Author Guidelines

Sections

  1. Submission and Peer Review Process
  2. Article Types
  3. After Acceptance

1. Submission and Peer Review Process

New submissions should be made via the Research Exchange submission portal https://wiley.atyponrex.com/journal/NHS. You may check the status of your submission at any time by logging on to submission.wiley.com and clicking the “My Submissions” button. For technical help with the submission system, please review our FAQs or contact [email protected].

Important: this journal operates a double-anonymized peer review policy. Please anonymize your manuscript and supply a separate title page file.

Preprint Policy

Please find the Wiley preprint policy here.

This journal accepts articles previously published on preprint servers.

Nursing & Health Sciences will consider for review articles previously available as preprints. You may also post the submitted version of a manuscript to a preprint server at any time. You are requested to update any pre-publication versions with a link to the final published article.

This Journal operates a double-anonymized peer review process. Authors are responsible for anonymizing their manuscript in order to remain anonymous to the reviewers throughout the peer review process (see “Main Text File” below for more details). Please note that if authors share their manuscript in preprint form this may compromise their anonymity during peer review.

Article Preparation Support

Wiley Editing Services offers expert help with English Language Editing, as well as translation, manuscript formatting, figure illustration and figure formatting – so you can submit your manuscript with confidence.

Also, check out our resources for Preparing Your Article for general guidance about writing and preparing your manuscript.

Free Format submission

Nursing & Health Sciences offers Free Format submission for a simplified and streamlined submission process.

Before you submit, you will need:

  • Your manuscript: this should be a single, editable file including text, figures, and tables and their labels/legends. All required sections should be contained in your manuscript, including, key words, 3 bullet points about what this paper adds, and an abstract. As per our guidelines all research and review papers will require an introduction, methods, results, and conclusions. Figures and tables should have legends. Figures should be uploaded in the highest resolution possible. If the figures are not of sufficient high quality your manuscript may be delayed. References may be submitted in any style or format, as long as it is consistent throughout the manuscript. Supporting information should be submitted in separate files. Your manuscript may be sent back to you for revision if the quality of English language is poor.
  • An ORCID ID, freely available at https://orcid.org. (Why is this important? Your article, if accepted and published, will be attached to your ORCID profile. Institutions and funders are increasingly requiring authors to have ORCID IDs.)
  • The title page of the manuscript, including:
    • All author details including co-authors, including affiliation and email addresses. (Why is this important? We need to keep all authors informed of the outcome of the peer review process.)
    • Statements relating to our ethics and integrity policies, which may include any of the following (Why are these important? We need to uphold rigorous ethical standards for the research we consider for publication):
      • data availability statement
      • funding statement
      • conflict of interest disclosure
      • ethics approval statement
      • patient consent statement
      • permission to reproduce material from other sources
      • clinical trial registration

Open Access

This journal is a subscription journal that offers an Open Access option. You’ll have the option to make your article open access after acceptance, which will be subject to an Article Publication Charger (APC) unless a waiver applies. Read more about APCs here.

Data Sharing and Data Availability

This journal expects data sharing. Review Wiley’s Data Sharing policy where you will be able to see and select the data availability statement that is right for your submission.

Data Citation

Please review Wiley’s Data Citation policy.

Data Protection

By submitting a manuscript to or reviewing for this publication, your name, email address, affiliation, and other contact details the publication might require, will be used for the regular operations of the publication. Please review Wiley’s Data Protection Policy to learn more.

Funding

You should list all funding sources in the Acknowledgments section of your manuscript. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their funder designation. If in doubt, please check the Open Funder Registry for the correct nomenclature.

Authorship

All listed authors should have contributed to the manuscript substantially and have agreed to the final submitted version. Review editorial standards and scroll down for a description of authorship criteria.

Author Pronouns

Authors now have the option to include their personal pronouns in the author bylines of their published articles and on Wiley Online Library. Authors can include their pronouns in their manuscript upon submission and can add, edit, or remove their pronouns at any stage upon request. Submitting/corresponding authors should never add, edit, or remove a coauthor’s pronouns without that coauthor’s consent. Where post-publication changes to pronouns are required, these can be made without a correction notice to the paper, following Wiley’s Name Change Policy to protect the author’s privacy. Terms which fall outside of the scope of personal pronouns (e.g. proper or improper nouns), are currently not supported.

