Health Economics

Author Guidelines

Author Guidelines

1. AIMS & SCOPE

The Journal publishes articles on all aspects of health economics: theoretical contributions, empirical studies and analyses of health policy from the economic perspective. Its scope includes the determinants of health and its definition and valuation, as well as the demand for and supply of health care; planning and market mechanisms; micro-economic evaluation of individual procedures and treatments; and evaluation of the performance of health care systems.

Contributions should typically be original and innovative. As a rule, the Journal does not include routine applications of cost-effectiveness analysis, discrete choice experiments and costing analyses. 

2. MANUSCRIPT CATEGORIES

Health Economics invites the following types of submission:

Research articles

Research articles are the Journal’s primary mode of communication. Research articles should not exceed 5000 words of body text. Tables and figures should be kept to a minimum.

Health Economics Letters

The Journal encourages the submission of concise reports which are published as Health Economics Letters. These should not exceed 2000 words of body text. A summary is required. All Letters are peer-reviewed.

Editorials

Summaries of pertinent issues, commentaries on recently published papers, or freestanding pieces expressing an opinion—are typically invited. Authors who wish to submit an unsolicited Editorial should first contact one of the Editors to determine its suitability for publication in the Journal. Editorials should not exceed 1500 words of body text.

3. SUBMISSION OF MANUSCRIPTS

All submissions should be made online at the Health Economics ScholarOne Manuscripts (formerly known as Manuscript Central) site - http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hec. New users should first create an account. Once a user is logged onto the site, submissions should be made via the Author Centre.

Authors must only supply to the Editorial office:

• Conflict of Interest Disclosure Form with original signature(s) - without these we are unable to accept the submission, and
• permission grants - if the manuscript contains extracts, including illustrations, from other copyright works (including material from online or intranet sources) it is the author's responsibility to obtain written permission from the owners of the publishing rights to reproduce such extracts using the Wiley Permission Request Form

4. EDITORIAL OFFICE

Mrs Frances Sharp, The Editorial Office, University of York, Centre for Health Economics, York, YO10 5DD, UK; Email: hejournal@york.ac.uk ; Fax: +44 1904 321402.

5. PREPARATION OF MANUSCRIPTS

Manuscripts must be written in English

Text should be supplied in a word processed format such as Microsoft Word for Windows. LaTeX files may be submitted provided that a pdf file is provided in addition to the source file. Charts and tables are considered textual and should be supplied in the same format. Figures (illustrations, diagrams, photographs) should be supplied in gif, jpeg, tif or eps format.

All manuscripts must be typed in 12 pt font with lines double spaced and margins of at least 2.5 cm.

Abbreviations must be defined when first used, both in the abstract and in the main text.

Manuscripts must be as succinct as possible. Repetition of information or data in different sections of the manuscript must be carefully avoided. Text must comply with the word limits defined in Section 2, and, where appropriate, include:

Title Page

The first page of all manuscripts (including correspondence) should contain the following information:

• the title of the paper
• a running head not exceeding 50 characters
• 2–6 article keywords
• manuscript word, table and figure count
• names of authors
• names of the institutions at which the research was conducted
• name, address, telephone and fax number, and email address of corresponding author
• a statement of all funding sources that supported the work
• any conflict of interest disclosures (see Section 5).

Abstracts

Abstracts (maximum 200 words) are required for all articles. Abstracts should contain no citations to previously published work.

Text

This should in general, but not necessarily, be divided into numbered sections with the headings: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Acknowledgements, References, Tables, Legends and Figures.

Headings should be numbered consecutively, e.g., 1. INTRODUCTION; 2. METHODS; 2.1 Literature search; 2.2 Study selection; 3. RESULTS

Tables and Figures

Tables and figures should not be inserted in the appropriate place in the text but should be included at the end of the manuscript, each on a separate page.

Tables and figures should be referred to in text as follows: Figure 1, Figures 2–4; Table I, Table II. The place at which a table or figure is to be inserted in the printed text should be indicated clearly on a manuscript. Each table and/or figure must have a legend that explains its purpose without reference to the text.

Authors are themselves responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce previously published figures or tables.

