Journal of the Dow University of Health Sciences

About Journal of the Dow University of Health Sciences

Journal of the Dow University of Health Sciences: Profile and Author Guide

The Journal of the Dow University of Health Sciences, abbreviated JDUHS and cited as J Dow Univ Health Sci, is the peer-reviewed health sciences journal of Dow University of Health Sciences in Karachi, Pakistan. Its own About page states that it was established in 2007 with the aim of disseminating high-quality scientific research papers among the healthcare research community, that it is published three times a year, in April, August and December, and that its print ISSN is 1995-2198 and its online ISSN is 2410-2180. Those are the two ISSNs carried in the Journals World record for this post, and they match the journal's own statement and its Directory of Open Access Journals record exactly, which makes this a clean identity to verify.

One field in the older Journals World record does need correction. Its publisher field is stored as the bare number 9104. That is not a publisher name. The journal's own site states plainly that JDUHS is managed and published by Dow University of Health Sciences, and the DOAJ record names the same university as publisher, in Pakistan. Readers should rely on that, and the numeric field is flagged here as a structured-field error in the directory record, of the same kind found in several older records, rather than as information about the journal.

Quick Facts

Aims, Scope and the Low- and Middle-Income Country Emphasis

JDUHS describes itself as a double-blind peer-reviewed open access health sciences journal aiming to provide valuable knowledge and understanding of health problems and their solutions to basic and clinical scientists and to allied health sciences researchers. Its distinguishing editorial choice is a special emphasis on primary research conducted in the field of health sciences in low and middle-income countries. That emphasis is worth taking seriously as guidance on fit. A study from a tertiary hospital in Karachi, a community survey in rural Sindh, a medical education intervention in a resource-constrained setting, or a clinical audit whose lessons transfer to similar health systems elsewhere is squarely within the journal's purpose. The same study framed as if setting were irrelevant loses the very quality the journal says it values.

The article types the journal considers are original articles, review articles, short communications, case reports, commentary and student articles, on all aspects of health sciences. The Directory of Open Access Journals record adds the subject vocabulary under which the journal is classified: medicine in the Library of Congress scheme, with keywords medicine, dentistry, biomedical science, public health and medical education. That keyword set is a fair map of the journal's centre of gravity. Dow University is a large public health sciences university with medical, dental, pharmaceutical, nursing, allied health and public health teaching, and its journal reflects that breadth rather than a single specialty. Authors in dentistry, pharmacy, rehabilitation, laboratory sciences, nursing and health professions education are therefore not peripheral contributors here; they are part of the stated scope.

The student article category also deserves attention, because it signals an editorial mission that goes beyond choosing finished research. A university journal that explicitly welcomes student work is investing in the research capacity of its own trainees, and it usually expects senior authors and supervisors to take responsibility for design, ethics approval and reporting quality in those submissions. Students submitting for the first time should treat the journal's instructions as a training document: follow the structure, report the ethics approval, give exact denominators, and avoid overstating what a small single-centre study can show. Those habits, more than topic novelty, are what separate an acceptable student paper from one returned at first screening.

Approval, Indexing and Discovery

The journal states that it is approved by the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council and by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan, and that it is abstracted and indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, the Index Medicus for the Eastern Mediterranean Region, PakMediNet, Google Scholar, EBSCO, Crossref and the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International. Those are the journal's own statements on its About page, and they are reported here as such, attributed to the journal. Independently of that list, this profile verified a live record for the journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals through the DOAJ search API, for both its print and online ISSNs, and verified a Scopus presence indirectly through SCImago-derived secondary summaries that carry the same two ISSNs, a Pakistan country attribution and the university as publisher.

For a Pakistani author, the Higher Education Commission and the national medical regulator recognition are often the practically decisive facts, because they affect whether a publication counts in appointment, promotion and postgraduate training requirements. Regulations and journal categorisations change, and categories are revised, so an author who needs a specific category for a specific purpose should check the current categorisation in the regulator's or the Commission's own system at the time of submission rather than relying on any profile, including this one. The same advice applies to Web of Science: coverage is by collection and by year, and a journal's own list is a starting point for verification, not a substitute for checking the master list for the exact ISSN and year.

