The "Journal of Medical Internet Research" (JMIR; ISSN 1438-8871, Medline-abbreviation: J Med Internet Res), founded in 1999, is a leading health informatics and health services/health policy journal (ranked first by impact factor in these disciplines). JMIR was the first open access journal covering health informatics, and the first international scientific peer-reviewed journal on all aspects of research, information and communication in the healthcare field using Internet and Intranet-related technologies; a broad field, which is nowadays called "eHealth" [see also What is eHealth and What is eHealth (2)]. This field has also significant overlaps with what is called "consumer health informatics.", health 2.0/medicine 2.0, or participatory medicine. This focus makes JMIR unique among other medical or medical informatics journals, which tend to focus on clinical informatics or clinical applications. As eHealth is a highly interdisciplinary field we are not only inviting research papers from the medical sciences, but also from the computer, behavioral, social and communication sciences, psychology, library sciences, informatics, human-computer interaction studies, and related fields. Manuscripts are invited which deal for example with
- studies evaluating the impact of Internet use or specific eHealth interventions on individual health-related or social outcomes
- descriptions of the design and impact of Internet applications and websites for consumers/patients or medical professionals
- use of the Internet in the context of clinical information and communication, including telemedicine
- use of the Internet in medical research and the basic sciences such as molecular biology or chemistry (e.g. bioinformatics, online factual databases)
- medical information management and librarian sciences
- e-learning and knowledge translation, online-courses, web-based programs for undergraduate and continuing education,
- eHealth applications for public health and population health technology (disease monitoring, teleprevention, teleepidemiology)
- evidence-based medicine and the Internet (e.g. online development or dissemination of clinical guidelines, measuring agreement about management of a given clinical problem among physicians, etc.)
- the impact of eHealth, the Internet, or health care technology on public health, the health care system and policy
- methodological aspects of doing Internet research, e.g. methodology of web-based surveys
- design and validation of novel web-based instruments
- analysis of e-communities or virtual social networks
- comparisons of effectiveness of health communication and information on the Internet compared with other methods of health communication,
- effects of the Internet and information/communication technology on the patient-physician relationship and impact on public health, e.g. the studies investigating how the patient-physician relationship changes as a result of the new ways of getting medical information
- ethical and legal problems as well as cross-border and cross-cultural issues of eHealth
- systematic studies examining the quality of medical information available in various online venues
- methods of evaluation, quality assessment and improvement of Internet information or eHealth applications
- proposals for standards in the field of medical publishing on the Internet, including self-regulation issues, policies and guidelines to provide reliable healthcare information
- results and methodological aspects of Internet-based studies, including medical surveys, psychological tests, quality-of-life studies, gathering and/or disseminating epidemiological data, use of the Internet for clinical studies (e-trials), drug reaction reporting and surveillance systems etc.
- electronic medical publishing, Open Access publishing, and use of the Internet for traditional scholarly publishing (e.g. collaborative peer review)
- information needs of patients, consumers and health professionals, including studies evaluating search and retrieval behavior of patients
- web-based studies, e.g. online psychological experiments
- evaluations of mhealth (mobile) applications, as well as ambient / ubiquitous computing approaches, sensors, domotics, and other cutting edge technologies
