About Reproductive Health Matters

Reproductive Health Matters

Quick Facts

About This Journal and Why This Record Uses Its Original Title

Reproductive Health Matters, universally shortened to RHM, was from 1993 one of the defining journals of the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights. On 1 February 2019 the journal changed its name to Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, shortened to SRHM, a change its editors explained in a dedicated editorial on what is in a name. This Journals World record, with the print ISSN 0968-8080 and online ISSN 1460-9576, is the record for the journal under its original title, the title under which the great majority of its archive was published and under which most of its citations were earned. The journal itself did not cease in 2019 and a new journal did not begin; one continuous journal continued under a broader name that added the word Sexual to reflect the full range of issues it had come to cover. Understanding that continuity is essential to using its archive, citing its articles and tracing its editorial history.

RHM was created to do something that existing journals of its moment did not do. Its own institutional history records that in October 1992 a group of women's health advocates from different parts of the world met in London to discuss the need for a feminist approach to family planning and population policy, a meeting prompted by controversy at a 1990 women's rights conference in New York in a session asking whether a feminist population policy was possible. The group recognised the need for a platform to publish research that put women's needs at the centre and allowed women to voice their experiences and views. That London meeting was the foundation of the Reproductive Health Matters journal, which began publishing in 1993. The journal was therefore an advocacy-minded scholarly project from its first issue: a respected peer-reviewed journal with a commitment to be used in advocacy, bringing solid public health research together with more directive analysis, with women at the centre.

That founding purpose shaped everything about RHM: its themed issues, which took a single subject and examined it from research, policy, legal and experiential angles in the same volume; its openness to authors who were programme managers, lawyers and activists as well as academics; its attention to subjects the mainstream literature left aside; and its insistence on examining experiences, values, information and issues from the point of view of the people whose lives are affected. Its publisher's description of the journal under the RHM title states its aims plainly: to promote laws, policies, research and services that meet women's reproductive health needs, to examine experiences from the point of view of the women affected, to explore the multifaceted nature of problems and their solutions, and to inspire new thinking and action and new forms of consensus in the field. Those aims, written for the RHM era, are still the clearest short statement of what the journal was for.

History: Editors, Organisation and the 2019 Name Change

Founding editor Marge Berer led RHM from its inception until 2015, and she and T. K. Sundari Ravindran co-edited the journal from 1993 to 1999, on the organisation's own account. That long founding editorship gave the journal a distinctive and consistent voice, and Berer became closely identified with its editorial line on contested questions in the field. In 2018 responsibilities passed onward: Shirin Heidari, who had transformed the journal into an open access online journal, handed over to Dr Julia Hussein as Editor-in-Chief and Eszter Kismodi as Chief Executive. In 2020, after Hussein announced her retirement, Dr Emma Pitchforth took over as Executive Editor, serving until 2025. Currently, on the organisation's account, Sapna Desai serves as the SRHM Journal Editor-in-Chief. That succession matters for authors because each editor has maintained the journal's rights-based identity while adjusting its formats, its move online and its open access model.

Behind the journal stands the organisation of the same name. Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, formerly Reproductive Health Matters, is a global charitable organisation whose mission is to advance the creation and dissemination of sexual and reproductive health knowledge that is grounded in human rights and based on credible evidence, and to facilitate the transformation of such knowledge into action for improved SRHR. The organisation describes itself as the only global organisation linked to a scientific, highly reputed journal in this field that provides an independent voice and offers space to a truly global network of researchers, policy makers, programme managers, lawyers and activists. The journal is the organisation's official publication, and at the same time, as its Taylor & Francis page stresses, the journal is editorially independent from the organisation. Both halves of that statement matter: the journal carries an institutional mission, and its editorial decisions are its own.

The 2019 rename deserves careful handling in citations and catalogues. Articles published before the change appeared in Reproductive Health Matters and should be cited under that title with the ISSNs on this record; articles from 2019 onward appear in Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters. The editors' own explanation was that developments in the field made the broader name essential: the journal's scope had expanded to address universal SRHR for women, men and transgender people regardless of age or sexual orientation, and sexuality, sexual rights and sexual health could no longer sit outside the title. Taylor & Francis records the current journal with its own newer identifiers alongside the historical ones, which is why databases sometimes file the continuous journal under different ISSN combinations for different periods. None of that indicates two competing journals; it is the normal bibliographic footprint of a title change in a long-running journal.

