will be consulted where necessary. The peer review process is closed, meaning reviewers remain anonymous. The journal aims to provide authors with a first response (accept; accept after revisions; reject) within 2 months. The final decision is made by the Editor-in-Chief in charge of a specific article, in consultation with the co-Editors. The Editors will re-open a discussion where authors appeal.

Edited by Lyn Clearihan, Tai Pong Lam and Zorayda Leopando, Asia Pacific Family Medicine is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Asia Pacific Family Medicine

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central.

Articles in Asia Pacific Family Medicine should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Asia Pac Fam Med 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Asia Pacific Family Medicine does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Asia Pacific Family Medicine, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Asia Pacific Family Medicine using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Asia Pacific Family Medicine is published  by BioMed Central, an independent publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is Open Access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Asia Pacific Family Medicine however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Asia Pacific Family Medicine's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Asia Pacific Family Medicine will be available.

Asia Pacific Family Medicine is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.