What is Malaria Journal

Malaria Journal is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal monitored by Thomson Reuters (ISI), MEDLINE and PubMed. All articles are published without barriers to access, immediately upon acceptance.

Malaria Journal is aimed at the scientific community interested in malaria in its broadest sense. It is the only journal that publishes exclusively papers on malaria and, as such, it aims to bring together knowledge from the different specialties involved in this very broad discipline, from the bench to the bedside and to the field. Malaria Journal offers a fast publication schedule while maintaining rigorous peer-review; this is achieved by managing the whole of the publication process electronically, from submission to peer-review.

Malaria Journal aims, in addition to the publication of high quality articles, to serve as a communication focus for malariologists and it endeavours to maintain up-to-date weblinks as well as information about meetings, initiatives and events. Unlike any other journal in this field, the electronic format of Malaria Journal provides an opportunity to publish articles with large datasets or large numbers of colour illustrations and moving pictures, and to create relevant links to databases, relevant websites or other papers. Authors of articles published in Malaria Journal retain copyright of their articles and can, therefore, display and distribute it as they wish.

Content overview

Malaria Journal considers the following types of articles:

  • Research: Malaria Journal publishes primary research articles from the full spectrum of malaria research. Subjects covered include any aspects of the biology of malaria parasites and their vectors; clinical features and disease pathophysiology; biochemistry and molecular biology; case management and treatment; drug development and drug resistance; immunology, immunogenetics and vaccine development; genomes and transcriptomes of malaria parasites and their vectors; epidemiology and transmission dynamics; vector control; health system, policy and planning issues relating to prevention and treatment; economic, sociological and anthropological issues; poverty and gender issues, land use and global environmental change; intersectoral issues; intervention studies and operational research; control policy and planning.
  • Case Reports: Malaria Journal welcomes well-described reports of cases that can be used for educational purposes or that describe unusual features of the disease, its treatment, transmission or control. When describing clinical cases, the authors are requested to provide written and signed consent to publish the information from the patients or their guardians; case reports may include clinical pictures.
  • Case Studies Malaria Journal welcomes well-described case study articles. These will usually describe a major health care intervention, usually from a public health perspective. Case study articles that include a rigorous assessment of the processes and impact of the intervention as well as recommendations for future interventions will be considered favourably.

    Note that Case study articles should not describe an individual patient - authors should use the case report format for such descriptions.

  • Methodology articles: Methodology articles should 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, or compare different methods currently in use.
  • Reviews: Malaria Journal aims to provide reviews with an in-depth coverage of all aspects of malaria. Some reviews are commissioned, but unsolicited reviews are welcome and are routinely peer-reviewed. Although reviews need not follow the same format as research articles, and are not limited in their length, they are nevertheless expected to conform to the overall house-style of the journal.
  • Opinion articles: These are short, opinionated, narrowly focused articles on issues of contemporary interest, including reports about meetings or viewpoints on recently published articles relevant to the readers of Malaria Journal. Some opinion papers are commissioned by the journal, but unsolicited commentaries are welcome and are routinely peer-reviewed. In addition, readers are encouraged to critically discuss papers published in Malaria Journal by means of 'Comments', which will then remain associated with the paper; all 'Comments' are edited.


Peer review policies

  • Peer review is designed to ensure that the research published is 'good science'.
  • Submitted articles are reviewed by two or more experts. Peer reviewers have four possible options:
    • Accept
    • accept after minor revision
    • ask author(s) to make revisions and resubmit
    • reject because scientifically unsound

  • Publication of research articles by Cardiovascular Diabetology is dependent primarily on their validity and coherence, as judged by peer reviewers, who are also asked whether the writing is comprehensible and how interesting they consider the article to be.
  • When asking for revisions, reviewers have three possible goals: to tighten the arguments based on existing data, to identify where more data are needed and to improve the clarity and coherence of the paper.


Edited by Marcel Hommel, Malaria Journal is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Publishing in Malaria Journal

All articles are listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and are covered by PubMed Central, MEDLINE, Thomson Reuters (ISI), CAS, CABI, Embase and Current Contents.

Articles in Malaria Journal 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:

Malar J 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Malaria Journal does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Malaria Journal, 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 Malaria Journal using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Malaria Journal is published by BioMed Central, part of Springer Science+Business Media. BioMed Central is 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. Malaria Journal however, has taken this further by making all its content open access.

Malaria Journal's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also 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.

Malaria Journal 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.
If you would like to help raise awareness of Malaria Journal, why not download the journal's leaflet and poster? You will need Acrobat Reader to open them.

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