About Frontiers in Global Women s Health

Frontiers in Global Women's Health

Frontiers in Global Women's Health is a peer-reviewed, gold open access journal published by Frontiers Media of Lausanne, Switzerland, devoted to the health of women across the whole life course and across the whole world. Its electronic ISSN is 2673-5059, its official abbreviation is Front. Glob. Women's Health, and its Frontiers journal code is fgwh. The Journals World record matches that identity exactly: Frontiers Media as publisher, Switzerland as the publisher's country, and ISSN 2673-5059. A naming caution is worthwhile at the outset, because an unrelated open access title with a very similar name exists from a different publisher; the Frontiers journal is the one with this ISSN, this publisher, and a home within the Frontiers journal family, and readers should check the ISSN whenever the short title alone is ambiguous.

The journal was launched in 2020, announced by Frontiers to coincide with International Women's Day that year, with Stephen Kennedy of the University of Oxford as its founding field chief editor. Its founding editorial set out the journal's intellectual position clearly: women's health should not be reduced to a narrow biomedical model centred only on maternity and reproduction, but should be understood across the life course, taking in the effects of infectious disease, poverty, gender-based violence, discrimination, mental health, ageing and environmental change, with particular attention to women in low- and middle-income countries undergoing rapid demographic, epidemiological, social and economic transition. That position still describes the journal's centre of gravity, and it explains both its section structure and its close alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Global Strategy for Women's, Children's and Adolescents' Health.

Scope and Specialty Sections

Like other Frontiers journals, this title is organised into specialty sections, each with its own chief editor, associate editors and review editors, and manuscripts are submitted to a specific section. The sections visible in the journal's structure include Maternal Health; Contraception and Family Planning; Women's Mental Health; Quality of Life; Sex and Gender Differences in Disease; Infectious Diseases in Women; and a section concerned with ageing in women. The journal's stated subjects of interest span ageing, contraception and family planning, infectious diseases in women, maternal health, quality of life, sex and gender differences in disease, and women's mental health. Two boundary rules from the journal's own scope statement are important for authors: studies that do not specifically address women's health, or that provide no gender-based analysis, fall outside scope, and the Maternal Health section states that studies primarily focused on child health sit outside that section's scope.

The Maternal Health section illustrates the journal's approach in detail. It covers the full continuum from preconception through pregnancy, labour and delivery to postnatal and inter-pregnancy care, including antenatal care models, diagnosis and care of pre-existing conditions in pregnancy, the interaction of mental and physical health, inequalities and disparities in maternal outcomes, maternal mortality and morbidity, quality of care, and the long-term health implications of pregnancy. It explicitly welcomes multidisciplinary work and qualitative studies alongside quantitative designs, and it ties its mission to Sustainable Development Goal 3 on health and well-being and Goal 5 on gender equality. Comparable specificity is available on each section's own page, and authors should read the section page, not just the journal page, before submitting, because section editors apply the section scope when they triage manuscripts.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

The publisher lists the journal as indexed in PubMed Central, PubMed, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Scopus, and the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index, with a longer list of additional services — including Crossref, CLOCKSS, Dimensions, EBSCO, PsycINFO and ProQuest — named on its about page. The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics. On the publisher's current about page, its headline metrics are an Impact Factor of 2.5 and a CiteScore of 3.6; those are publisher-displayed figures at the time of consultation, they are revised on the usual annual cycles of their respective services, and anyone needing a citable figure should take it from Journal Citation Reports or Scopus directly. The Journals World record, drawing on open indexing, shows an h-index of 39 with about 1,238 works and close to ten thousand citations — rapid accumulation for a journal launched in 2020, reflecting both the size of the global women's health research community and the visibility that full open access gives to work aimed at practitioners and policymakers as well as academics.

