Information for Authors

SRHM is the official journal of Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters (SRHM) – a global charitable organisation whose remit is to advance the creation and dissemination of sexual and reproductive health knowledge that is grounded in human rights and based on credible evidence, and to facilitate the transformation of such knowledge into action for improved SRHR. While the journal and the organisation are intrinsically connected, SRHM is editorially independent from SRHM. 

SRHM is an independent journal that does not partner with a commercial publisher. Instead, its submission-to-publication system is hosted in partnership with Janeway. 

Each year, SRHM publishes an Open Issue where articles related to any of the topics indicated above are published throughout the year on an ongoing basis, following peer review. In addition, SRHM usually launches Themed Issues each year, which focus on particular SRHR issues and involve a specific call for papers or proposals. The journal also publishes Special Issues (also known as supplements). The abstracts of all published articles are translated into French and Spanish.

The sections below provide detailed guidance for all authors considering submisison to SRHM. Please ensure that you read the information on this page and in the Aims & Scope before submitting your manuscript.  

If you have any queries, including about proposals for Themed or Special Issues, please contact the Editorial Team (via the Contact page or via email to the Managing Editor). 

SRHM will offer a 100% APC waiver where the primary affiliations of all authors are in a country (or countries) with a low-income economy (as defined by World Bank criteria) and where any funding specifically does not cover APCs. If this applies to your manuscript, please contact the journal ahead of submission (via the Contact page or via email to the Managing Editor). 

SRHM will offer a 100% APC waiver where all authors are fully independent (i.e. those without any institutional or organisational links) and do not have any funding, regardless of geographic location. If this applies to your manuscript, please contact the journal ahead of submission (via the Contact page or via email to the Managing Editor). 

SRHM will offer a 50% APC discount where the primary affiliations of all authors are in a country (or countries) with a lower-middle-income economy (as defined by World Bank criteria) and where any funding specifically does not cover APCs. If this applies to your manuscript, please contact the journal ahead of submission (via the Contact page or via email to the Managing Editor). 

SRHM will offer a 50% APC discount where the primary affiliations of all authors are in countries with low-income and lower-middle-income economies (as defined by World Bank criteria) and where any funding specifically does not cover APCs. If this applies to your manuscript, please contact the journal ahead of submission (via the Contact page or via email to the Managing Editor). 

SRHM’s discount and waiver policy applies only to the Open Issue of SRHM, and not Themed or Special Issues.

Please note that APCs must be agreed at the point of submission, and discounts and waivers must be agreed before submission. If you may be eligible for a discount or a waiver, please contact the journal ahead of submission to discuss whether budget is available. Should a waiver or discount be agreed prior to submission, please indicate this in the space provided during the submission process. To avoid potential conflicts of interest, handling editors will not be involved in discussions about APCs, discounts or waivers.

Ethical considerations 

SRHM follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals and the relevant COPE best practice guidance where applicable, including for consideration of corrections and retractions of published content. Any such corrections to the publication record will be reported transparently.  

Publication ethics and previous publication 

SRHM uses iThenticate to screen manuscripts for material that overlaps with previously published sources. 

If authors are submitting work to SRHM that is part of a larger project and associated with multiple potential publications, we ask that this is clearly stated in the cover letter and in the manuscript so that the context is clear to the editorial team, the reviewers and potential readers. Please ensure that the methods are reported in a sufficiently clear way, rather than citing a currently unpublished (or published but paywalled) manuscript that reports other aspects of the same project. Sufficient detail should be provided so that the submission to SRHM can ‘stand alone’ and be fully assessed by the editorial team and reviewers.  

Previously published papers may be considered if they appeared in a publication with specialist, national or limited circulation, or are not easily accessible to international readers. Articles previously published in languages other than English could be considered, in full or modified version, for publication in English. Authors are asked to contact the Editorial Team (via the Contact page or via email to the Managing Editor) before submitting any previously published works. 

