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About Health SA Gesondheid

This page includes information on the focus and scope of Health SA Gesondheid as well as the policies and publication procedures. For details on how to prepare and submit a manuscript via the online manuscript submission system, please see the instructions for authors.

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Focus and scope ↑

Health SA Gesondheid - Journal of Interdisciplinary Health Sciences is an open access, peer-reviewed interdisciplinary and interprofessional scholarly journal that aims to promote communication, collaboration and teamwork between professions and disciplines within the health sciences to address problems that cross and affect disciplinary boundaries.

The journal is the only English and Afrikaans journal that publishes original articles on issues related to public health, including implications for practical applications and service delivery that are of concern and relevance to Africa and other developing countries.  It facilitates the gathering and critical testing of insights and viewpoints on knowledge from different disciplines involved in health service delivery.

The journal offers the breadth of outlook required to promote health science education, research and professional practice.

Unique features distinguishing this journal:

Health SA Gesondheid - Journal of Interdisciplinary Health Sciences explores issues and posits solutions to current challenges existing in health care from an interdisciplinary perspective within Africa and other developing countries, including but not limited to:

  • improvement of health safety and service delivery
  • management and measurement of health services
  • evaluation and assessment of health care needs
  • prevention of ill health and health-affecting behaviours
  • promotion of healthy lifestyles
  • health security, economics, policy and regulations.

The journal has a strong regional focus (South Africa) with abstracts published in English and Afrikaans. It offers a nurturing environment for young and novice researchers to showcase their work whilst upholding the standards of health science education, research and professional practice.

Health SA Gesondheid with its interdisciplinary scope attracts interest from a wide audience of scientists and health professionals working in the areas of health care management, health care economics, policy making, nursing, psychology, sociology, ethics and education.

Submissions in English (full article) and Afrikaans (full article) will be accepted.

Open Access ↑

Open Access refers to free and unrestricted access via the Internet to articles published in Health SA Gesondheid. This free access has usage limitations as stipulated in the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) usage license. The license allows redistribution and reuse of all articles on the condition that Health SA Gesondheid is appropriately credited.

Peer review policy ↑

Health SA Gesondheid has a double-blinded peer review process. Manuscripts are initially examined by editorial staff and are sent by the Editor-in-Chief to two expert independent reviewers, either directly or by a Section Editor. The editors do not inform the reviewers of the identity of the author(s). The reviewers’ identities are not disclosed to the authors either. The reviewers’ comments as well as recommendations regarding an article’s form may be passed on to the corresponding author and may also include suggested revisions. Manuscripts that are not approved for publication will not be returned to the submitting author in any format. Please note that AOSIS OpenJournals do not retain copies of rejected articles.

The peer review process aims to ensure that all published articles:

  • present the results of primary scientific research
  • report results that have not been published elsewhere
  • are scientifically sound
  • provide new scientific knowledge where experiments, statistics and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail so that another researcher will be able to reproduce the experiments described
  • provide conclusions that are presented in an appropriate manner and are supported by the data
  • are presented in an intelligible and logic manner and are written in clear and unambiguous English
  • meet all applicable research standards with regard to the ethics of experimentation and research integrity
  • adhere to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.

The journal publisher, AOSIS OpenJournals, is a member of the CrossCheck plagiarism detection initiative. In the event of suspected plagiarism in submitted works CrossCheck is available to the editors of Health SA Gesondheid to detect instances of overlapping and similar text. AOSIS OpenJournals endorses and applies the standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which promotes integrity in peer-reviewed research publications.

Publication frequency ↑

Health SA Gesondheid publishes one issue per year. Individual articles are published as soon as they are ready for publication by adding them to the table of contents of the 'current' volume and issue. In this way, Health SA Gesondheid aims to speed up the process of manuscript publication from submission to becoming available on the website. Special issues may be added on an ad hoc basis to the journal throughout a particular year and will form part of consecutive issues thereafter.

Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript via the submission system at any time by logging into the journal website’s personalised section.

Indexing ↑

After publication in Health SA Gesondheid, the complete text of each article is deposited immediately and permanently archived in major bibliographic databases:

Additionally, Health SA Gesondheid uses the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) system to create a distributed archiving system amongst participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

The journal is always seeking to establish a LOCKSS-compliant archive with university libraries. The URL to the LOCKSS Publisher Manifest for Health SA Gesondheid is: http://www.hsag.co.za/index.php/hsag/gateway/lockss 

Please inform us if you are using our manifest as we would like to add your name to the list above.

DoHET accreditation ↑

The following lists are regarded as accredited journals by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DoHET):

Journals appearing on the IBSS:

Journals appearing on the three indices of Thomson Reuters products:

List of approved South African journals: Journals that do not appear in the abovementioned international indices but are published in South Africa and meet specific criteria may be included in this list.

In conclusion: Health SA Gesondheid meets the criteria of the DoHET (see List of approved South African journals as maintained by the DoHET). It is therefore accredited and approved by the DoHET for its inclusion in the subsidy system for being a research publication for South Africa.



ISSN: 1025-9848 (print) | ISSN: 2071-9736 (online)Follow us on:

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