Global Pediatric Health

About Global Pediatric Health

Global Pediatric Health — Journal Profile

Global Pediatric Health (GPH) is a peer-reviewed, open access journal published by SAGE Publishing (SAGE Publications Inc., Thousand Oaks, California, United States) that focuses on health issues of children that are common to all regions of the world. Launched in 2014 and published continuously online, it carries research articles, reviews and case reports across the pediatric subspecialties as well as public health, health-care delivery, medical education and the administrative aspects of medicine. Its electronic ISSN — its only ISSN, as an online-only title — is 2333-794X. The journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), its articles are archived in PubMed Central among other preservation services, and it serves a deliberately international authorship and readership: its stated intent is that sharing medical information from an international perspective will help physicians, health care workers and public officials in many geographic areas recognise and solve similar problems in child health.

Quick Facts

Aims and Scope

The publisher’s own statement of aims defines the journal’s territory with unusual clarity. Global Pediatric Health is a peer-reviewed open access journal focusing on health issues of children common to all regions of the world. The research articles, reviews and case reports it publishes cover a variety of pediatric subspecialties as well as public health issues, the delivery of health care, medical education and administrative aspects of medicine. The journal serves as a resource both for physicians who have completed fellowship training and for those practising primary care, and its organising idea is comparative: a problem documented in one country’s clinics frequently has the same shape in another’s, and a journal that collects such reports internationally helps clinicians, health care workers and public officials recognise and solve similar problems related to pediatric health.

The scope statement elaborates the welcome list. The journal welcomes papers on general pediatrics and on the pediatric subspecialties, and papers on public health issues, delivery of health care, medical education and administrative aspects of medicine with relevance to pediatric health. It makes a point of welcoming work on methods to solve the inequality of care in developing countries as contrasted with developed ones, and states that both hypothesis-based and evidence-based papers are welcome on that theme. DOAJ’s keyword summary for the journal — public health, critical care, clinical medicine, healthcare, paediatrics — matches this breadth, and the journal’s section structure includes a dedicated humanitarian and crisis research section covering pediatric care and health in disasters and crisis scenarios, a section whose editor was recruited internationally and which reflects the journal’s global-health orientation.

In subject terms, readers can expect content spanning neonatology and preterm care; infant and child nutrition; obesity, physical activity and diet; maternal and neonatal health care as it bears on child outcomes; infectious disease and immunisation; pediatric critical care and emergency care; adolescent health; developmental and behavioural pediatrics; and health-systems research on how children’s care is organised, financed and taught. The unifying test is not a subspecialty but a question: does this work concern a child-health problem shared across regions, or a solution one region can learn from another?

History and Place in the SAGE Portfolio

Global Pediatric Health began publication in 2014, part of the wave of born-open-access journals that large publishers launched in the early 2010s to serve fields where the case for unrestricted readership was especially strong. Child health is such a field: the clinicians who most need research on, for example, neonatal care or childhood pneumonia in low-resource settings are often the least able to pay subscription prices, and an open access licence removes that barrier at the point of care. The ISSN record confirms the outline — title proper Global Pediatric Health, medium online, earliest publisher SAGE of Thousand Oaks, dates of publication 2014 onward, status published — and DOAJ records that the journal has been open access since 2014, its first year.

The journal has grown by annual volumes since launch (volume 4 appeared in 2017; citation databases record content through volume 11 in 2024 and beyond) under continuous publication, in which articles are posted as they complete production rather than held for issues. Within SAGE’s medical portfolio it sits alongside the publisher’s other open access specialty titles, produced on the same platform and submission infrastructure, and it benefits from the preservation arrangements SAGE maintains for its open access content — the DOAJ record lists CLOCKSS, LOCKSS, PubMed Central and Portico as the services in which GPH articles are digitally archived, with the DOI as the permanent article identifier.

Peer Review, Speed and Publication Practice

DOAJ records the journal’s review model as anonymous peer review and notes that the journal checks submissions for plagiarism. The average time from submission to publication recorded by DOAJ is about twelve weeks — brisk by medical-journal standards, and consistent with a continuous-publication workflow that does not wait to assemble issues. Articles are published open access under Creative Commons licences — the DOAJ record lists CC BY or CC BY-NC — with authors not retaining unrestricted copyright and publishing rights, the standard SAGE open access arrangement in which the licence terms are set by the article’s licence choice at publication. Readers should therefore check the licence printed on each article: some GPH content may be reused freely with attribution under CC BY, while CC BY-NC items exclude commercial reuse.