Manuscripts that have been posted on preprint servers are welcomed for submission to SRHM, as this is not considered to constitute previous publication. Authors are asked to provide the full citation and DOI of the preprint both in their cover letter and on the first page of their SRHM manuscript. 

Ethics committee approval 

All manuscripts reporting research involving human participants must include a statement in the methods section on consideration of the study by ethics committee, institutional review board (IRB) or other authorised body. The journal’s strong expectation is that formal ethics approval or exemption would have been determined before the study began – particularly in the country (or countries) where the research was conducted, in addition to adherence to local legal frameworks and policy. This expectation applies to both observational and interventional studies. Where these expectations are not met or where official ethics consideration was not sought, authors should contact the Editorial Team (via the Contact page or via email to the Managing Editor) prior to submission to discuss suitability. 

Where ethics approval has been obtained, authors should include: (i) the name of the committee(s)/IRB(s) or other authorised body; (ii) the approval number(s) or ID(s); and (iii) the full date(s) on which approval was obtained, in the format day, month, year.  

Where research was determined to be exempt from approval, authors should include: (i) the name of the committee(s)/IRB(s) or other authorised body; (ii) the reason for exemption; and (iii) the full date(s) on which exemption was provided, in the format day, month, year.  

Any other ethical considerations that are relevant to the work should also be described in the manuscript text. 

Manuscripts will be returned to authors if a sufficient level of detail is not provided within the ethics statement. 

Informed consent 

All manuscripts reporting research involving human participants must include a statement in the methods section on informed consent for participation in the study. Authors should provide details of the consent process and specify whether the informed consent was written or verbal, and if the latter why that was the case and how it was witnessed and documented. Where minors were involved, the statement should describe who provided informed consent, and the issue of assent should be addressed where applicable.  

Where the need for informed consent was waived, authors should include (i) the name of the ethics committee(s), IRB(s) or other authorised body that provided the waiver and (ii) the reason for the waiver.  

Where consent was not sought and authors did not obtain a waiver of consent beforehand, they should contact the Editorial Team (via the Contact page or via email to the Managing Editor) prior to submission in order to discuss the matter.  

Where individual-level information (including potentially identifiable images) is included in a manuscript, a statement on informed consent (and, where applicable, assent) specifically for publication of the information in the present manuscript is also required. This is distinct from consent for participation in research.  

Internet-mediated research 

For internet-mediated research, while we appreciate that data are often obtained from publicly available online posts, it is important that ethical considerations – beyond just whether ethics committee approval/exemption has been obtained – are described clearly and fully in the manuscript. Please see the following resources ahead of submission: 

Association of Internet Researchers

British Psychological Society

Equity in global collaborations and authorship opportunities

Where there are international collaborations between individuals from the global north and the global south (for both primary and secondary research, and for other journal content), SRHM strongly advocates for equitable partnerships from conceptualisation, throughout the research and/or analysis process, and during the writing and publication of the manuscript. This extends to expectations for appropriate author roles for local colleagues and partners.  

National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) guidance on equitable partnerships throughout the research and reporting cycle can be found here. 

SRHM is unlikely to consider manuscripts with no authors from the study setting(s) or the region(s) or group(s) about which a manuscript refers. All listed authors must fulfil all of the authorship criteria listed in the 'authorship' section below. Token authorship in order to comply with this journal policy must be avoided. 

Authorship 

An author is defined as an individual who has participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Consistent with ICMJE recommendations, listed authors should meet all of the following criteria: 

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND 

2. Drafting the work and revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND 

3. Final approval of the version(s) to be submitted and published; AND 

4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. 

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify for authorship should be listed as such.  

The order of authorship should be a joint decision of the co-authors, and it should be agreed upon prior to submission to the journal. One author must be designated as the corresponding author, and they will be responsible for communicating with the journal on behalf of any co-authors. Joint authorship and/or equal contributions to authorship may be denoted using footnotes. 

The following information for all authors should be included on the first page of all manuscripts: full name; position; institution(s) or affiliation(s); city; country; and email address. Authors’ affiliations should be the affiliations when the work was conducted. 

