About Patient Related Outcome Measures

Patient Related Outcome Measures — Journal Profile

Patient Related Outcome Measures (abbreviated PROM) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal devoted to research about outcomes that matter directly to patients. Its electronic ISSN is 1179-271X, which is also its ISSN-L, and the ISSN Portal records the abbreviated key title as Patient relat. outcome meas. and the title variant PROM. The journal began in 2010, with Volume 1 appearing that year, and the publisher's archive lists a continuous run through Volume 16 in 2025. That long, unbroken volume sequence is the simplest way to confirm identity: a journal with this exact title, this exact ISSN and a Dove Medical Press archive beginning in 2010 is the record described here, not a general article collection about outcome measurement.

The journal is published by Dove Medical Press. The ISSN Portal records the earliest publisher as Dove Medical Press in Auckland, New Zealand, from 2010, and gives the country of the record as New Zealand, while the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists the publisher as Dove Medical Press in the United Kingdom. Those two country attributions reflect different stages and registrations in the publisher's history rather than two different journals, and readers checking the record should expect to meet both. Dove Medical Press was acquired by the Taylor & Francis Group in 2017, and the same journal, under the same title and ISSN, is also presented on Taylor & Francis Online under the journal code dpro20. Its DOI pattern, visible throughout the JournalsWorld article feed for this ISSN, is the Dove pattern 10.2147/PROM, followed by an article number.

The purpose of this profile is practical. It explains, from official and directory sources only, what the journal publishes, which kinds of study it welcomes and which it no longer considers, how peer review and publication charges are described by its own publisher and by DOAJ, where it is indexed, and how an author or reader can verify any of those claims independently before relying on them. Where a figure is time-sensitive, such as the Journal Impact Factor displayed by the publisher, the profile attributes it to its source instead of presenting it as a permanent property of the journal. Where sources differ in wording, the profile says so plainly rather than smoothing the difference away.

Aims and scope in the publisher's own terms

The publisher describes Patient Related Outcome Measures as a journal for authoritative and clinically relevant research that will inform and guide practitioners, researchers and patients on questions about the quality of patient care and about patients' experiences. That framing matters. The journal is not limited to clinicians reporting clinical endpoints; it explicitly invites work from practitioners across all disciplines, from healthcare researchers and from patient support groups, and its Taylor & Francis presentation extends the invitation to patients, caregivers and patient advocates themselves. A submission therefore needs a clear line of sight to the patient: what was experienced, what was measured, and why the result should change care, measurement or understanding.

The Dove aims and scope page, updated on 6 August 2025, lists the territory in detail. It covers quality of life scores, patient satisfaction audits, treatment outcomes that focus on the patient, research into improving patient outcomes, hypotheses of interventions intended to improve outcomes, short communications that illustrate improved outcomes, case reports or case series that show an improved patient experience, and patient journey descriptions or research. Read together, those categories describe a journal interested both in instruments — the questionnaires and scales through which outcomes are captured — and in the interventions and service changes those instruments are used to evaluate. Psychometric validation studies, cross-cultural adaptations of existing scales, and real-world cohort studies tracking change in generic and disease-specific measures over time are characteristic examples, and recent articles listed under this ISSN follow exactly that pattern.

One scope limit should be checked before any submission is prepared. The current aims and scope page states, in a highlighted sentence, that Patient Related Outcome Measures will no longer consider meta-analyses for publication. Authors holding a completed meta-analysis should therefore look for a different venue rather than reformatting the work for this journal, and authors planning a systematic review should read the current instructions carefully to see how a review without a pooled meta-analysis is treated. The same page asks that articles have a sound rationale and pose a research question, which is a useful early test: a purely descriptive dataset with no question about patient experience or outcome measurement is unlikely to fit, however large the sample.

Reporting standards the journal endorses

Patient Related Outcome Measures endorses a specific set of reporting statements, and naming them tells authors a great deal about the editorial expectations. It endorses the COSMIN statement for reporting studies of health measurement instruments, the STARD statement for diagnostic accuracy studies, the PRISMA statement for systematic reviews, the STROBE statement for observational studies in epidemiology, and the RECORD statement for studies conducted using observational routinely collected health data. Qualitative research reports should follow COREQ or SRQR. The journal points authors to the EQUATOR Network for the full set of reporting instructions.

For a prospective author, the practical consequence is that the checklist belongs at the design and drafting stage, not at the proof stage. A validation study written up without the COSMIN structure, or an observational cohort reported without attention to STROBE, invites avoidable revision even when the underlying work is sound. For a reader, the endorsement is a quality signal of a particular kind: it shows the journal has publicly tied its name to community reporting norms for exactly the study designs it publishes most. It is not, on its own, a guarantee that every published article follows those norms perfectly, and careful readers will still check the methods section of any individual paper they intend to cite or act on.

The journal is also a member of, and subscribes to the principles of, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). COPE membership is a publisher-level commitment about how ethical problems — disputed authorship, undisclosed conflicts, suspected duplication, concerns about data — should be handled. Combined with the plagiarism checking recorded by DOAJ, it places the journal inside the standard governance framework of contemporary medical publishing. Authors should still make their own disclosures complete and explicit, because the framework works only when the information editors need is supplied in the first place.

