Special Issues

Propose a special issue

Journal of Tropical Diseases and Medicine welcomes proposals for focused collections that address important questions in tropical disease and tropical medicine. Researchers with relevant expertise are invited to review the requirements below and contact the editorial office.

A special issue is worth running when a question is live, when the work answering it is scattered across venues, and when bringing it together changes what a reader can conclude. Each collection applies the journal's usual editorial standards and peer-review process to its focused scholarly question.

Proposals go to [email protected] with the subject line JTMH special issue proposal.

What a proposal states

The question

The scientific question the collection addresses, why it is unresolved, and what a reader would be able to conclude from the collection that they cannot conclude from the literature as it stands.

Scope fit

Which of the journal's core domains the collection sits in, set out on Aims and Scope, and how each expected contribution meets the relevance test stated there.

Guest editors

Names, affiliations, ORCID iDs and a short statement of the relevant publication record for each proposed guest editor.

Expected contributions

An indicative list of manuscripts, their article types and their authors where known, with a realistic estimate of how many are firm.

Timeline

A proposed opening and closing date for submissions. A date is published only once it is agreed, and is not used to create urgency.

Interests

Any commercial, funding or institutional interest held by a guest editor or by an expected contributing group.

Themes the journal would consider

Illustrative, not a list of open calls. Each sits inside an approved core domain and answers a question the field has not settled.

• Insecticide resistance and what it has changed about vector control in practice.
• Diagnostic performance at the point of care against performance under trial conditions.
• Holding elimination in settings where case numbers have fallen below the threshold that justified the program's funding.
• Antimalarial and antiparasitic resistance: detection, spread and the regimens that remain.
• Imported and travel-associated tropical disease outside endemic regions, including delayed recognition.
• Zoonotic spillover and the animal or environmental reservoirs of human tropical pathogens.
• Vector range and transmission seasonality under measured environmental change.
• Soil-transmitted helminth and schistosomiasis control after several rounds of mass drug administration.

Guest editors and the safeguards that apply

Appointment

Guest editors are appointed by the journal on the strength of a verifiable publication record in the collection's subject. They are named on every article in the collection.

Same review, same standard

Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request.

Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts. Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.

Guest editors' own manuscripts

A manuscript authored by a guest editor is handled by a member of the journal's editorial board who is not connected to the collection. The author-guest-editor has no access to reviewer identities, reports or the decision.

Independent oversight

A member of the editorial board oversees every collection and can decline any manuscript, replace a reviewer, or close the collection.

Conflicts

Guest editors declare their interests on appointment and recuse themselves from any manuscript where an interest could reasonably be seen to affect their judgment.

Terms that apply to every collection

• Article types, manuscript requirements and reporting standards are those on Instructions for Authors. A collection does not set its own.
• The article processing charge is the journal's standard charge, on the terms set out on Article processing charges. A collection carries no separate rate.
• A manuscript submitted to a collection that is declined may be considered as a regular submission, and one submitted as a regular manuscript may be invited into a collection.
• A collection may be closed or cancelled where too few manuscripts meet the standard. Articles already accepted are published as regular articles and keep their place in the record.
• Every article in a collection appears in the archive under the volume and issue it was published in.