The journal charges an article processing charge to publish, recorded by DOAJ as up to USD 2,500, and the same record confirms that a waiver policy exists for these charges. As with all SAGE open access titles, authors should confirm the current charge and waiver eligibility on the journal’s SAGE page at the point of submission, since charges are set by the publisher and can change; the figure here is the one reported in the journal’s DOAJ listing. There are no subscription charges for readers anywhere in the model — the journal is free to read in full, worldwide, which for a journal about global child health is not a detail but the mission working as intended.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

Global Pediatric Health is listed in DOAJ, the standard whitelist for open access journals, and its archiving in PubMed Central means its articles are discoverable through PubMed searches and preserved in the US National Library of Medicine’s archive — the single most important visibility channel for a clinical pediatrics journal. Bibliographic control records give the journal’s library identifiers (LCCN 2013207553; the US national library of medicine catalogue number 101670224; OCLC 870526478), and its Library of Congress subject classification is Medicine: Pediatrics.

On citation standing, SCImago-derived listings place the journal in the second quartile range for pediatrics categories in recent years (Resurchify’s SCImago-based summary lists Global Pediatric Health at Q2 in Pediatrics and in Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health for 2023, with an SJR of 0.46 and an h-index of 28), while Scopus-derived services record a CiteScore of about 1.4. These are the indicators of a mid-field specialty journal: not a high-impact flagship, but a legitimately indexed, steadily cited open access venue whose articles accumulate citations in the thousands across its run (one citation-analysis service counts roughly a thousand articles and several thousand citations). Readers should quote any metric with its source and year, because aggregator values for this title vary between services; the stable, verifiable facts are its DOAJ listing, its PubMed Central presence and its continuous publication record since 2014.

Who Publishes in It, and Who Reads It

The journal’s authorship is genuinely international, reflecting both its title and its inequality-of-care brief: hospital-based pediatricians reporting case series and cohort studies, public health researchers documenting programmes, medical educators describing training interventions, and clinicians in low- and middle-income countries publishing findings that subscription journals’ readership economics historically kept local. Its readership, as the publisher frames it, includes fellowship-trained subspecialists and primary care physicians, together with the wider circle of health care workers, administrators and public officials concerned with child health. The humanitarian and crisis section extends that circle to disaster and refugee health, where pediatric questions — infant feeding in emergencies, protective action for children in disasters, care in displacement — are chronically under-published.

For an author weighing the journal, the fit test follows from the aims. A manuscript belongs in Global Pediatric Health if it reports research, a review or a case with lessons that travel: a clinical problem common across regions, a delivery or education model others could adopt, or evidence about unequal care and what reduces it. Purely local administrative reports with no generalisable lesson, and highly technical subspecialty work aimed at a narrow research frontier, will usually find better homes in the corresponding subspecialty titles. Authors should also weigh the practical offer: anonymous peer review, an average twelve-week submission-to-publication path per DOAJ, immediate worldwide open access under a Creative Commons licence, PubMed Central archiving, and an APC of up to USD 2,500 with waivers — a package designed for speed and reach rather than for prestige signalling.

Reading Global Pediatric Health Well

Because the journal publishes continuously and broadly, the effective way to read it is by theme rather than by issue: follow its sections and collections — general pediatrics, the subspecialties, public health and delivery of care, medical education, and humanitarian and crisis research — and use its PubMed Central presence to fold its content into ordinary literature searches, where it will surface alongside the subscription pediatrics literature on equal terms. For clinicians in training, the case reports are a genuinely useful feature: individually modest, collectively they form a library of presentations and management decisions from health systems very different from one’s own, which is the journal’s founding idea in its most practical form. For researchers, the journal’s value is complementary to the big general medical titles: it captures the implementation detail — how a programme actually ran, what a clinic actually did — that high-selectivity journals often edit out.