History and publication record

The ISSN Portal records the journal as an online periodical that began with 2010, Volume 1, and remains in published status, with the record created in 2011 by the New Zealand ISSN centre and last modified in 2023. DOAJ records that the journal began publishing in open access in 2010, which aligns with the founding year: this is a journal that was born open access rather than converted later, and its entire back file belongs to the open access era. That matters for readers, because it means the early volumes should be as accessible as the recent ones, through the publisher's archive and through PubMed Central.

The publisher's own archive gives the shape of the run. Volume 1 in 2010 carried 19 articles, and the archive lists annual volumes thereafter: 16 articles in Volume 2 (2011), 11 in Volume 3 (2012), 8 in Volume 4 (2013), 17 in Volume 5 (2014), 21 in Volume 6 (2015), 20 in Volume 7 (2016), 17 in Volume 8 (2017), 37 in Volume 9 (2018), 41 in Volume 10 (2019), 25 in Volume 11 (2020), 31 in Volume 12 (2021), 25 in Volume 13 (2022), 32 in Volume 14 (2023), 21 in Volume 15 (2024) and 29 in Volume 16 (2025), with the publisher's article index showing 370 articles in total at the time of checking. The pattern is of a small-to-mid-sized specialist journal: selective enough to publish a few dozen papers a year, large enough to sustain a recognisable community of authors and reviewers around patient-reported measurement.

Because the journal is electronic and article-based, volume counts are a better guide to its rhythm than issue counts. The ISSN Portal lists its frequency as annual, reflecting the single yearly volume, within which articles appear continuously as they are accepted. A reader browsing for the newest work should therefore sort by publication date inside the current volume rather than waiting for a themed issue, and a citing author should record volume, page or article range and DOI exactly as the publisher presents them, since continuous publication makes the DOI the most stable locator.

Indexing, metrics and discoverability

The publisher displays two headline credentials on the journal's home page: listing in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) and a Journal Impact Factor of 1.8. Both are presented here as the publisher presents them, attributed and undated beyond the checking date, because metrics change with each annual release and a profile that hard-codes a figure without attribution misleads within a year. Readers who need the current figure for a promotion, tenure or grant document should take it from the publisher's journal metrics page or from Journal Citation Reports at the time they write, and should record the year of the figure they quote.

Discoverability rests on more than one index. The journal's call for papers notes that it is indexed on PubMed Central, with all published papers submitted to PubMed for indexing straight away, and its Taylor & Francis presentation describes it plainly as a PubMed-indexed journal. For a clinical readership that searches PubMed first, that is arguably the most consequential listing of all: it places every article in the workflow clinicians already use. DOAJ listing adds a second, independent route, confirming the journal against open access criteria and exposing its metadata to library discovery systems that harvest DOAJ. Articles are digitally archived in CLOCKSS and in PubMed Central, according to DOAJ, and the permanent article identifier is the DOI. Permanent archiving in two systems protects the record if the publisher's platform changes, a protection that has real value for a journal whose publisher has already changed ownership once.

Readers should distinguish these verified listings from looser claims made by third-party ranking sites, which often recycle old figures or attribute metrics from unrelated sources. The verified set for this journal, from its publisher and DOAJ, is: Emerging Sources Citation Index, PubMed and PubMed Central, and DOAJ, with digital archiving in CLOCKSS and PubMed Central. No Scopus figure is quoted in this profile because no official Scopus source was consulted that confirms a current score, and a careful profile leaves that space empty rather than filling it with an unattributed number.

Peer review, timing and editorial process

Two official descriptions of the review process exist, and they differ in wording, so both are reported. DOAJ records the journal's review as anonymous peer review, with plagiarism checking, and gives an average of 16 weeks from submission to publication. The Taylor & Francis presentation says manuscripts are assessed for suitability by the Executive Editor and Editor in Chief, and are then peer-reviewed in a single-anonymized fashion. Single-anonymized and anonymous in these directory entries both point to review in which the reviewers' identities are protected, but because the two wordings are not identical, an author for whom double-anonymized review is essential should confirm the current arrangement in the journal's own instructions for authors before submitting.

The publisher's call for papers gives a more granular picture of timing at the review stage. It says peer review is generally complete within three to four weeks, with the editor's decision following within two to fourteen days of that, so that waiting more than six weeks for a first editorial decision is described as very rare. That first-decision window and DOAJ's sixteen-week average to publication describe different spans — one ends at first decision, the other at publication — and they are compatible rather than contradictory. Authors planning around a thesis deadline, a conference or a funding report should nevertheless build in time for revision cycles, which neither figure includes, and should treat both numbers as averages drawn from the publisher's and the directory's records, not as promises for an individual manuscript.

Dove also operates a Favored Author programme, mentioned on the journal's pages, offering fast-tracking, a personal coordinator and a discount on the publication processing fee for authors who join. The existence of a paid-relationship programme is disclosed openly by the publisher, and authors should weigh it as they would any optional service: it may suit a group with a time-critical paper, and it is not a condition of publishing in the journal. The standard route — submission, suitability assessment, peer review, revision, acceptance — remains the route described for all manuscripts.

