Integrated Pharmacy Research and Practice

About Integrated Pharmacy Research and Practice

Integrated Pharmacy Research and Practice — Journal Profile

Integrated Pharmacy Research and Practice (IPRP) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access online journal devoted to academic and professional pharmacy practice, published by Dove Medical Press — part of the Taylor & Francis Group, the academic publishing division of Informa. It carries the electronic ISSN 2230-5254 and has been publishing since 2012; its archive on the Dove Medical Press website runs from Volume 1 (2012) to Volume 15 (2026). The journal's defining idea is contained in its title: it exists to represent the research output of pharmacists and pharmacy practice, with a particular focus on integrated care — the pharmacist's work as part of a wider health-care team rather than in isolation. Its Editor-in-Chief is Professor Walid Al-Qerem.

IPRP is a small, selective title by the standards of open access medical publishing. Dove's own journal page counts just over two hundred articles across its entire archive, with annual volumes typically containing between ten and twenty-five papers. Its official metrics page reports an acceptance rate of 7 percent. For pharmacy practice researchers, that combination — a dedicated practice focus, indexing in PubMed and PubMed Central, a Journal Impact Factor in the Emerging Sources Citation Index, and unusually fast editorial handling — makes it a distinctive venue, provided the article publishing charge is affordable. This profile draws only on the publisher's own pages and the journal's DOAJ listing.

Aims and Scope

Dove Medical Press states the aims and scope (updated 4 August 2025) as follows in substance: the journal publishes research in all areas of academic and professional pharmacy practice, aims to represent the research output of pharmacists and pharmacy practice with particular focus on integrated care, and peer-reviews all papers to inform and stimulate pharmaceutical professionals. The areas the journal names as covered are:

• Community and hospital pharmacy
• Pharmaceutical sciences, formulation and industrial pharmacy
• Patient communication and patient research
• Pharmacist counselling, prescribing and clinical pharmacy
• The role of the pharmacist as part of a multidisciplinary team to improve health and economic outcomes
• The pharmacist's role in reporting and minimising adverse drug reactions
• Forensics, medico-legal issues and bioethics

The journal publishes original research, reports, reviews and commentaries. One boundary is stated explicitly and authors should respect it: the journal will no longer consider meta-analyses for publication. That single sentence rules out a manuscript type that pharmacy researchers frequently produce, and submitting one wastes the editorial office's time and the author's. Systematic reviews that are not meta-analyses are a different matter — the journal's recent content includes evidence syntheses such as an umbrella review of pharmaceutical care services in community pharmacies — but authors planning a quantitative pooling study should choose another venue.

In practice the published content is strikingly international and practice-grounded. Recent articles include a simulated-patient study of non-prescription antibiotic dispensing in community pharmacies in Port Sudan conducted in a conflict-affected setting, a quantitative study of bilingual communication barriers in pharmacies in eastern Romania, an assessment of drug-related problems and quality of life in elderly multimorbid inpatients with stroke, a readiness study for online pharmaceutical services by retail pharmacies in Kampala, Uganda, and a perspective piece on strengthening hospital pharmacy practice in Nepal through a minimum service standards checklist. The pattern is clear: empirical studies of what pharmacists actually do, in real health systems, with implications for care integration, patient safety or professional practice.

History and Development

The journal's own archive tells a compact history. Volume 1 appeared in 2012 with just three articles, and the early volumes were small — three articles in 2013, nine in 2014, nineteen in 2015 — before the title settled into a steadier rhythm of roughly ten to twenty-five papers a year through the late 2010s and 2020s: twenty-four articles in 2020, twenty-two in 2024, eleven in 2025 and the fifteenth volume under way in 2026. That trajectory reflects the journal's positioning. It was never designed as a high-volume outlet; it grew as pharmacy practice consolidated itself as a research discipline with its own methods — simulated-patient studies, dispensing audits, intervention evaluations, workforce and communication research — distinct from the pharmacology and pharmaceutics journals that had previously absorbed practice manuscripts as a sideline.

Three later developments shaped the journal's current standing. Its content entered Embase from 2018, according to the publisher's metrics page, extending its reach in the biomedical database that European and pharmaceutical-industry searchers favour. Its inclusion in PubMed and PubMed Central placed its full text in the world's most-used biomedical archive, a step that matters disproportionately for practice research, because practitioner readers rarely search beyond PubMed. And its coverage by the Emerging Sources Citation Index brought it a Journal Impact Factor — 2.4 for 2025 on the publisher's figures — giving authors a Clarivate metric to report to funders and promotion committees. Dove Medical Press itself became part of the Taylor & Francis Group, and the journal now sits inside one of the world's largest academic publishing portfolios while retaining the Dove imprint, workflow and pricing structure. The aims and scope were refreshed in August 2025, most notably with the decision to stop considering meta-analyses — a signal that the editors want the journal's limited pages reserved for primary practice research, reports and commentary rather than further layers of evidence synthesis.