ORCID

This journal requires ORCID. Please refer to Wiley’s resources on ORCID.

Reproduction of Copyright Material

If excerpts from copyrighted works owned by third parties are included, credit must be shown in the contribution. It is your responsibility to also obtain written permission for reproduction from the copyright owners. For more information visit Wiley’s Obtaining Permission to Reproduce Material.

The corresponding author is responsible for obtaining written permission to reproduce the material "in print and other media" from the publisher of the original source, and for supplying Wiley with that permission upon submission.

Priority is given to research that:

  • adds to current knowledge
  • shows depth, rigour, originality, and a high standard of presentation
  • is of high scientific quality, with methods and analysis appropriate to the research question(s)
  • is relevant to an international readership
  • follows the applicable reporting guidelines
  • is current - data no older than 5 years
  • is likely to contribute to improvements in clinical practice, health care policy, education or further research

Title Page 

The title page should contain:

  1. A brief informative title containing the major key words. The title should not contain abbreviations (see Wiley's best practice SEO tips). Do not use country names in the title.
  2. A short running title of less than 40 characters;
  3. The full names of the authors (please put the last names in CAPITALS) and qualifications;
  4. The author's institutional affiliations where the work was conducted, with a footnote for the author’s present address if different from where the work was conducted;
  5. Acknowledgments.
  6. Manuscript category;
    1. A short title of approximately 12 words. The title should be informative and contain the major key words and the study design. The title should not contain abbreviations (see Wiley's best practice SEO tips);
    2. A short running title of less than 40 characters;
    3. Corresponding author: The full postal and email address, plus telephone number, of the author to whom correspondence about the manuscript should be sent;
    4. ORCID: The Journal requires the submitting author to provide an ORCID iD;
    5. Registration of clinical trial and registration identification number

For all submissions with statistics, include the following in the title page: Include “b” OR “c”:

  1. The statistics were checked prior to submission by an expert statistician, and state their name and email address OR
  2. There is a statistician on the author team and states which author.

Main Text File

Manuscripts can be uploaded either as a single document (containing the main text, tables and figures), or with figures and tables provided as separate files. The main manuscript file can be submitted in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) format.

Important: this journal operates a double-anonymized peer review policy. Please anonymize your manuscript and supply a separate title page file. Authors are required to provide details about the ethical review board, including the IRB number and ID. Please ensure that the names of the centers and the protocol registry or clinical trial registry when applicable are clearly identified and not blinded in the main body of the text.

Your main document file should include:

  • A short informative title containing the major key words. The title should not contain abbreviations;
  • Acknowledgments;
  • Abstract structured (intro/methods/results/conclusion) or unstructured;
  • Up to seven keywords;
  • Key Points Authors will need to provide no more than 3 ‘key points’, written with the practitioner in mind, that summarize the key messages of their paper to be published with their article;
  • Main body: formatted as introduction, materials & methods, results, discussion, conclusion;
  • Relevance for clinical practice;
  • References;
  • Tables (each table complete with title and footnotes);
  • Figure legends: At initial submission, figures can be included in the manuscript or can be submitted in separate files.

Reference Style

This journal uses the reference style of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th edition). Review your reference style guidelines prior to submission.

If you are utilizing Free Format submission, you do not need to format the references in your article. This will be done by typesetter.

 

Figures and Supporting Information

Figures, supporting information, and appendices should be supplied as separate files. You should review the basic figure requirements for manuscripts for peer review, as well as the more detailed post-acceptance figure requirements. View Wiley’s FAQs on supporting information.

Peer Review

This journal operates a double-anonymized peer review policy. Except where otherwise stated, manuscripts are peer reviewed by at least two anonymous reviewers and Editor and Editor in Chief. Papers will only be sent to review if the Editor-in-Chief determines that the paper meets the appropriate quality and relevance requirements.