Open access, charges and licensing

Patient Related Outcome Measures is a fully open access journal: the publisher's call for papers emphasises that published papers can be downloaded free by anyone in the world from the publisher's website, and that, as an electronic journal, it is not constrained by page space in the way print journals are. Open access here is funded by an article publishing charge paid by the author or the author's institution, which the publisher describes as the mechanism that recovers editorial and production costs while keeping reading free. DOAJ quantifies the charge as up to 2,990 US dollars and records that a waiver policy exists for these charges. The exact charge for a given article type should always be confirmed on the journal's current article publishing charges page before submission, because charges are revised and because different article types can carry different fees.

Licensing is recorded by DOAJ as CC BY or CC BY-NC: articles appear under a Creative Commons Attribution licence or a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial licence, and the publisher's copyright information reflects the same pairing. That means readers may reuse published work within the terms of the licence attached to the individual article — and the operative phrase is the individual article, because the two licences differ on commercial reuse. Anyone planning to reproduce a figure in a commercial product, a paid course or a company document should open the article itself and check which of the two licences it carries, rather than assuming the more permissive one.

DOAJ also records that the author does not retain unrestricted copyright and publishing rights in the form its questionnaire measures, which is consistent with a licence-based open access model administered by the publisher. For most academic reuse — citation, quotation with attribution, inclusion in teaching within licence terms, text and data mining for research — the Creative Commons terms are what govern, and they are generous. The deposit and archiving arrangements recorded by DOAJ, CLOCKSS and PubMed Central, together with a deposit policy registered with Open Policy Finder, complete a standard, verifiable open access profile: free to read, licensed for reuse, permanently archived, and funded by a disclosed charge with a waiver policy.

Who should publish here, and who should read here

The strongest fit is a study whose central contribution is about the patient as reporter or beneficiary of care: development or validation of an outcome measure, evaluation of an existing instrument in a new population or language, a satisfaction or experience audit with a clear improvement loop, or an intervention study whose primary interest is whether patients' outcomes or experiences actually improved. Clinicians with a well-documented case series showing an improved patient experience, and teams describing a patient journey in a way that teaches other services something transferable, are also named in the scope. Patient support groups and, in the Taylor & Francis framing, patients, caregivers and advocates are part of the intended author community, which is still relatively unusual in clinical publishing and shapes the journal's plain-language expectations.

The journal also welcomes formats beyond the standard research article. Its current presentation invites reviews, case reports and series, patient perspectives, plain language summaries of publications, commentaries, editorials and letters, and it encourages article extenders — text and graphical plain language summaries, graphical and video abstracts, podcasts and other infographic, audio and video content. That menu suits authors whose work needs to reach non-specialist readers, including the patients the research is about. A team whose funder requires accessible outputs can treat those extenders as part of the publication itself rather than as an afterthought produced for a project website.

Readers who gain most are clinicians and service managers looking for tested instruments and for evidence about which outcome measures behave well in which populations, health services researchers comparing measurement approaches, and patient organisations looking for published, peer-reviewed accounts of experience and outcome rather than testimonials. Because every article is open access and PubMed-indexed, none of those readers needs a subscription or a library login to follow a citation to its full text — a practical point for patient readers in particular, for whom paywalls are often the end of the search.

How to verify this profile and submit with care

Every load-bearing claim in this profile can be checked in minutes. The ISSN 1179-271X resolves in the ISSN Portal to the title Patient related outcome measures, online medium, beginning in 2010, with Dove Medical Press as earliest publisher. The publisher's journal page displays the same ISSN, the Emerging Sources Citation Index listing and the Journal Impact Factor figure it currently claims. DOAJ's record for the same ISSN gives the charge ceiling, the waiver policy, the licences, the archiving services and the sixteen-week average. If any of those pages disagrees with this profile at the time you read it, trust the live page: directories and publisher sites are updated, profiles are snapshots.

Before submitting, an author should work through a short, concrete checklist drawn from those same sources. Confirm the manuscript is not a meta-analysis, which the journal no longer considers. Match the reporting checklist for the study design — COSMIN, STARD, PRISMA, STROBE or RECORD, with COREQ or SRQR for qualitative work — and complete it during drafting. Confirm the current article publishing charge for the article type and whether a waiver or a Favored Author discount applies. Prepare a plain language summary, since the journal actively encourages accessible outputs. And decide, with the current instructions in front of you, how anonymized review will handle author-identifying material in the manuscript and its supplements.

A final caution concerns look-alike titles. Patient-reported outcome measurement is a large field with many similarly named instruments, conferences and special issues, and the abbreviation PROM denotes the whole field as well as this journal. When citing, searching or submitting, use the full title together with the ISSN 1179-271X. That pairing is unique to this journal, it is the pairing recorded by the ISSN Portal, DOAJ and the publisher alike, and it protects authors and readers alike from the most common identification error this title invites.