Author Guidelines

Medicine Anthropology Theory is an English-language, fully open access journal hosted by the Edinburgh Diamond Hosting Service at the University of Edinburgh. It welcomes the submission of Research Articles, Position Pieces, Reviews, Field Notes, and Photo Essays related to the areas of medical anthropology, the anthropology of biomedicine, critical global health studies, medical humanities, and science and technology studies.  

We accept submissions of original content (not published or under review elsewhere) on an ongoing basis. We are an open access journal, and we do not charge any fees to submit, publish, or view journal content.

Submission guidelines

Thank you for considering submitting your work to Medicine Anthropology Theory. We are not presently accepting new submissions; we will issue an announcement when the submission portal reopens.

If you are considering submitting a piece to MAT, please consult the Type of contributions we publish in the journal. We currently accept submissions of Research Articles, Position Pieces, Field Notes, Photo Essays, and Reviews. 

Ahead of sending your submission, it is fundamental that you read in detail and follow our guidelines to prepare the manuscript. 

Authors should prepare their manuscripts in an anonymised form to facilitate blind peer-review. Any identifying reference to the author(s) ought to be removed prior to submission.

All authors are expected to abide by our Authorship policy, which is intended to ensure all contributors to MAT published articles are credited appropriately for their work. 

To send your submission through our publications system or view an open submission, please login here.  Note that the journal's publications system is the only means of submitting a piece for consideration in the journal. If you encounter any technical difficulties, please get in touch with us by email at MATeditors@ed.ac.uk for assistance.

Special issues and special sections

Medicine Anthropology Theory regularly publishes special sections and special issues. Please review our guidelines for submissions to special issues and special sections if you wish to submit a proposal for an edited collection.

The peer review process

For Research Articles. Research articles are initially screened by a member of the MAT Editorial Collective to assess whether the piece meets the journal’s relevance and quality thresholds. The author will be informed at this stage whether their article has been rejected or whether it will go on to undergo peer review. In the latter case, the article will usually remain under the oversight of the MAT editor who carried out the initial screening for the duration of the review process. Research articles undergo a double-blind peer review process and are reviewed by at least two reviewers. Some article manuscripts will go through several rounds of external peer reviews.

For Position Pieces, Field Notes, Reviews, and Photo Essays. All these submissions are initially screened by the section's editors. Our section editors may work with authors on idea development prior to submission (though this is not a prerequisite for submission) and will be the first and main point of contact for any submitting author. If a section editor considers an idea is promising, the author will be invited to submit their manuscript through the publications system. The section editor will then screen the manuscript and send it out for an external double-blind review to at least one reviewer.

Authors may be invited to suggest reviewers for double-blind external review throughout the review process. The journal is committed to keeping authors regularly updated about the progress of the review process.   

To submit a revised manuscript, please login to your account in the journal publications system and click on your original submission. In the Review tab you will see a section labelled 'Revisions'. Click on the blue button 'Upload File'. Please also upload cover letter addressed to the editor and the reviewers outlining the changes made to the text and their reasoning. Please ensure both the manuscript and the cover letter are anonymised to facilitate blind peer review, as these will be shared with reviewers. 

Production 

Once a piece has been accepted and scheduled for publication, the author will be required to prepare the manuscript to begin the production process with the support of the editorial staff at the journal, strictly following the journal's guidelines for preparation of manuscripts. THe manuscript will then be copyedited for clarity, accessiblity and consistency with the journal's house style. At this stage, authors have an opportunity to review the copyedited manuscript in consultation with our in-house coypeditor. Thereafter, the manuscript will be typeset and proofread and a final proof will be provided to the author, at which point only small corrections of typos will be allowable. Authors are expected to respond promptly and follow the journal's deadlines throughout this process in order to facilitate the publication schedule of the journal.

Please consult our Journal Policies for more information on open access, copyright, indexing and other aspects of relevance to our authors.