Publisher and Editorial Model

Dove Medical Press is a specialist open access publisher of scientific and medical journals, founded on a fully online model, and since its acquisition it has operated as part of the Taylor & Francis Group within Informa PLC — a fact stated on every page of the journal's website. The journal itself is a member of, and subscribes to the principles of, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Editorial control rests with the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Walid Al-Qerem, supported by the journal's editorial board, whose membership Dove publishes on its editors page; DOAJ records the review model as single anonymous peer review — referees know the authors' identities, authors do not know the referees' — and Dove publishes general peer review guidelines describing how manuscripts are assessed. Like other Dove titles, the journal checks all submitted manuscripts for plagiarism using Crossref Similarity Check powered by iThenticate, and it offers article-level features uncommon among smaller journals, including video abstracts.

One feature of the Dove model deserves a balanced note. The publisher applies a centralised, production-driven workflow across its journals: standardised submission, rapid technical checks, and fast movement from acceptance to publication (see the speed figures below). Authors who value that efficiency, and the discoverability that comes from PubMed Central deposit, tend to rate the experience highly; authors should nonetheless budget for the article publishing charge from the outset, because under the open access model the charge is invoiced on acceptance and the paper cannot progress until it is settled.

Indexing and Journal Metrics

Dove's official metrics page for IPRP (consulted October 2026) reports a Journal Impact Factor of 2.4 (2025) and a 5-year Impact Factor of 2.5 (2025), and the journal is covered by the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) — the journal's pages carry an "ESCI Impact Factor" designation, meaning its Impact Factor comes through the ESCI tier of the Web of Science Core Collection rather than the Science Citation Index Expanded. Authors should describe it accurately in that form; it is a genuine Clarivate Impact Factor, but the ESCI provenance is part of the fact.

The same metrics page lists indexing and archiving coverage in PubMed and PubMed Central (where the journal is abbreviated Integr Pharm Res Pract), Embase (from 2018), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Open Access Initiative (OAIster). DOAJ additionally records digital preservation through CLOCKSS and PubMed Central. For a pharmacy practice journal, PubMed visibility is the decisive credential: it places articles in the database that clinicians and health-services researchers actually search, and it is the main reason a small journal can compete for good manuscripts against much larger titles.

Dove also publishes operational metrics that most journals keep private: 49,781 annual downloads and views; an average of 34 days from submission to first editorial decision; an average of 6 days from editorial acceptance to publication; and a 7 percent acceptance rate. DOAJ records a longer overall publication time of 16 weeks, which is best read as the fuller submission-to-publication arc for a typical paper, including revision time in authors' hands, rather than a contradiction of Dove's handling figures. Taken together, the numbers describe a journal that decides quickly and rejects heavily — authors should expect a fast answer, and should not mistake speed for leniency.

Publication Model and Article Publishing Charges

IPRP is a fully open access journal: every article is freely readable on publication, and DOAJ records the available licences as CC BY and CC BY-NC, with copyright terms set out in Dove's author guidelines. All manuscripts submitted to Dove Medical Press are assumed to be submitted under the open access model, under which an article publishing charge (APC) becomes payable when a paper is accepted. Dove's current pricing page for this journal lists the charge at US$3,278 for authors in the USA, Canada and the rest of the world, £2,428 in the UK and €2,918 in the Eurozone, plus any applicable taxes; DOAJ's listing records a maximum of US$3,230, and Dove notes that fees may change without notice because of exchange-rate movements, so authors should confirm the live figure on the journal's pricing page at submission. An optional accelerated publication service is offered across Dove titles at additional cost for authors for whom speed is critical.

The charge is substantial relative to the budgets of many practice researchers, and Dove attempts to soften it with a structured waiver system. Where all authors are primarily affiliated in a World Bank low-income economy below a stated GDP threshold, a 100 percent waiver applies; authors from qualifying lower-middle income economies receive a 50 percent discount; and discretionary waivers can be requested before submission with supporting evidence. Authors employed by, or supported by, a commercial organisation are not eligible for the discounted rates. Dove also explains the logic publicly: the charge recovers editorial and production costs and funds the waiver pool for authors from low- and middle-income countries. None of this changes the core calculation — a funded research group will absorb the APC without difficulty, while an unfunded practitioner-researcher should resolve the waiver question before submitting, since Dove states that a discretionary waiver request must be settled before the manuscript can enter the system.

