Instructions for Authors

Article types

JPP publishes research articles, reviews, commentaries, book reviews, molecular images, reports, perspectives on published reports in the form of journal clubs, and views. The journal also publishes editorials on policy.

Original articles, review articles, reprint articles and case reports are peer reviewed. Word limits:

• Original articles: 3,500–4,000 words.
• Review articles: up to 3,500 words.
• Commentaries: not more than 700 words.

Submitting your manuscript

Manuscripts are submitted online through Sage’s peer-review system at https://peerreview.sagepub.com/pha. There is no charge for submitting a manuscript. Submission implies that the work has not been published before and is not under consideration by another journal.

The author details entered in the submission system — names, affiliations and the corresponding author’s contact details — must exactly match those on the manuscript and/or title page. List each author’s affiliation as the institution where the research was conducted; an author who has since moved can give the new affiliation in a note at the end of the manuscript.

Authors are encouraged to link their ORCID iD in the submission system before acceptance: an ORCID iD can only appear on the published article if it was linked beforehand.

Word is the preferred file format. LaTeX files are also accepted, using the template available from the Sage Journal Author Gateway.

Preparing your manuscript

Include a structured abstract of 250–300 words, placed between the title and the main text, under the headings Background, Purpose, Methods, Results and Conclusion. It should concisely state the purpose of the research, the major findings and the conclusions.

Give an ethics approval statement under its own heading, even if approval is also mentioned in the Methods section. If ethics approval was not required, say so explicitly.

Declare all sources of funding and any conflicts of interest, and disclose any use of artificial intelligence tools in preparing the work. If the manuscript has been posted as a preprint, give the preprint’s DOI at submission.

Peer review and publication ethics

JPP operates double-anonymized peer review.

The journal is committed to fulfilling and preserving ethical standards throughout the publication process, and closely follows the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

Open access and article processing charge

JPP is a gold open access journal: articles are freely accessible online in perpetuity under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0).

A one-time article processing charge (APC) is payable — by the author, their institution or funder — once a manuscript has been accepted after peer review, before it is published: INR 30,000 plus 18% GST for authors in India, and USD 800 plus taxes for the rest of the world.

After acceptance you will receive instructions by email to complete the open access process, including signing the appropriate Creative Commons licence and, where applicable, paying the APC or assigning a bill payer.

Full submission guidelines

The complete and current guidelines, including any changes to fees and policies, are published by Sage:

• Sage submission guidelines for JPP ↗
• Submit a manuscript ↗
• JPP on Sage Journals ↗