In-house submissions, i.e. papers authored by Editors or Editorial Board members of the title, will be sent to Editors unaffiliated with the author or institution and monitored carefully to ensure there is no peer review bias.

Wiley's policy on the confidentiality of the review process is available here.

Refer and Transfer Program

Wiley believes that no valuable research should go unshared. This journal participates in Wiley’s Refer & Transfer program. If your manuscript is not accepted, you may receive a recommendation to transfer your manuscript to another suitable Wiley journal, either through a referral from the journal’s editor or through our Transfer Desk Assistant.

Appeals and Complaints

Authors may appeal an editorial decision if they feel that the decision to reject was based on either a significant misunderstanding of a core aspect of the manuscript, a failure to understand how the manuscript advances the literature or concerns regarding the manuscript-handling process. Differences in opinion regarding the novelty or significance of the reported findings are not considered grounds for appeal. To raise an appeal, please contact this journal by email, quoting your manuscript ID number and explaining your rationale for the appeal. The editor’s decision following an appeal consideration is final.

To raise a complaint regarding editorial staff, policy or process please contact the journal in the first instance. If you believe further support outside the journal’s management is necessary, please refer to Wiley’s Best Practice Guidelines on Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) tools—such as ChatGPT and others based on large language models (LLMs)—cannot be considered capable of initiating an original piece of research without direction by human authors. They also cannot be accountable for a published work or for research design, which is a generally held requirement of authorship (as discussed in the previous section), nor do they have legal standing or the ability to hold or assign copyright. Therefore—in accordance with COPE’s position statement on AI tools—these tools cannot fulfill the role of, nor be listed as, an author of an article. If an author has used this kind of tool to develop any portion of a manuscript, its use must be described, transparently and in detail, in the Methods or Acknowledgements section. The author is fully responsible for the accuracy of any information provided by the tool and for correctly referencing any supporting work on which that information depends. Tools that are used to improve spelling, grammar, and general editing are not included in the scope of these guidelines. The final decision about whether use of an AIGC tool is appropriate or permissible in the circumstances of a submitted manuscript or a published article lies with the journal’s editor or other party responsible for the publication’s editorial policy.

Guidelines on Publishing and Research Ethics in Journal Articles

This journal requires that you include in the manuscript details IRB approvals, ethical treatment of human and animal research participants, and gathering of informed consent, as appropriate. You will be expected to declare all conflicts of interest, or none, on submission. Please review Wiley’s policies surrounding human studies, animal studies, clinical trial registration, biosecurity, and research reporting guidelines.

This journal follows the core practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and handles cases of research and publication misconduct accordingly (https://publicationethics.org/core-practices). This journal uses iThenticate’s CrossCheck software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. Read Wiley’s Top 10 Publishing Ethics Tips for Authors and Wiley’s Publication Ethics Guidelines.

Author Contributions

For all articles, this journal mandates the CRediT (Contribution Roles Taxonomy)—more information is available on our Author Services site.

2. Article Types

2.1 Original research and education articles:

Original Articles should not exceed 5,000 words. The main text should be structured as follows: Introduction (putting the paper in context - policy, practice or research); Background (literature); Methods (design, data collection and analysis); Results; Discussion; Conclusion; Relevance for clinical practice. Include all information required by the reporting relevant to your study. (Trial and Research Reporting Guidelines)

We recommend adhering to APA style bias-free guidelines Bias-free language

Research Reporting Guidelines by type of article

We expect authors to adhere to an EQUATOR research reporting checklist (https://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/consort/) EQUATOR checklists include: EQUATOR checklist,

  • CONSORT checklist for reports of randomized trials and cluster randomized trials
  • STROBEchecklist for observational research: cohort, case-control, and cross-sectional studies
  • COREQ or SRQR checklist for qualitative studies
  • PRISMAguidelines for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. SRs need to follow PRISMA-P guidelines, be demonstrably based upon an internationally recognised method (such as Cochrane or Joanna Briggs Institute methodology) and the SR report needs to cite the protocol registration number in PROSPERO.

Please ensure that you have completed and uploaded an EQUATOR checklist with your manuscript submission.