The Submission Process in Practice

Submissions are made online through the Dove Medical Press system ("Submit new manuscript" on the journal page), under Dove's standard author guidelines. The workflow authors should expect, assembled from the publisher's stated policies, is: submission and plagiarism screening of every manuscript through Crossref Similarity Check (iThenticate); editorial assessment and single anonymous peer review under the Editor-in-Chief's control; a first editorial decision in about a month on average, according to the journal's published speed metrics; revision; and, on acceptance, invoicing of the APC, followed by rapid production — Dove reports an average of six days from acceptance to publication. Papers are published continuously online within the year's volume rather than held for issues, which is why the 2026 volume already shows articles dated across the year.

Preparation advice specific to this journal follows from its scope and selectivity. Frame the study around pharmacy practice or integrated care, not around a molecule: a formulation or pharmacology paper needs an explicit practice, service or patient-care dimension to fit. State the health-system context clearly, because the journal's readership is international and its recent content ranges across Sudan, Romania, Uganda, Nepal and China. Report methods to the standard expected of health-services research, since PubMed indexing exposes the paper to clinical readers well beyond pharmacy. Do not submit a meta-analysis. And confirm funding for the APC, or a waiver decision, before submission rather than after acceptance.

Editorial Standards, Ethics and Article Features

Several features of the Dove model shape what an IPRP paper looks like once published. Every submission is screened for plagiarism through Crossref Similarity Check powered by iThenticate — the publisher states this as a blanket practice, and authors reusing text from their own theses or prior papers should expect the overlap to be detected and queried. The journal subscribes to COPE's principles, and its editorial policies on scientific misconduct are the ones DOAJ links from the journal's record. Dove also offers video abstracts, short author-recorded summaries that sit alongside the article; for practice research aimed partly at busy clinicians, that format can carry a study's message further than the abstract alone. Articles are published with full open access licensing, deposited in PubMed Central, and preserved through CLOCKSS as well as PMC, according to DOAJ's record — a preservation arrangement stronger than that of many small journals, and relevant to authors whose funders mandate long-term archiving.

One further publisher policy is worth knowing about, with a caveat. Dove's journal pages state that the publisher will reconsider papers previously rejected by a small set of very high-profile general medical journals, in those journals' original formats, with the earlier reviewer comments enclosed to expedite assessment. The statement on the IPRP pages is framed through a sister journal's name (it speaks of what "Clinical Epidemiology recognizes"), which suggests boilerplate text shared across Dove titles rather than a policy written for this journal alone. Authors in that unusual position should confirm the arrangement with the IPRP editorial office directly before relying on it; the underlying point — that Dove titles will look at strong papers rejected elsewhere, with prior reviews attached — is nonetheless part of how the publisher positions its journals in the cascade of medical publishing.

Readership and Fit

The journal's natural readers are academic pharmacists, clinical and hospital pharmacists, community pharmacy researchers, health-services researchers working on medicines use, and the multidisciplinary colleagues — physicians, nurses, health economists — with whom integrated care research is done. Its content mix (dispensing behaviour, pharmacist counselling and communication, clinical pharmacy interventions, adverse drug reaction reporting, pharmacy education and workforce questions, medico-legal and ethical dimensions of practice) maps closely onto the research programmes of schools of pharmacy worldwide.

IPRP is a strong choice when three conditions hold: the work is genuinely about pharmacy practice or the pharmacist's role in integrated care; the authors need the visibility and credibility that PubMed Central deposit and an ESCI Impact Factor provide; and the APC is funded or waived. It is a poor choice for meta-analyses, for purely laboratory-based pharmaceutical science without a practice dimension, for authors who cannot meet the charge and do not qualify for a waiver, and for anyone who needs a Science Citation Index Expanded journal specifically. Judged on its publisher's own figures — a 2.4 Impact Factor for 2025, a 7 percent acceptance rate, decisions in about five weeks and publication within days of acceptance — it is one of the more demanding and more visible specialist outlets in pharmacy practice research.

Key Facts at a Glance

Sources: Dove Medical Press journal pages for Integrated Pharmacy Research and Practice (about, aims and scope, journal metrics, article publishing charges) and the journal's DOAJ listing, consulted October 2026. Fees and metrics are updated by the publisher; confirm the current APC before submitting.