About Head & Face Medicine

What is Head & Face Medicine?

Head & Face Medicine is an interdisciplinary, Open Access, peer-reviewed online journal that considers original research on all aspects of the prevention, diagnosis and management of cranial and facial disorders, including molecular genetics, pathophysiology, epidemiology, new therapeutic strategies and etiological factors related to acute and chronic psychological stress and other psychobiological factors.

The journal covers the interdisciplinary aspects of cranial, facial and oral diseases and their management. It has been designed as a multidisciplinary journal for clinicians and researchers involved in the diagnostic and therapeutic aspects of diseases which affect the human head and face. The journal will be wide-ranging, covering the development, aetiology, epidemiology and therapy of head & face diseases to the basic science that underlies these diseases. Management of head & face diseases includes all aspects of surgical and non-surgical treatments including psychopharmacological therapies.

To date, no journal has provided readers with multidisciplinary information in the field of head & face medicine. With this expanding field covering surgical and non-surgical management of diseases and including original research concerning basic science, development, aetiology, and epidemiology of diseases in the complex cranial and facial area, information for a broad readership is needed. Head & Face Medicine will provide an Open Access journal that will cover this interdisciplinary area.

Content overview

Head & Face Medicine considers the following types of articles:

• Research: reports of data from original research.
• Case reports: reports of clinical cases that can be educational, describe a diagnostic or therapeutic dilemma, suggest an association, or present an important adverse reaction.
• Database articles: describe a new database or a substantial improvement of an existing database.
• Hypothesis: short articles presenting an untested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence. They should outline significant progress in thinking that would also be testable.
• Methodology articles: present a new experimental method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method.
• Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative descriptions of any subject within the scope of Head & Face Medicine. These articles are usually written by opinion leaders that have been invited by the Editorial Board.
• Short reports: brief reports of data from original research.
• Software articles: describe the source code for software applications, tools or algorithm implementations.
• Study protocols: describe proposed or ongoing research, providing a detailed account of the hypothesis, rationale, and methodology of the study.

Peer review policies

The journal will have an open peer review policy, with authors and reviewers asked to declare any competing interests. When making a decision regarding acceptance/rejection, reviewers are asked to consider whether the scientific community is better served by publishing or not publishing the article. This decision should be independent of the 'positive' or 'negative' nature of the results, where 'negative' means that the findings do not reflect the current 'opinion of experts'. The journal welcomes such findings if they are scientifically justified. The ultimate responsibility for any decision lies with the Editors-in-Chief.

Edited by Thomas Stamm, Ulrich Meyer and Hans-Peter Wiesmann, Head & Face Medicine is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Head & Face Medicine

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central, MEDLINE and Scopus.

Articles in Head & Face Medicine should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Head Face Med 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Head & Face Medicine does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Head & Face Medicine, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Head & Face Medicine using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Head & Face Medicine is published  by BioMed Central, an independent publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is Open Access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Head & Face Medicine however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Head & Face Medicine's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also in repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Head & Face Medicine will be available.

Head & Face Medicine is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.