For other type of studies, please check (https://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/consort/) before submission

We publish high-quality original research aligned with the scope of the journal. Pilot studies are unlikely to be accepted.

Design

State the study design clearly, for example, randomized controlled trial, intervention study (randomized or non-randomized), quasi-experimental study, systematic review, cross-sectional study, case-control study, ecological study, descriptive study, etc.

Cross-sectional studies

The quality of cross-sectional studies depends on clear research questions, an appropriate study design, a representative and adequately sized sample, accurate measurement of variables, and control of confounding factors. Ethical standards should be followed, and data analysis must be performed using appropriate statistical methods. The study should address relevant social determinants of health and acknowledge its limitations, particularly regarding causality. Transparent reporting, such as using STROBE guidelines, and a contribution to existing knowledge are also essential for ensuring the study's reliability and value.

A common issue with cross-sectional studies is that they often don't build on existing knowledge, and replication may not always be necessary. Given the large volume of manuscripts submitted for publication, authors should consider the value of publishing repeated cross-sectional studies. A longitudinal approach, if funding permits, may offer a better way to assess how healthcare factors change over time.

Clinical Trials

Trial and Protocol Registration: Include the following for papers that require trial and protocol registration:

  • Include the name of the trial register, the clinical trial registration number, and a link to the trial at the registration website.
  • If there is a protocol that does not require registration, it must still be made accessible at: Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/) ” or “Figshare ( https://figshare.com/ ). Include the name of the website, the protocol number, and a link to the registration site.
  • If the trial is not registered, or was registered retrospectively, explain the reasons why.

Key reporting standards for RCTs are pre-trial registration, open access data and CONSORT adherence for study publication.

The journal requires authors to submit the following information:

  • The Consort Statement (https://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/consort/)
  • Open access content link or similar for trial data.

For small RCT, it is required that the authors correctly frame small RCT as pilot/feasibility designs https://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/consort-2010-statement-extension-to-randomised-pilot-and-feasibility-trials/

For correctly reporting interventions within trials please follow https://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/tidier/

It is not possible to anonymize the trial registration entry for peer review.  Reviewers will be able to view who conducted the trial when making essential checks of the registration entry.

Clinical Trial Registration

The journal requires that clinical trials are prospectively registered in a publicly accessible database such as http://clinicaltrials.gov/ and clinical trial registration numbers should be included in all papers that report their results. Authors are asked to include the name of the trial register and the clinical trial registration number at the end of the abstract. If the trial is not registered, or was registered retrospectively, the reasons for this should be explained.

Reporting Sex and Gender in Research (SAGER Guidelines)

We encourage authors to adhere to the 'Sex and Gender Equity in Research' (SAGER) guidelines and incorporate sex and gender considerations where relevant. It is important to use the terms "sex" (biological characteristic) and "gender" (shaped by social and cultural factors) with precision to avoid confusion between the two. Article titles and/or abstracts should clearly specify the sex(es) to which the study applies. Authors should outline in the background whether sex and/or gender differences are anticipated, explain how these factors were incorporated into the study design, provide disaggregated data by sex and/or gender when appropriate, and discuss the corresponding findings. If a sex and/or gender analysis was not performed, a justification should be provided in the Discussion section. We recommend that authors consult the full guidelines before submitting their manuscripts.

2.2 Discussion/ Discursive papers:

includes position papers, methodological concepts, philosophy, theory pertaining to professional areas of interest, and critical reviews that do not contain empirical data or use systematic review methods. They should not exceed 5,000 words and include: Aims; Background; Design (stating that it is a position paper or critical review, for example); Method (how the issues were approached); Conclusions; Relevance for clinical practice.

2.3 Systematic Reviews:

Nursing & Health Sciences accepts systematic reviews using any robust methodology for reviews of the effects of interventions, qualitative reviews, prevalence and incidence, economics, diagnostic test accuracy, prognosis/risk, psychometric properties of measurement instruments, and mixed-methods systematic reviews.

Nursing & Health Sciences recommends that a systematic review be conducted using high quality guidelines such as those from a recognised agency or a source such as (but not limited to) Cochrane, EPPI Centre, IOM, JBI, NICE, NIH. Other sources of guidance are considered on methodological grounds; that is, where the methods provided have sufficient detail to allow for auditability and transparency of what key decisions were made while doing the review, and how they were made.

