About Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation

What is Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation?

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal that 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.

Content overview

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation considers the following types of articles:

• Research - country-level primary research on the costs, effectiveness, or cost-effectiveness of (single or combined) interventions.
• Commentaries - opinion articles on the use of information for policy purposes, including ethical dimensions of the use of cost-effectiveness analysis.
• Methodology articles - articles on methodological issues surrounding studies of costs, effectiveness or cost-effectiveness.
• Review articles - comprehensive, authoritative descriptions of subjects within the journal's scope.

Peer review policies

To promote transparency and accountability, a policy of open peer review of submitted manuscripts is adopted by the journal. Peer review in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation is designed to ensure that the research published is 'good science'.

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.

Submitted manuscripts will be reviewed by two or three external experts. Peer reviewers will have four possible options, for each manuscript:

1. accept without revision
2. accept after revision without expecting to check those revisions
3. neither accept nor reject until author(s) make revisions and resubmit
4. reject because scientifically unsound

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.

We aim to publish research as quickly as possible. Our electronic submission process is designed to facilitate rapid publication.

Edited by David B Evans and Rob Baltussen, Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central and Embase.

Articles in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Cost Eff Resour Alloc 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation is published by BioMed Central, an independent publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is Open Access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also in repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation will be available.

Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.