JMIR Public Health and Surveillance

A multidisciplinary journal that focuses on the intersection of public health and technology, public health informatics, mass media campaigns, surveillance, participatory epidemiology, and innovation in public health practice and research.

Editor-in-Chief:

Travis Sanchez, DVM, MPH, Emory University Rollins School of Public Health, USA


Impact Factor 3.5 CiteScore 13.7

JMIR Public Health & Surveillance (JPHS, Editor-in-chief: Travis Sanchez, Emory University/Rollins School of Public Health) is a top-ranked (Q1) Clarivate (SCIE, SSCI etc), ScopusPubMed, PubMed CentralMEDLINE, Sherpa/Romeo, DOAJ, Embase, CABI, and EBSCO/EBSCO essentials indexed, peer-reviewed international multidisciplinary journal with a unique focus on the intersection of innovation and technology in public health, and includes topics like public health informatics, surveillance (surveillance systems and rapid reports), participatory epidemiology, infodemiology and infoveillance, digital disease detection, digital epidemiology, electronic public health interventions, mass media/social media campaigns, health communication, and emerging population health analysis systems and tools. 

In 2024, JMIR Public Health and Surveillance received a Journal Impact Factor™ of 3.5 (5-Year Journal Impact Factor™: 4.7), ranked Q1 #84/403 journals in the category Public, Environmental & Occupational Health) (Clarivate Journal Citation Reports™, 2024) and a Scopus CiteScore of 13.7, placing it in the 97th percentile (#18/665) as a Q1 journal in the field of Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health.

JPHS has an international author- and readership and welcomes submissions from around the world.

We publish regular articles, reviews, protocols/system descriptions and viewpoint papers on all aspects of public health, with a focus on innovation and technology in public health. The main themes/topics covered by this journal can be found here.

Apart from publishing traditional public health research and viewpoint papers as well as reports from traditional surveillance systems, JPH was one of the first (if not the only) peer-reviewed journals to publish papers with surveillance or pharmacovigilance data from non-traditional, unstructured big data and text sources such as social media and the Internet (infoveillance, digital disease detection), or reports on novel participatory epidemiology projects, where observations are solicited from the public.  

Among other innovations, JPHS is also dedicated to support rapid open data sharing and rapid open access to surveillance and outbreak data. As one of the novel features we plan to publish rapid or even real-time surveillance reports and open data. The methods and description of the surveillance system may be peer-reviewed and published only once in detail, in a  "baseline report" (in a JMIR Res Protoc or a JMIR Public Health & Surveill paper), and authors then have the possibility to publish data and reports in frequent intervals rapidly and with only minimal additional peer-review (we call this article type "Rapid Surveillance Reports"). JMIR Publications may even work with authors/researchers and developers of selected surveillance systems on APIs for semi-automated reports (e.g. weekly reports to be automatically published in JPHS and indexed in PubMed, based on data-feeds from surveillance systems and minimal narratives and abstracts).

Furthermore, during epidemics and public health emergencies, submissions with critical data will be processed with expedited peer-review to enable publication within days or even in real-time.

We also publish descriptions of open data resources and open source software. Where possible, we can and want to publish or even host the actual software or dataset on the journal website.

Recent Articles

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Longitudinal and Cohort Studies in Public Health

Converging evidence indicates an adolescent mental health crisis in Western societies that has developed and exacerbated over the past decade. The proposed driving factors of this trend include more screen time, physical inactivity, and social isolation but their causal influence on mental health is insufficiently understood.

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Surveillance Reports

Hepatitis B is an important public health challenge facing China, Understanding the long-term epidemiological trends and evolving spatial distribution patterns is critical for optimizing prevention strategies and achieving the WHO's 2030 hepatitis elimination targets.

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Innovative Methods in Public Health and Surveillance

Social network data are essential and informative for public health research and implementation as they provide details on individuals and their social context. For example, health information and behaviors, such as HIV-related prevention and care, may disseminate within a network, or across society. By harmonizing egocentric and digital networks, researchers may construct a sociocentric-like “fuzzy” network based on a subgroup of the population.

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Theme Issue 2023: Preventive Strategies

Unemployment is a risk factor for the development and perpetuation of psychological distress. Finding support for affected individuals can be particularly challenging, which causes a vicious cycle of psychological distress and unemployment.

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Longitudinal and Cohort Studies in Public Health

While survival among pediatric cancer patients has advanced, disparities persist. Public health tools such as the Area Deprivation Index, Child Opportunity Index, and the Social Vulnerability Index are potential proxies for social determinants of health and could help researchers, public health practitioners, and clinicians identify neighborhoods or populations most likely to experience adverse outcomes. However, evidence regarding their relationship with healthcare utilization, especially in the pediatric cancer population remains mixed.

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Longitudinal and Cohort Studies in Public Health

Colorectal cancer (CRC) and diabetes share many common lifestyle risk factors, such as obesity. However, it remains largely unknown how different factors interact to influence the risk of CRC development among diabetes patients.

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HIV/AIDS/STI Prevention and Care

HIV infections have caused severe public health and economic burdens to the world. Adolescents and young people continue to constitute a large proportion of newly diagnosed HIV cases. Digital health interventions have been increasingly used to prevent the rising HIV epidemic. Behavior change techniques (BCTs) are intervention components designed to modify the underlying processes that regulate behavior. The BCT taxonomy offers a systematic approach to identifying, extracting, and coding these components, providing valuable insights into effective intervention strategies. However, few reviews have comprehensively identified the use of BCTs in digital HIV interventions among adolescents and young people.

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Surveillance Systems

Early diagnosis and treatment initiation for tuberculosis (TB) not only improve individual patient outcomes, but also reduce circulation within communities. Active case-finding (ACF), a cornerstone of TB control programs, aims to achieve this by targeting symptom screening and laboratory testing to individuals at high risk of infection. However, its efficiency is dependent on its ability to accurately identify such high risk individuals and communities. The socio-economic determinants of TB include difficulties in accessing healthcare and high within-household contact rates. These two determinants are common in the poorest neighborhoods of many sub-Saharan cities, where household crowding and lack of healthcare access often coincide with malnutrition and HIV infection, further contributing to the burden of tuberculosis.

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COVID-19 Vaccination

Social norms provided a framework for understanding a variety of behaviors. Cultural tightness was introduced to measure the level of adherence to social norms and tolerance of deviant behavior.

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HIV/AIDS/STI Prevention and Care

The AIDS epidemic among older people is becoming more serious. Evidence-based, acceptable and effective preventive interventions are urgently needed. Video-based intervention has become an innovative way to change healthy behaviors, and we have developed a brief video-based intervention named Sunset Without AIDS.

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Infoveillance, Infodemiology, Digital Disease Surveillance, Infodemic Management

Concerns have been raised about discrepancies in COVID-19 mortality data, particularly between preliminary and final vital statistics datasets for Serbia. In the original preliminary dataset, released daily during the ongoing pandemic, there was an underestimation of deaths in contrast to those reported in the subsequently released yearly vital statistics.

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Behavioural Surveillance for Public Health

Social distancing behavior has been a critical non-pharmaceutical measure for mitigating the COVID-19 pandemic. For this reason, there has been widespread interest in the factors determining social distancing violations, with a particular focus on individual-based factors.

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