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Preparing your materials

Policy on prior publication

When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record. 

Preparing your article for submission - ICMJE

Health Economics, Policy and Law endorses the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ (ICMJE) Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals. Authors should familiarise themselves with the Uniform Requirements at www.icmje.org before submitting their manuscripts.

Preparing your article for submission

1. Manuscripts should be clearly typed in double spacing and should have a left-hand margin of at least 25 mm/1 inch and a right-hand margin of at least 40mm/1.5 inches. Type size should be no smaller than 12 points. Contributors are asked to retain an exact replica themselves for use in answering copy-editor’s enquiries and correcting proofs.

2. Footnotes should be numbered consecutively (in superscript) within the text and listed in a separate section at the end of the article before the References.

3. Referencing. Authors must use the author-date system of referencing as described in The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition, (The University of Chicago Press, 2003). In this system citations in the text and footnotes list the author’s surname and the year of publication of the work in parentheses. Eg. (Sen and Williams, 1963). Where there are three or more authors, list the first author’s surname, followed by et al. and the year of publication. The full list of cited references is then provided alphabetically at the end of the article. References should contain, in the case of books, the names of authors as they appear on the title page, the year of publication, the full title including any subtitle, the place of publication and the name of the publisher, and in the case of articles, the name(s) of the author(s), the year of publication, the full title of the article, the name of the journal, the volume and issue numbers, and the page reference (number of first and last page).

Le Grand, J. (2003), Motivation, agency and public policy: of knights & knaves, pawns & queens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Harsanyi, J.C. (1982), ‘Morality and the theory of rational behaviour’, in A. Sen and B. Williams (Eds), Utilitarianism and beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Arrow, K.J. (1963), ‘Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care’, American Economic Review, 53(5): 941-73.

4. Tables and Figures. Each table and figure should be on a separate sheet, numbered and collected together at the end of the article, after the References. Their place in the text should be indicated by a space and the words ‘Table X (Figure X) about here’. Tables should be clearly laid out and designed to fit into a space 190 x 120mm. Vertical lines between columns should be omitted, and horizontal lines limited to the top and bottom of the table, with an additional line below the column headings. Totals and percentages should be labeled, and units identified. Figures should not contain more detail than can be clearly shown in a space 190 x 120mm.

5. Spelling: Please use English rather than American spelling. In general use the spelling –ise/isation rather than –ize/ization (eg. organise/organisation).

Capitals: Please keep these to a minimum and be consistent throughout the manuscript.

Italics should be used for foreign words except proper names and words (such as role, elite) that have entered common English usage. The use of italics for emphasis is discouraged.

Abbreviations: Omit full stops in abbreviations consisting of capital letters (USA) and use capitals for acronyms (WHO). Use eg. instead of ‘for example’ and ie. instead of ‘that is’. Dates should be in the form 1 May 1968; 1990s (no apostrophe); the twentieth century.

Numbers up to ten should normally be spelt out, except for percentages, exact quantities or a series of numbers. Use ‘per cent’ (not %) except in tables. Include a comma in numbers over 999.

6. To ensure a fair and anonymous peer review process, authors should not allude to themselves as the authors of their article in any part of the text. This includes citing their own previous work in the references section in such a way that identifies them as the authors of the current work.

7. Proofs are supplied to ensure that the printed version coincides with the manuscript accepted. Rewriting sections of an article in proof is not possible. Please make sure that your accepted manuscript is in its final form before it is sent to the printer.

Abstract and Keywords Preparation

For guidance on how to prepare your Abstracts and Keywords, please refer to these guidelines.

How to prepare your materials for anonymous peer review

To ensure a fair and anonymous peer review process, authors should not allude to themselves as the authors of their article in any part of the text. This includes citing their own previous work in the references section in such a way that identifies them as the authors of the current work.

Please refer to our general guidelines on how to anonymise your manuscript prior to submission.

English language editing services 

Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.  

In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.

Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal. 

Tables and Artwork

Please refer to the following guidance about preparing artwork and graphics for submission.

Seeking permissions for copyrighted material

If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. Guidance on how to do that can be found here.

Competing Interests

All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.

Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.

If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors. 

Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”. 

Ethics and Transparency Policy Requirements

Please ensure that you have reviewed the journal’s Publishing ethics policies while preparing your materials. 

Please also ensure that you have read the journal’s Research transparency policy prior to submission. We encourage the use of a Data Availability Statement at the end of your article before the reference list. Guidance on how to write a Data Availability Statement can be found here. Please try to provide clear information on where the data associated with you research can be found and avoid statements such as “Data available on request”.

A list of suggested data repositories can be found here.

Authorship and contributorship

All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.

Author affiliations

Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated. 

For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.

Funding statement

A declaration of sources of funding must be provided if appropriate. Authors must state the full official name of the funding body and grant numbers specified. Authors must specify what role, if any, their financial sponsors played in the design, execution, analysis and interpretation of data, or writing of the study. If they played no role this should be stated. 

Supplementary materials

Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.

Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.

ORCID

We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

  • Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
  • Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
  • Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.

See our ORCID FAQs for more information.

If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.

If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.

ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information. 

Author Hub

You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.