Authors are encouraged to link to their ORCiD identifier. 

Any authorship changes following submission must be flagged to the Editorial Team (via the Contact page or via email to the Managing Editor), who will then request any additional information and confirmation of agreement from all authors (current and previous).  

Contributions and CRediT 

Cover letter 

Authors are required to use the template cover letter, addressed to the Editor-in-Chief.  

Where a manuscript has been posted on a preprint server, authors are asked to provide the full citation and DOI of the preprint both in their cover letter and on the first page of their SRHM manuscript. If you are submitting to a special or themed issue, please specify this in the cover letter. 

Terminology and House Style

SRHM requires authors to use respectful and inclusive language and terminology throughout their manuscripts. Details of preferred terminology can be found here.  
 
SRHM strongly encourages the use of the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) guidelines to ensure appropriate reporting of sex and gender, where applicable. 
 
SRHM normally uses UK spelling at copyediting; however, authors’ use of US spelling will be retained as long as it is consistent within a manuscript.  

Abstract and keywords 

Abstracts for full-length articles should be approximately 250 words (150-200 words for Commentaries, Perspectives and Policy & Practice articles). They should be a concise summary of the work being reported. SRHM publishes unstructured abstracts, but the main elements of (structured) abstracts described in the relevant EQUATOR Network guidelines should be incorporated.  

When submitting, authors will need to select several specific keywords in order to increase the discoverability of the article in searches. 

Plain-language summaries 

SRHM requires the inclusion of plain-language summaries for full-length articles. Plain-language summaries, which are distinct from abstracts, provide non-specialist readers and policy makers (among others) with a brief and easy-to-understand overview of what is being reported in a article.  

More information about plain-language summaries can be found on the NIHR website.  

Plain-language summaries should be no more than 250 words and should be included under a separate heading beneath the abstract of your submitted manuscript.  

Please use the free Hemingway Editor to check the readability level of your plain-language summary, and aim for a reading level of grade 9 or less. 

Author reflexivity 

For all submissions, authors are required to include a reflexivity statement in the manuscript text (e.g. within the methods section for Research Articles) to describe the composition of the authorship group (even for single-author manuscripts) in terms of geographic location, background, gender and seniority, as well as any other considerations that might be relevant. Any further information related to this that you would like the editorial team to consider can be included in your cover letter. The following links may be useful when writing your reflexivity statement: 

https://medresearch.umich.edu/labs-departments/centers/cdhw/about/positionality-statements-brief 

https://www.equalityinstitute.org/blog/how-to-write-a-positionality-statement 

Reporting the results of statistical hypothesis testing 

Consistent with current guidance from the American Statistical Association , SRHM advocates avoiding binary interpretations of p values as being statistically significant or non-significant depending on whether they are <0.05 or ≥0.05 (or <0.01 or ≥0.01), respectively, unless related to e.g. thresholds for inclusion in regression analyses or tests for effect modification.  

Generally speaking, authors should avoid referring to statistical significance, focusing instead on the strength of evidence. Where applicable, we recommend reporting the size of an estimate together with a confidence interval and (where calculated) a p value. Throughout the manuscript (including figures and tables), please report p values exactly, to 3 decimal places, unless p<0.001 – in which case it can be reported as such. Results should not be reported or interpreted in terms of p values alone. Similar policies can be found here and here. 

Footnotes 

Footnotes are comments or additional information about the text. They should be used sparingly and be brief. If they include a reference, this should be numbered in or at the end of the footnote and appear in the reference list in numerical order. Any footnote symbols should be superscripted in the text and appear at the bottom of the page where they are noted, using the Word footnote function.  

Conflicts of interest 

All manuscripts require a statement before the reference list detailing any potential conflicts of interest. This is to acknowledge any potential financial and/or non-financial interest or benefit related to your manuscript or the project to which it relates. If no conflict of interest exists, please include a statement to this effect.  