Scope and Subject Coverage

Under both titles, the journal explores emerging, neglected and marginalised issues across the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights. Its current Taylor & Francis description, continuous with its RHM-era aims, states that it aims to publish original and contemporary research, particularly from a feminist perspective, that can help inform the development of policies, laws and services to fulfil the rights and meet the sexual and reproductive health needs of people of all ages, gender identities and sexual orientations. It publishes work that engages with fundamental dilemmas and debates in SRHR, highlights multiple perspectives, acknowledges differences and searches for new forms of consensus, and it strongly encourages research that explores experiences, values, information and issues from the point of view of those whose lives are affected. A key test applied to submissions is whether authors have included a sufficient rights focus in their work, and each manuscript is expected to explain its relevance to SRHR in a global context.

• Abortion: law, policy, services, safety, and lived experience.
• Family planning and contraception: programmes, access, choice and rights.
• Maternal health: quality of care, morbidity and mortality, and health systems.
• HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, and human papillomavirus (HPV), in their SRHR dimensions.
• Female genital mutilation: prevention, law, services and community perspectives.
• Gender-based and other forms of interpersonal violence, and responses to it.
• SRHR in conflict and humanitarian settings, and for young people.
• Gender, sexuality, sexual rights and sexual pleasure.
• Challenging anti-gender and anti-rights agendas, and climate change and SRHR (topics the current journal lists explicitly).

The journal is multidisciplinary, welcoming submissions from the social sciences and humanities, behavioural science, public health, human rights and law. Its accepted methodological range is correspondingly wide: qualitative and quantitative analyses, policy analysis, mixed methods approaches to public health and health systems research, economic, political and historical analysis, and epidemiological work with a focus on SRHR. What unifies that range is not a method but a standpoint: the work must connect evidence to rights, and must be able to speak to the development of policy, law or services. A purely clinical study with no rights, policy or experiential dimension is a poor fit here however strong its data, while a rigorous policy, legal or qualitative study of a neglected SRHR question is exactly the material the journal was founded to publish.

The themed issue tradition of the RHM years shows the scope in action. The publisher's archive listing for the RHM title records themes such as knowledge, evidence, practice and power, and sexuality, sexual rights and sexual politics in 2015; population, environment, development and sustainability, and using the law and the courts in 2014; young people, sex and relationships, and new development paradigms after 2015 in 2013; and maternal mortality and women's health, pregnancy decisions of women living with HIV, and sexual and reproductive morbidity in 2012. Each issue concentrated on a specific theme while also carrying papers on other timely topics and a round-up of the published literature. Under the current title the journal runs an open issue in which accepted papers are published throughout the year, alongside themed issues launched with specific calls and occasional special issues or supplements, and the abstracts of all published articles are translated into French and Spanish, a practice that reflects its global authorship and readership.

Editorial Standards, Peer Review and the Rights Test

RHM and its continuation are peer-reviewed journals, and their editorial process is organised around two questions that many journals never ask together: is the evidence sound, and does the work carry a genuine rights focus? The journal directs authors to an introductory guide on rights-based knowledge creation in sexual and reproductive health, published in the journal in 2022, which sets out with illustrative examples what rights-based work looks like in practice. Authors preparing a submission should read that guide as part of their preparation, because a manuscript that treats rights as a decorative final paragraph rather than as part of its research questions, methods and interpretation will read to this journal's reviewers as unfinished. Attention to whose experience is centred, whose voice is quoted, and how affected people participated in or are represented by the research is part of the scholarly standard here, not an addition to it.

The journal particularly welcomes submissions from and relevant to low- and middle-income countries and describes itself as a truly global journal. That welcome has practical consequences: authors writing from those settings are the journal's core constituency rather than a diversity supplement, editors are accustomed to work produced under resource constraints, and the significance test applied to a paper includes its significance for policy and services in the settings where SRHR needs are greatest. At the same time the scholarly bar is not lowered; the journal's reputation, on its organisation's account, rests on scientific rigour combined with explicit attention to sexual and reproductive justice and to how health and human rights are interlinked. Ethical review, informed consent and the protection of participants on highly sensitive topics, including abortion, violence and sexuality, must be documented with particular care, because the journal's subjects are precisely those on which weak ethics can cause real harm.