References

References should be in 'Harvard' format, i.e., names and dates in brackets in the text (Jones, 2000; Smith and Jones, 2001; Jones et al ., 2002), and the full reference listed at the end of the paper, in alphabetical order by first author, as follows:

Morris S, Devlin N, Parkin D. 2007. Economic Analysis in Health Care . Wiley: Chichester.

Moscone F, Tosetti E, Knapp M. 2007. Sur model with spatial effects: an application to mental health expenditure. Health Economics 16 : 1403–1408.

Health Economic Evaluations Database. http://heed.wiley.com [1 January 2008].

6. DECLARATIONS

Original Publication

Submission of a manuscript will be held to imply that it contains original unpublished work and is not being submitted for publication elsewhere at the same time. The author must supply a full statement to the Editor about all submissions and previous reports that might be regarded as redundant or duplicate publication of the same or very similar work.

Conflicts of Interest

Authors are responsible for disclosing all financial and personal relationships between themselves and others that might be perceived by others as biasing their work. To prevent ambiguity, authors must state explicitly whether potential conflicts do or do not exist.

Ethics

When reporting experiments on human subjects, indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 1983. Do not use patients' names, initials or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. When reporting experiments on animals, indicate whether the institution's or a national research council's guide for, or any national law on, the care and use of laboratory animals was followed. A statement describing explicitly the ethical background to the studies being reported should be included in all manuscripts in the Materials and Methods section. Ethics committee or institutional review board approval should be stated.

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential but patient data should never be altered or falsified in an attempt to attain anonymity. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity.

Authorship

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. One or more authors should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article. Authorship credit should be based only on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; 3) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2 and 3 must all be met. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data or general supervision of the research group, by themselves, do not justify authorship. All others who contributed to the work who are not authors should be named in the Acknowledgements section.

Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

As a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), adherence to these submission criteria is considered essential for publication in Health Economics ; mandatory fields are included in the online submission process to ensure this. If, at a later stage in the submission process or even after publication, a manuscript or authors are found to have disregarded these criteria, it is the duty of the Editor to report this to COPE. COPE may recommend that action be taken, including but not exclusive to, informing the authors' professional regulatory body and/or institution of such a dereliction.

The website for COPE may be accessed at: http://www.publicationethics.org.uk

7. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON ACCEPTANCE

Proofs

Proofs of accepted articles will be sent to the author for checking. This stage is to be used only to correct errors that may have been introduced during the production process. Prompt return of the corrected proofs, preferably within two days of receipt, will minimise the risk of the paper being held over to a later issue.

Offprints

Free access to the final PDF offprint of your article will be available via Author Services only. Please therefore sign up for Author Services if you would like to access your article PDF offprint and enjoy the many other benefits the service offers.

Early View

Early View is Wiley's exclusive service presenting individual articles online as soon as they are ready before the release of the compiled print issue. Early View articles are complete, citable and are published in an average time of 6 weeks from acceptance.

OnlineOpen

OnlineOpen is available to authors of primary research articles who wish to make their article available to non-subscribers on publication, or whose funding agency requires grantees to archive the final version of their article. With OnlineOpen, the author, the author's funding agency, or the author's institution pays a fee to ensure that the article is made available to non-subscribers upon publication via Wiley Online Library, as well as deposited in the funding agency's preferred archive. For the full list of terms and conditions, see http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/onlineopen#OnlineOpen_Terms.

Any authors wishing to send their paper OnlineOpen will be required to complete the payment form available from our website at: https://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/onlineopen_order.asp

Prior to acceptance there is no requirement to inform an Editorial Office that you intend to publish your paper OnlineOpen if you do not wish to. All OnlineOpen articles are treated in the same way as any other article. They go through the journal's standard peer-review process and will be accepted or rejected based on their own merit.

Note to NIH grantees

Pursuant to NIH mandate, Wiley-Blackwell will post the accepted version of contributions authored by NIH grant-holders to PubMedCentral upon acceptance. This accepted version will be made publicy available 12 months after publication. For further information, click here

Best Paper Award

On a biennial basis, Health Economics provides a prize of $2,000 for the best paper published in the two preceding volumes. For further information, click here