Details of what may constitute a conflict of interest can be found in the ICMJE guidance. While authors may find the ICMJE Disclosure Form useful for determining the information to include in their statement, the form itself should not be submitted with the manuscript files. 

Funding 

All manuscripts require a funding statement before the reference list. 

Where funding has been provided, please include the name(s) of the funding agency (or agencies) and the grant number(s). Please also specify whether the funder had any input into the conduct and analysis of the study or work, the writing of the manuscript or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication. 

SRHM’s expectation is that funders will be named in the funding statement. If a funder has requested that its name be omitted from the funding statement, please include an explanation in your cover letter; the journal will consider such requests on a case-by-case basis.  

If no funding has been provided, please include a statement to this effect before the reference list. 

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) 

SRHM acknowledges AI’s potential in research and in communications. The journal policy is that transparency and accountability are essential where AI tools have been used by researchers and authors. All submissions are now required to include a statement regarding the use of AI at any stage of the project or in preparing, writing or translating the manuscript. 

If AI has been used at any stage of the project or in preparing, writing or translating the manuscript, please provide sufficient detail in your statement: (i) name and version of AI technology used; (ii) reason for the use of AI; and (iii) how the AI technology was used, and how the output was subsequently reviewed/modified by the authors.  

All listed authors must take full responsibility for the contents of their manuscript. AI tools or AI-assisted technologies may not be listed as an author. 

Personal communications should be cited in the text as follows: (name, position; personal communication; date). They should not be treated as footnotes or references. 

Please ensure that reference lists that have been compiled using reference management software are ‘unlinked’ before submission. Please do not use the footnote function to compile your reference list. 

While reference list formatting is not a strict requirement for new submissions, it will be required ahead of submission for all revised manuscripts. This is intended to save time for authors prior to initial submission and the journal team following acceptance (should that be the final decision). 

Figures and tables 

Figures should be submitted as separate high-resolution TIFF, JPEG or EPS files. Other formats may be suitable, provided the images are editable and sufficiently clear. Tables should be submitted as separate Word files. All figures and tables should be cited in numerical order within the main text, and each should have a title. Figures also require an accompanying legend in the manuscript file. 

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any copyrighted material in their manuscript, and to confirm in the text or appropriate legend that this has been done. 

Supplementary material 

Supplementary material should be submitted as separate files (e.g. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or high-resolution TIFF, JPEG or EPS). Other formats may be suitable, provided the information is sufficiently clear. All supplementary material should be cited in numerical order within the main text, and each should have a title. Supplementary material will be made available for peer review alongside the main manuscript. 

Supplementary material associated with a published article will not be copyedited or typeset prior to publication. Authors are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of all supplementary material. 

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any copyrighted material in their supplementary material, and to confirm in the text or appropriate legend that this has been done. 

Submitting your manuscript 

SRHM is keen to reduce the opacity of peer review, while maintaining appropriate standards of confidentiality. To this end, each published article includes a statement on its provenance (whether commissioned) and its peer review (whether external or internal). Most manuscripts that are accepted for publication by SRHM have gone through external peer review. Exceptions include Editorials, and some Letters to the Editor and Perspectives. 

Manuscripts under consideration by SRHM will not be uploaded to public AI tools by the editorial team, and AI will not be used in place of human assessment and decision making for any manuscripts.

Manuscripts that are authored by SRHM editors will be handled by other editors, and the submitting editor will recuse themselves from all editorial processes. 

Copyediting and proofreading 

Following acceptance, all manuscripts will undergo copyediting. The corresponding author will need to check the copyedited version of their manuscript and address any queries prior to typesetting.  

Following typesetting, the corresponding author will receive proofs of the article for checking on behalf of all co-authors prior to publication. The editorial team will also proofread the typeset article ahead of publication. 

Copyright 

The default licence for articles published in SRHM is CC BY 4.0. There is also the option to publish under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Further details about Creative Commons licences can be found here. 

v1.0. Reviewed and approved XX January 2026