Open Access, Copyright and Charges

JDUHS states that it is an open access journal, meaning all content is freely available without charge to the user or the user's institution, and that users may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full texts, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition. Its copyright statement says authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication, with the work simultaneously licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Licence, CC BY-NC 4.0, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited and its first publication in the journal is acknowledged, for non-commercial purposes.

The DOAJ record agrees on the essentials and adds operational detail: author-retained copyright, a CC BY-NC licence, a DOI identifier scheme, plagiarism screening, a deposit policy recorded through Open Policy Finder, and a recorded publication time of 14 weeks. On charges, the DOAJ record states that the journal has no article processing charge and no other charges. Because fee pages are among the most frequently updated pages on any journal site, an author should still open the journal's own article processing charges page, linked from its DOAJ record, at the moment of submission and keep a note of what it said; if the two ever differ, the journal's current page is the one that governs a submission made that day. Nothing in the sources in hand supports any figure for a fee, so no figure is invented here.

Metrics: Two Databases, Two h-Indexes, One Explanation

OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint to source S2764383643 and then fetched directly by that identifier for this profile, records 348 works and 424 citations for the journal, an h-index of 8, an i10-index of 6 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.24, with works in that record spanning 2007 to 2025 — the full life of the journal from its founding year. Secondary summaries of Scopus-based SCImago data report a smaller picture for the Scopus record: an SJR of 0.120 for 2025, an h-index of 4 and a Q4 position in a health professions miscellaneous category, with citation-based impact values in the 0.1 to 0.2 range in recent Journal Citation Reports-derived summaries. The Journals World record likewise carried an h-index of 4 and described coverage as 2018 to 2025.

As with many university journals from the region, the discrepancy is about coverage and counting, not about honesty. Scopus coverage in the record consulted begins later than the journal's founding, so the Scopus-based h-index is computed over a shorter and more recent slice of the journal's output, while OpenAlex counts from 2007. Authors should quote a metric with its database, and should expect evaluators in Pakistan to look primarily at the categorisation and indexing that their own institution recognises. For the journal itself, the more informative description is qualitative: a steadily publishing, triannual, university health sciences journal with a modest but real citation record, a long continuous run since 2007, and a readership concentrated among clinicians, dentists, allied health researchers and medical educators in Pakistan and comparable health systems.

How to Prepare a Submission That Fits

Reporting quality is the main lever an author controls. Follow the reporting standard for the study type — randomised trials, observational studies, diagnostic accuracy work, case reports and systematic reviews each have an established checklist — and state ethics approval, consent and the approving committee in the methods. Give the study setting, dates and eligibility criteria precisely, because the journal's emphasis on research from low and middle-income countries means readers need the context to judge transferability. Report exact numbers with denominators, avoid percentages alone for small samples, and distinguish clearly between association and effect in observational work. For case reports, explain what is unusual or instructive and obtain and state patient consent. For review articles, describe how literature was searched and chosen, even in a narrative review, so readers can judge completeness.

Practical points follow from the journal's arrangements. Prepare the manuscript so that authors cannot be identified from the text, headers or file properties, because review is double-blind. Keep the title page and identifying material separate as the submission system directs. Use the journal's abbreviated citation style consistently and check that DOIs, where they exist, are complete. Write the abstract to stand alone, with the objective, methods, key results with numbers, and a conclusion that the data support. And because the journal publishes three issues a year, plan timelines around those issues rather than assuming continuous publication of an accepted paper in the following week; the DOAJ-recorded 14-week publication time is a planning guide, not a commitment.

Who Should Submit, and Alternatives to Consider

JDUHS is a strong choice for a well-conducted single-centre or multi-centre study from Pakistan or a comparable setting, for dental, pharmacy, nursing, rehabilitation and laboratory research that large general medical journals often treat as peripheral, for medical and health professions education research, and for early-career and student-led work supervised to a publishable standard. It is a less natural home for work whose main claim depends on very large sample sizes, advanced trial infrastructure or a highly specialised international audience, not because such work lacks value but because the journal's readership and review pool are centred on general health sciences in its region. Authors choosing between JDUHS and a specialty journal should weigh audience against categorisation: publish where the readers who can use the finding actually are, while confirming that the venue satisfies any institutional requirement that applies to them.