Article Types in Detail

The journal’s three core article types each do different work. Research articles report original studies — clinical cohorts, trials, surveys, programme evaluations and health-services analyses — and form the journal’s evidentiary core. Reviews synthesise a field for the practising reader, valuable in a journal whose audience includes primary care physicians far from academic centres. Case reports, the third pillar, document unusual presentations, instructive management problems and first experiences with interventions in particular settings; in a global journal they carry an extra function, because a case managed in a district hospital with limited resources teaches different lessons from the same case managed in a tertiary centre, and GPH’s pages preserve both. Around these core types sit the journal’s thematic sections, including the humanitarian and crisis research section, which commissions and handles work on pediatric care in disasters, displacement and emergencies — a section for which the journal recruited a specialist section editor through an open international search that drew more than a hundred applicants, a small but telling indicator of the journal’s reach into the global health community.

Global Pediatric Health and the Open Access Argument

GPH is a useful specimen for understanding why open access mattered first and most in fields like child health. The global burden of childhood illness falls heaviest where library budgets are thinnest; a subscription paywall on pediatrics research therefore taxes exactly the readers the research is meant to serve. By inverting the payment — authors, funders or institutions pay an article processing charge, with waivers for those who cannot, and every reader everywhere pays nothing — the journal aligns its economics with its title. Its preservation arrangements reinforce the point: deposit in PubMed Central places its full text inside the archive that clinicians and researchers in low-resource settings most reliably can reach, and CLOCKSS, LOCKSS and Portico deposit guards the record against publisher-side failure. When librarians assess open access journals, the checks are precisely the ones this profile has applied — a DOAJ listing, transparent charges and waiver policy, named archiving services, a real publisher with a track record, and a continuous publication history — and Global Pediatric Health passes each of them on publicly verifiable evidence. That, more than any single citation metric, is the basis on which authors and readers can trust it with work that matters.

How the Journal Is Organised Editorially

Like other SAGE medical titles, Global Pediatric Health is led by an editor-in-chief working with an editorial board and section editors who handle defined territories of the scope — the humanitarian and crisis research section, with its own section editor, is the publicly documented example of that structure. Section editing suits this journal’s breadth: a generalist editor cannot referee neonatology, adolescent medicine, health-systems research and disaster pediatrics with equal authority, so manuscripts are routed to editors whose expertise matches the submission, and those editors in turn draw on the anonymous peer reviewers recorded in the journal’s DOAJ entry. For authors, the practical consequence is that a well-targeted submission — clearly framed for a section, explicit about the generalisable lesson, and honest about setting and limitations — moves more smoothly than a generic one, because the handling editor can immediately see where the paper belongs in the journal’s map. For readers, the section structure doubles as a browsing tool: the sections are stable across volumes even though articles publish continuously, so following a section is the closest equivalent of following a favourite part of a print journal. Authors should use the journal’s SAGE submission system and guidelines for current requirements on article types, word limits and reporting standards, which the publisher maintains and updates centrally.

One further practical note for readers concerns citation. Because the journal publishes continuously rather than in conventional issues, individual articles are cited by year, annual volume and article DOI rather than by issue and page range; the volume numbering (volume 1 in 2014, volume 4 in 2017, volume 11 in 2024) nonetheless gives a quick sense of an article’s age. When quoting the journal in coursework or a manuscript, give the DOI exactly as printed on the article, and record the licence shown on its first page, since reuse rights differ between the journal’s CC BY and CC BY-NC articles.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Global Pediatric Health? 2333-794X, an online ISSN; the journal is online-only and has no separate print ISSN.

When was Global Pediatric Health founded? In 2014, by SAGE Publishing in the United States, as an open access journal from its first volume.

Is Global Pediatric Health really open access? Yes. It is listed in DOAJ, articles carry CC BY or CC BY-NC licences, and reading is free worldwide; authors pay an article processing charge recorded by DOAJ as up to USD 2,500, with a waiver policy.

Where is it indexed and archived? Listed in DOAJ; articles archived in PubMed Central, CLOCKSS, LOCKSS and Portico, per the DOAJ record.

How fast is publication? DOAJ records an average of about twelve weeks from submission to publication, under a continuous publication model.

What kinds of papers does it publish? Research articles, reviews and case reports in general pediatrics and the pediatric subspecialties, plus work on public health, delivery of care, medical education, administrative aspects of medicine, inequality of care, and humanitarian and crisis settings.

Profile prepared from the publisher’s statement of aims as reproduced in bibliographic services, the journal’s DOAJ record, its ISSN Portal record and SCImago-derived listings used for classification context only. Figures such as the article processing charge are those reported in the DOAJ listing and should be re-checked on the journal’s SAGE page before submission, as publisher charges can change.