Open Access Model, Licensing and Charges

Frontiers is a gold open access publisher: every article is freely available to read, download and reuse immediately on publication, articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY) with authors retaining copyright, and the model is funded by article publishing charges paid on acceptance. The publisher's current fee page for this journal lists CHF 2,695 for A-type articles — the full-length categories such as Original Research, Systematic Review, Review, Methods, Clinical Trial and Study Protocol — CHF 2,195 for B-type articles such as Mini Review, Perspective, Case Report, Brief Research Report and Opinion, and no charge for C-type articles, namely Corrections and Editorials. Fee support and waivers exist within the publisher's policies, and many authors are covered in full or in part by institutional partnership agreements, so the listed figure is a starting point for a conversation with the publisher and your institution, not always the amount an individual author personally pays. Charges in this model change over time; verify the live fee page on the day you submit. Rejected articles are not charged.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

Frontiers operates a structured, platform-based peer review in which manuscripts are assessed by associate editors and reviewers of the relevant specialty section, with an interactive review stage in which authors and reviewers can discuss the manuscript in a forum before a final decision. The publisher also applies explicit research-integrity standards, including a stated rule that manuscripts primarily comprising computational studies of public data must include appropriate validation, and its standards policy on research methodology generally. For a global-health journal, that validation rule and the journal's insistence on a genuine women's-health focus are the two most common avoidable reasons for early rejection, and both are entirely within an author's control at the drafting stage. Study protocols are a recognised article type here, which suits global health, where publishing the design of a trial or implementation study before results exist is good practice that many conventional journals still accommodate poorly.

What the Journal Has Published and Who It Serves

The journal's early life coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of its first research collections addressed the pandemic's effects on women's health — maternal mental health, vaccination in pregnancy, fertility concerns and the psychosocial consequences of the pandemic — drawing submissions from dozens of countries and very high readership. That pattern has continued: the journal serves clinicians, midwives and public-health practitioners, implementation and health-systems researchers, social scientists working on gender and health, and policymakers and programme managers in ministries, agencies and non-governmental organisations, as well as academic researchers. Its research-topic collections, which gather articles around a theme under guest editors, are a practical entry point for readers who want the state of a question — respectful maternity care, contraceptive access, menopause in low-resource settings, violence and health — rather than a single study. For authors in low- and middle-income countries, the combination of full open access, a stated commitment to those settings, and fee support mechanisms makes this one of the more accessible international venues in the field, provided the manuscript's women's-health and gender-analysis focus is genuine and explicit.

How to Read Research in Frontiers in Global Women's Health

Reading a journal well is a skill that repays a small amount of preparation, and Frontiers in Global Women's Health is no exception. Start with the question the article is actually trying to answer, which is usually stated most plainly at the end of the introduction, rather than with the headline result. Then look at the evidence offered for that question: what data, cases, systems, participants or texts were examined, how they were selected, and what was left out. A strong article in this field makes its selection logic visible, because selection shapes every conclusion that follows. In global health, read the setting as carefully as the result. An intervention that worked in one health system, financing arrangement and cultural context needs adaptation, not photocopying, in another, and the best articles in this journal say plainly what their setting contributed to the outcome.

Next, separate findings from interpretation. Findings are what the study observed or computed under stated conditions. Interpretation is what the authors believe those observations mean for theory, practice or policy. Good journals, and good readers, keep those two layers distinct, and the discussion section is where you can watch the authors move from one layer to the other. Note where they are careful, where they acknowledge alternative explanations, and where the language becomes more confident than the evidence underneath it. That calibration is often the most reliable sign of quality in a single article, more telling than the journal name on the cover.

Finally, place the article in conversation with what came before and after it. Check who cites it, whether later work confirms, qualifies or contradicts it, and whether corrections or updates exist. For fast-moving topics this step matters enormously, because a result that was sound when published can be overtaken by new data, new methods or changed real-world conditions. Keeping a short research log for each paper you rely on — question, method, key finding, limitation, and how you used it — turns casual reading into a cumulative, defensible evidence base for your own writing.

Guidance for Authors Considering a Submission

Authors should begin by testing fit honestly, before investing weeks in formatting. Read at least a dozen recent articles in Frontiers in Global Women's Health, including several in the section or topic area closest to your work, and ask whether your manuscript speaks to the same readers, uses a comparable standard of evidence, and adds something those articles do not already provide. If the honest answer is that the work belongs elsewhere, submitting elsewhere first saves everyone time, including you. If the fit is real, make that fit visible in your cover letter and in the opening pages: state the problem, the gap, your contribution, and why this journal's audience needs it, in plain language and without exaggeration.