The University Behind the Journal and Why It Matters for Authors

JDUHS cannot be understood apart from Dow University of Health Sciences itself. The university grew out of Dow Medical College, one of Pakistan's oldest medical institutions, and now operates a large cluster of medical, dental, pharmaceutical, nursing, allied health and public health colleges, institutes and teaching hospitals in Karachi, together with diagnostic and research facilities that serve a very large urban population. A journal published by such an institution sits close to an unusually varied flow of clinical material, community health problems and trainee research. Its pages have room for the kinds of questions that arise in high-volume public hospitals and in community settings in a megacity: patterns of infectious and non-communicable disease, maternal and child health, oral health, antimicrobial use, health workforce training, and the practical organisation of care under resource constraints. Those are questions of wide relevance across South Asia and other regions with similar health systems, which is one reason the journal's stated emphasis on research from low and middle-income countries is more than a slogan.

For authors outside the university, that institutional setting is an invitation rather than a barrier. The journal's scope is health sciences in general, not the internal reporting of one university, and its indexing and open access arrangements are designed for external readers and contributors. What the setting does change is the standard of contextual reporting a reader should expect: a study should say where patients were recruited, what services were available, what the referral pattern was, and what constraints shaped the care being studied, because those details determine whether a finding from Karachi can inform practice in Lahore, Dhaka, Nairobi or a smaller district hospital. Authors who supply that context, who report limitations candidly, and who resist importing conclusions from very different health systems without comment will find their work reads as the journal intends. Authors preparing a first submission from the region may also use the journal as a standard of presentation — its published articles show the expected structure, abstract format, referencing discipline and ethics statements in a local venue — while remembering that emulating presentation is a starting point, and that sound design and honest analysis remain the decisive factors in review.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was the journal founded and how often does it appear? In 2007, per the journal, and three times a year in April, August and December.

What are its ISSNs? Print 1995-2198 and online 2410-2180, stated by the journal and confirmed in its DOAJ record.

Is it open access and does it charge? It is open access under CC BY-NC 4.0 with authors retaining copyright. DOAJ records no article processing charge and no other charges; check the journal's own charges page at submission in case it has been updated.

Is it indexed in Scopus and Web of Science? The journal lists both, along with several other services, on its own About page. Verify the exact collection and year in the relevant master list if a specific requirement depends on it.

Does it accept student articles? Yes; student articles are among the article types the journal says it considers, alongside original articles, reviews, short communications, case reports and commentary.

Why do sources give different h-index values? Because OpenAlex counts the journal from 2007 while the Scopus-based record consulted covers a later period. The values in this profile are 8 from OpenAlex and 4 from Scopus-based summaries, each attributed to its source.

Finally, a word on patience and record keeping. Keep copies of the submitted version, the revised version, all correspondence and the final published PDF, and record the issue and page or article details once they appear. For a triannual journal, those records are what an author needs for annual appraisals, postgraduate logbooks and institutional research reporting, and they are far easier to assemble at publication than to reconstruct years later from memory and inbox searches.

Verification Notes

Founding year, frequency, ISSNs, aims and scope, article types, the low- and middle-income country emphasis, the open access and copyright statements, the publisher statement and the indexing list were taken from the journal's own About page. The DOAJ search API returned a matching record for both ISSNs, and its fields supplied the review model wording, licence, charge position, publication time, keywords and subject classification used here. Bibliometric figures were taken only from the OpenAlex record resolved by ISSN and then fetched directly as S2764383643, with Scopus-based figures attributed to secondary summaries of SCImago data. The numeric publisher field in the older directory record is reported as an error. An acceptance rate is not published in the sources in hand and is not stated here; any field that could not be verified is described as not publicly disclosed rather than filled by inference.