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Aims and scope

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation considers manuscripts on all aspects of cost-effectiveness analysis, including conceptual or methodological work, economic evaluations, and policy analysis related to resource allocation at a national or international level.

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation is aimed at health economists, health services researchers, and policy-makers with an interest in enhancing the flow and transfer of knowledge relating to efficiency in the health sector. Manuscripts are encouraged from researchers based in low- and middle-income countries, with a view to increasing the international economic evidence base for health. The journal particularly solicits manuscripts on the costs, effectiveness, or cost-effectiveness of health interventions, based on primary empirical research/data collection or via a modelling approach. A health intervention is defined broadly as any action whose primary intent is to improve health - promotive, preventive, curative and rehabilitative actions at the clinical or population level. As well as manuscripts reporting cost or cost-effectiveness data, the journal also considers contributions that report or discuss methodological aspects of economic evaluation - such as disease modelling, cost estimation, or uncertainty - and policy-related issues such as the interplay between efficiency and other decision-making criteria.

There will never be sufficient resources available to allow all possible means of improving health to be provided to all people who might benefit from them. Information on the health improvements resulting from possible uses of scarce resources is critical to informed decision making about where scarce resources should be allocated. Nowhere is this truer than in low- and middle-income countries, where there is greatest pressure on limited resources for health and health care. Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation aims to be a home for this type of information.

Open access

All articles published by Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.

As authors of articles published in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation you are the copyright holders of your article and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate your article, according to the BMC license agreement.

For those of you who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, BMC can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.

Article processing charges (APC)

Authors who publish open access in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation are required to pay an article processing charge (APC). The APC price will be determined from the date on which the article is accepted for publication.

The current APC, subject to VAT or local taxes where applicable, is: £1990.00/$2690.00/€2290.00

Visit our open access support portal and our Journal Pricing FAQs for further information.

Open access funding

Visit Springer Nature’s open access funding & support services for information about research funders and institutions that provide funding for APCs.

Springer Nature offers agreements that enable institutions to cover open access publishing costs. Learn more about our open access agreements to check your eligibility and discover whether this journal is included.

Springer Nature offers APC waivers and discounts for articles published in our fully open access journals whose corresponding authors are based in the world’s lowest income countries (see our APC waivers and discounts policy for further information). Requests for APC waivers and discounts from other authors will be considered on a case-by-case basis, and may be granted in cases of financial need (see our open access policies for journals for more information). All applications for discretionary APC waivers and discounts should be made at the point of manuscript submission; requests made during the review process or after acceptance are unable to be considered.

Indexing services

All articles published in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation are included in:

DOAJ 
Embase 
PubMed
PubMed Central
Scopus
Social Sciences Citation Index
Zetoc

The full text of all articles is deposited in digital archives around the world to guarantee long-term digital preservation. You can also access all articles published by BioMed Central on SpringerLink.

We are working closely with relevant indexing services including Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) to ensure that articles published in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation will be available in their databases when appropriate.

Peer-review policy

Peer-review is the system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in their journal. You can read more about the peer-review process here.

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation  operates a single-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers are aware of the names and affiliations of the authors, but the reviewer reports provided to authors are anonymous.

Submitted manuscripts will be reviewed by two or three external experts. When asking for revisions, reviewers have two possible goals: to ask authors to tighten their arguments based on existing data or to identify areas where more data are needed. Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation normally allows authors a maximum of two revisions of a manuscript. Peer reviewers are asked to say if the manuscript is not sufficiently clearly written for publication. In such cases authors are asked to revise the manuscript, seeking, if necessary, the assistance of colleagues or a commercial editing service. Edited by Mihajlo (Michael) Jakovljevic, Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation is supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation considers manuscripts spanning a wide range of scientific interests, as long as the results and conclusions are scientifically justified and not misleading.


Editorial policies

All manuscripts submitted to Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appeals and complaints

Authors who wish to appeal a rejection or make a complaint should follow the procedure outlined in the BMC Editorial Policies.

Citing articles in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation

Articles in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.

Article citations follow this format:

Authors: Title. Cost Eff Resour Alloc [year], [volume number]:[article number].

e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL: Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. Cost Eff Resour Alloc 2009, 1:115.

refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.

Benefits of publishing with BMC

High visibility

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. 

Speed of publication

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles will be published with their final citation after acceptance, in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF.

Flexibility

Online publication in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation gives you the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other articles).

Promotion and press coverage

Articles published in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be highlighted on Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation’s pages and on the BMC homepage.

In addition, articles published in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BMC is available here.

Copyright

As an author of an article published in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation you retain the copyright of your article and you are free to reproduce and disseminate your work (for further details, see the BMC license agreement).

For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BMC, please click here.

Annual Journal Metrics

  • 2022 Citation Impact
    2.3 - 2-year Impact Factor
    2.4 - 5-year Impact Factor
    0.916 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
    0.530 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

    2023 Speed
    6 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
    157 days submission to accept (Median)

    2023 Usage 
    595,859 downloads
    2,584 Altmetric mentions