Special publications

Population Medicine publishes Conference Proceedings and Special issues as long as they advance research or policies within the journal's scope.

Publication Process of Conference Proceedings
Population Medicine periodically publishes supplement issues consisting of conference abstracts, most notably as the official abstract-publication venue for the World Congress on Public Health, organized by the World Federation of Public Health Associations (WFPHA) in association with co-organizing bodies for each congress. These supplements are clearly distinguished from the journal's regularly numbered issues and from its primary peer-reviewed research content. Abstracts are reviewed and selected by the congress's International Scientific Committee under the scientific program of the relevant World Congress on Public Health.
Neither the Editor-in-Chief nor the editorial board nor European Publishing, has any financial relationship with WFPHA or its congress co-organizing bodies in connection with the publication of these supplements, which are published without any financial support from WFPHA or its congress co-organizers.

How supplement abstracts are reviewed
Abstracts submitted to a congress or conference are reviewed and selected by the Scientific Committee of that congress or conference. Selection is made against the criteria published by the organising body as part of its call for abstracts. The journal's double blind external peer review process is not applied to these abstracts, and the journal's editorial board does not participate in their selection. This is a deliberate and disclosed distinction. Conference abstracts are short,
preliminary research communications presented at a scientific meeting. They are made available through the journal in order to give them a permanent, citable and openly accessible record. They are not equivalent to, and are not presented as, peer reviewed original research articles.

How supplement abstracts are labelled
Every abstract published in a supplement is labelled CONFERENCE ABSTRACT on its article record and in the published PDF, and is tagged as such in the metadata supplied to indexing and abstracting services.

What is disclosed for each supplement
The landing page of each supplement issue states:
- the full name of the congress or conference and its organising body
- the name of the Scientific Committee responsible for reviewing and accepting the abstracts
- a statement that abstracts were reviewed by that Committee
- the source of funding or sponsorship for the supplement (if funded)
- confirmation that the journal's editorial board did not participate in abstract selection

Policies that continue to apply
The journal's policies on authorship, conflicts of interest, research ethics, informed consent and plagiarism apply in full to abstracts published in supplements. Authors retain copyright of their abstracts, which are published under the journal's open access licensing terms.

Publication Process of a Special Issue
Should the editorial board allow for the submission of a special issue, all manuscripts will undergo the routine, independent, double-blind peer review process. No exceptions to the vigorous peer review process of the journal will be made. The publication of manuscripts in a special issue can be either consecutive (rolling) with manuscripts published as they are accepted, or it may be published at one specific timepoint that will be agreed upon with the editorial board. Manuscripts submitted to a special issue by the guest editor(s) will be handled under an independent review process and must not make up no more than 25% of the issue's total manuscript count.

Approval Process
Interested authors are kindly requested to contact the editorial office if they are interested in submitting a conference proceeding to Population Medicine. The source of funding of the research will also be assessed. The proposal will be evaluated by the editorial board for its relevance to the journal, and a decision will be made if the supplement is in scope.