Developing a completed systematic review into a publishable manuscript requires adherence to the reporting standards required by PRISMA2020. Reporting guidelines (including PRISMA and extensions of PRISMA reported by the EQUATOR network) are for manuscript writing once a systematic review has been completed. They are not used to guide researcher’s decision making as they do a systematic review.

The PRISMA flow-chart:
must be included in every systematic review submission to report the audit trail of how papers were managed throughout a review project. However, detailed methods reporting as per the PRISMA checklist are also required.

The PRISMA checklist:
is a required component for every systematic review manuscript submission. There are important changes from PRISMA 2009, corresponding authors are expected to know these differences, and ensure their manuscript fits the updated requirements, or that the limitations section of the manuscript describes which elements are not reported and why.

2.4 Scoping reviews:

Authors considering a scoping review are required to read the following resources prior to submission:

To be considered for publication in NHS, Scoping reviews must:

  1. Focus on topics that inform Nursing and/or Allied Health knowledge needs,
  2. Cite and demonstrably follow a reliable methodology (PRISMA-scr is mandatory),
  3. Report the results of the scoping review using text, tables and figures such as evidence maps
  4. Be based upon a protocol (Cited in the review, or appended to the review).
  5. Include a comprehensive search strategy which demonstrably aims to identify all relevant types of literature from all relevant and available sources
  6. Cite the chosen methodology and/or reporting guidelines 

2.5 Brief Report:

Limited to 2000 words and no more than four figures and/or tables. Follow EQUATOR reporting guidelines. Brief Reports are not intended to allow publication of incomplete or preliminary findings. The order of text should be background, methods and combined results and discussion. The methods section in the main article should be sufficiently detailed to allow readers to repeat the study without having to refer to supplementary material.

2.6 Commentaries and Responses to Commentaries:

The Editor-in-Chief welcomes commentaries and responses to commentaries on papers published in NHS. These should be approximately 500 words in length and should offer a critical but constructive perspective on the published paper.

NHS has a multidisciplinary focus and broad scope and a particular focus on the translation of research into clinical practice, inter-disciplinary and multidisciplinary work, primary health care, health promotion, health education, management of communicable and non-communicable diseases, implementation of technological innovations and inclusive multicultural approaches to health services and care.

3. After Acceptance

Wiley Author Services

When an accepted article is received by Wiley’s production team, the corresponding author will receive an email asking them to login or register with Wiley Author Services. You will be asked to sign a publication license at this point as well as pay for any applicable APCs.

Copyright & Licensing

You may choose to publish under the terms of the journal’s standard copyright agreement, or Open Access under the terms of a Creative Commons License.

Standard re-use and licensing rights vary by journal. Note that certain funders mandate a particular type of CC license be used.

Self-Archiving Definitions and Policies: Note that the journal’s standard copyright agreement allows for self-archiving of different versions of the article under specific conditions.

Proofs

Authors will receive an e-mail notification with a link and instructions for accessing HTML page proofs online. Authors should also make sure that any renumbered tables, figures, or references match text citations and that figure legends correspond with text citations and actual figures. Proofs must be returned within 48 hours of receipt of the email.

Continuous Publication

Under a Continuous Publication model used at Wiley, journal articles are published directly into an online issue with their final citations as soon as they are ready. There is no issue curation and no issue pagination; articles publish when they have completed production and are not held for upcoming issues. The ability to publish an article online before its issue is completed provides faster publishing of articles with final citation details for the academic community.

Author Name Change Policy

In cases where authors wish to change their name following publication, Wiley will update and republish the paper and redeliver the updated metadata to indexing services. Our editorial and production teams will use discretion in recognizing that name changes may be of a sensitive and private nature for various reasons including (but not limited to) alignment with gender identity, or as a result of marriage, divorce, or religious conversion. Accordingly, to protect the author’s privacy, we will not publish a correction notice to the paper, and we will not notify co-authors of the change. Authors should contact the journal’s Editorial Office with their name change request.