On preparation, follow the journal's current author guidelines exactly as published on the publisher's own site, because requirements for structure, referencing, ethics statements, data statements and supplementary files change over time and third-party summaries go stale. Declare funding, conflicts of interest and any prior dissemination, such as a preprint, at submission rather than when asked. Where human participants, personal data, animals, or sensitive locations are involved, document approvals and consent in the manuscript itself. Plagiarism screening, image screening and authorship disputes are handled far more harshly after publication than before it, so the cheapest place to fix a problem is always in your own draft.

During peer review, treat reviewer reports as free expert consultancy, even when they sting. Respond point by point, explain what you changed and where in the text, and where you disagree, disagree with evidence and courtesy rather than volume. If a reviewer has misunderstood something, first assume the manuscript allowed the misunderstanding and fix the passage so the next reader cannot make the same mistake. After acceptance, check proofs slowly, confirm author names, affiliations, funding lines and licence wording, and then help the work travel: share the published version through the channels your licence permits, deposit it where your funder or institution requires, and correct the record promptly if you later find an error.

Who Reads This Journal and Why It Matters

The readership of Frontiers in Global Women's Health extends well beyond the authors who publish in it. It is read by clinicians and midwives, public-health and health-systems researchers, social scientists studying gender and health, and policymakers and programme staff whose decisions shape services for women, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. For all of these readers, a journal is infrastructure: it organises a field's memory, signals which questions the field currently takes seriously, and provides the citable record on which teaching, grant applications, clinical or technical practice, and policy debate all depend. That is why accuracy about a journal — its real scope, its real indexing, its real publisher — matters, and why this profile separates verified facts from claims that could not be verified from official sources.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Frontiers in Global Women's Health peer reviewed?

Yes. The journal describes itself as peer reviewed, and articles are assessed by external or editorial reviewers before acceptance. As with any journal, readers should still appraise individual articles on their own methods and evidence, because peer review is a quality filter, not a guarantee that every conclusion is correct.

How can I verify the journal's identity?

Use the ISSN as the anchor. Title spellings vary across databases, subtitles change, and similar titles exist in neighbouring fields, but the ISSN printed on the publisher's own site and recorded in the ISSN system identifies one continuing publication. Cross-check that number against the publisher listing and at least one major index before citing, submitting or paying any fee.

What should I check before submitting or paying a charge?

Confirm, on the publisher's official site and on the day you submit, the current submission portal, any article charge and what it covers, the licence offered, the expected article types, and the indexing services that currently list the journal. Screenshot or save those pages. If any of that information could not be verified from an official source, this profile says so openly rather than repeating an unverified figure.

Does a journal-level metric tell me whether one article is good?

No. Journal-level metrics describe averages across many articles over a defined window, and citation distributions are highly skewed, so a small number of heavily cited papers can lift an average while most articles are cited modestly. Use metrics to understand a journal's visibility, then judge the article in front of you by its question, design, transparency and limitations.

Reading This Journal Critically: A Note on Global Health Evidence

Global women's health is a field where evidence, advocacy and funding are tightly intertwined, and good readers keep that in view without becoming cynical about it. Much of the research this journal publishes is funded to improve outcomes in specific settings, evaluated against global goals, and written partly for the programme and policy audiences who can act on it. None of that compromises the work; it does mean the standard critical questions matter even more. Who was studied, and who was missing? Was the comparison group fair? Were outcomes that matter to women themselves — experience of care, dignity, cost to the household — measured alongside clinical endpoints? Was the intervention described well enough that another team, in another setting, could genuinely repeat it?

The journal's own structure helps the reader here. Its acceptance of study protocols means designs can be inspected before results are known, reducing the temptation to reshape questions around whatever the data happened to show. Its openness means the full text, including methods supplements, is never behind a paywall, so a reader in the setting being studied can check exactly what was done and said about her own health system — a basic matter of research justice that subscription publishing routinely fails. And its section system means a maternal-health reader and a mental-health reader can each follow a curated stream while still encountering the cross-cutting work, on violence, poverty or gender norms, that connects their concerns.

Finally, a word about the journal's place in its publisher's family. Frontiers publishes a large portfolio of journals sharing one platform, one review system and one open access model, and titles within it are frequently confused with one another and with similarly named journals from other publishers. In this family the exact title, the journal code fgwh and the ISSN 2673-5059 together pick out this journal and no other. Use all three when you cite, submit or evaluate, and the confusion that surrounds similarly named women's health titles disappears.