Practical submission arrangements have changed with the journal's platform. Taylor & Francis notes that SRHM has moved to a new submission-to-publication platform at its srhmjournal.org address, where up-to-date journal policies and information for authors are found, and that new submissions are made via that platform. Authors who know the journal only from its RHM years, when submission ran through the publisher's earlier systems and its London editorial office, should therefore start from the current platform and the current Taylor & Francis journal page rather than from old instructions in print issues. Article charges, licences and any waivers for open access publishing are stated in the current policies on those official pages and should be confirmed there, since open access arrangements for this journal have changed over its life and earlier descriptions do not govern new submissions.

Impact, Readership and How to Use the Archive

RHM's influence was never measured well by a single number. Its issues were used in advocacy, teaching and policy work as well as in research, its themed volumes became reference collections on their subjects, and its model of a peer-reviewed journal committed to advocacy influenced how other fields thought about the boundary between scholarship and action. The journal under its current name reports the citation standing expected of a leading field journal, and readers who need a current impact factor or quartile should take it from the current Taylor & Francis journal page or from the citation index itself for the year in question, rather than from a directory profile, because those figures are revised annually and are title-specific after a name change. What can be said without a number is that the continuous journal, under both names, is a first-rank source for the history of SRHR debates since 1993, and no literature review of abortion law reform, contraceptive access, maternal health policy or sexual rights in that period is complete without it.

Using the archive well requires searching both titles. Work published from 1993 to 2018 sits under Reproductive Health Matters, work from 2019 onward under Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, and database records differ in whether they consolidate the two. A search on only the current title silently truncates three decades of material, including the themed issues listed above; a search on only the old title misses the journal's current work on humanitarian settings, anti-rights movements and climate change. Cite each article under the title and year in which it appeared, include its DOI, which for this journal's Taylor & Francis era follows the pattern built on the historical ISSN, and expect reference managers to need correction where they have merged or split the journal's titles incorrectly.

For teachers and programme staff, the RHM archive has a use beyond citation. Because its articles foreground experience and policy as well as data, back issues work as teaching collections: a single themed issue can structure a course unit or a policy briefing on its subject. Its literature round-ups from the RHM years are also a finding aid to the wider field as it stood at that date. Libraries that hold the print run hold, in effect, a curated record of what the SRHR field thought mattered, year by year, from the 1994 Cairo conference era onward, and that curatorial value is a reason the original title record deserves its own full profile rather than a bare redirect to the current name.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Reproductive Health Matters still published?

The journal continues, but since 1 February 2019 it has been published as Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters (SRHM). Articles before the change appeared under Reproductive Health Matters and should be cited under that title.

What are the ISSNs of Reproductive Health Matters?

This record gives the print ISSN 0968-8080 and the online ISSN 1460-9576 for the journal under its original title. The continued journal under its current title carries its own newer identifiers in publisher records.

Who founded Reproductive Health Matters and when?

The journal was founded from a meeting of women's health advocates in London in October 1992 and began publishing in 1993. Its founding editor, Marge Berer, led it from inception until 2015, co-editing with T. K. Sundari Ravindran from 1993 to 1999.

Who publishes Reproductive Health Matters?

The journal is published by Taylor & Francis in the UK and is the official journal of the organisation Sexual and Reproductive Health Matters, formerly Reproductive Health Matters. The journal is editorially independent from the organisation.

What does the journal publish?

Peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary research on sexual and reproductive health and rights, with an explicit rights focus and a feminist perspective: abortion, contraception, maternal health, HIV and other infections, violence, humanitarian settings, young people, sexuality and sexual rights, among other topics.

Is the journal open access?

Under its current title the journal is described by Taylor & Francis as a peer-reviewed, international, open access journal. Confirm current article charges and licence terms in the journal policies on its official platform before submitting.

Sources and Verification

This profile is based on the official journal and publisher pages, the journal's own author and editorial information, and established bibliographic records listed in the accompanying sources file. Facts that could not be verified from those sources are described as not publicly disclosed or could not be verified, rather than being estimated. Readers should confirm time-sensitive details, including editorial contacts, submission status and any fees, on the official journal site before submitting a manuscript or making a payment.