About the Journal

Scope

JCPH publishes three types of submission, as outlined below. Please note that word limits include all text and references.

Research Papers. We consider submissions from any discipline, across the social and health sciences, and both qualitative and quantitative empirical papers.  These should be no more than 8000 words in total. The research  should be directly relevant to public health (including social medicine, health promotion, population health and related issues). The paper should be directly relevant to critical public health. All papers should be written for an international and multi-disciplinary readership. 

Research & Practice Notes. These are shorter empirical papers (up to 3000 words in total), which can report pilot studies, case studies, or critical reviews that are likely to be of wider (international) interest.  

Commentary. The Commentary section (limit 4000 words in total) is for innovative and scholarly discussions which provide fresh perspectives and new thinking on public health issues.  There is limited space for Commentary papers, so we cannot consider general essays or reviews which are unlikely to progress scholarship on a topic.  

JCPH operates a double-anonymous peer review policy.

JCPH is 'diamond open access': there are no fees for publishing or reading articles in the journal.

History 

The journal began life in 1979 as the newsletter Radical Community Medicine (RCN).  The archive of RCN is digitised on the Critical Public Health Network site.  RCN  was rebranded as Critical Public Health in 1990, and became a fully refereed international journal in 1998, with the publisher (then Carfax) taking ownership of the journal.  In 2023, as the constraints of commercial academic publishing became increasingly difficult to align with the principles of the Critical Public Health Network, the editorial board resigned en masse to set up the Journal of Critical Public Health, as a publication which could be owned and managed by the wider critical public health community.  An editorial discussed some of the tensions that led to JCPH being established in 2023.