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Aims and scope

Research Involvement and Engagement is an interdisciplinary, health and social care journal focussing on patient and wider involvement and engagement in research, at all stages. The journal is co-produced by all key stakeholders, including patients, academics, policy makers and service users.

Focussing on patient and public involvement and engagement in health and social care research, we welcome research articles, methodologies, protocols and commentaries, particularly those with patient authors. All submissions are peer-reviewed by patients and academics and are edited by a patient and an academic editor, who have equal weight in editorial decisions. We encourage submissions from anyone who is committed to delivering the patient or public voice in research.

A co-produced journal

Research Involvement and Engagement co-produces the journal, involving academics, policy makers, patients and service-users, with a unique governance structure. We welcome articles from anyone involved or engaged with research into supporting, encouraging or delivering the patient/public voice in research processes or structures

Research Involvement and Engagement is a Patients Included accredited journal. Full details on how we meet the Patients Included journal charter clauses can be found here.

Nature Awards for Inclusive Health Research: Collection for the Journal of Research Involvement and Engagement

Edited by:
Heidi Surridge, BA (Hons), MA, National Institute for Health and Care Research, UK
Akinlabi Kazeem Jimoh, BSc, MSc, Medical Physiology, MPH Health Promotion and Health Education, Nature Africa, Nigeria

Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline: 1 May 2024

About the editors

Richard Stephens, co-Editor-in-Chief
Richard is a survivor of two cancers, a heart emergency and sundry other health challenges. He has been a carer for family members with both mental and physical health challenges. Richard has participated in four interventional and fifteen other research studies (including on Covid-19 and on aspects of Patient and Public Involvement in research).

Richard chaired the NCRI Consumer/Advocates Forum 2012-19, and again from 2023. He also chairs useMYdata, and chaired BBMRI-ERIC's Stakeholder Forum, 2018-22. In 25 years as a Patient Advocate he has worked with the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), the Health Research Authority (HRA), Cancer Research UK, Genomics England and with pharma, biotechs and Clinical Research Organizations. This has included sitting on funding committees, advisory bodies, trial management/steering groups, as well as working on individual studies or helping to set strategic priorities. He has co-authored over thirty research papers. His desire is that research outcomes should benefit patients and that participation should be made as easy as possible. He believes that including patients in designing, delivering and disseminating research will help those things happen.

Sophie Staniszewska, co-Editor-in-Chief 
Professor Sophie Staniszewska leads the Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) and Experiences of Care Research Programme at Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, England. She focuses on developing the evidence base of PPIE for high quality practice. Sophie is founding Co-editor in Chief of the Springer Nature Journal, Research Involvement and Engagement.

Sophie leads and is involved with a number of studies focused on different aspects of PPIE and experiences of care and supervises PhD students working in these areas. She is a founding member of the International PPI Network which aims to create global understanding and synergy in patient and public involvement in health and social care research and has been part of the judging panel for the Nature Awards for Inclusive Research.

Sophie is the academic lead for public involvement for the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration West Midlands, PPIE for the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit for Gastrointestinal Research, the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Genomics and Enabling Data, the NIHR West Midlands Evidence Synthesis Group and is PPIE co-lead For the Health Determinants Research Collaboration in Coventry, England.

Instructions for Authors: Mandatory requirements for all submissions

• Plain English Summary must be included in addition to the Abstract for all article types.

• GRIPP2 Form checklist is required for all research articles reporting patient and public involvement. It should be provided as an additional file and should be referenced in the text.


Please ensure that your manuscript meets the requirements above prior to submission. For more information, please see our submission guidelines.


Reviewer guidelines for Research Involvement and Engagement

All submissions to Research Involvement and Engagement are peer reviewed by patients and academics. Following feedback from our patient and wider reviewer community we have developed our reviewer guidelines to include details on how peer review works in the journal, links to training resources and example reviews, and points to consider when writing a review. We recommend all of our reviewers, both patients and academics, familiarize themselves with these guidelines.

Building the evidence base for the best public involvement in clinical trials

Editors-in-Chief Sophie Staniszewska and Richard Stephens highlight the importance of patient and public involvement in clinical trials in this blog for International Clinical Trials Day.

Articles

  1. Authors: Shelley M. Vanderhout, Catherine S. Birken, Peter Wong, Sarah Kelleher, Shannon Weir and Jonathon L. Maguire

Peer review taxonomy

Research Involvement and Engagement and Springer Nature are participating in a pilot of STM's Working Group on Peer Review Taxonomy.

More publishers are adopting open peer review as an operating model. STM, the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, has identified a need to promote the adoption of standard definitions and terminology in peer review practices across all publishers. An agreed peer review taxonomy will help make the peer review process for articles and journals more transparent and more comparable between different journals.

Taxonomy:

Identity transparency:

All identities visible

Reviewer interacts with:

Editor

Review information published:

Review reports, reviewer identities

We would welcome your feedback on the Peer Review Taxonomy Pilot - please fill out this short survey.

Indexing

We are pleased to announce that Research Involvement and Engagement has been accepted for indexing with Scopus. Articles published in the journal will appear in Scopus in due course.

Thank you to our peer reviewers

The editors and staff of Research Involvement and Engagement would like to thank warmly the academic and patient reviewers whose comments have helped to shape the journal.

Annual Journal Metrics

  • 2022 Citation Impact
    1.424 - SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper)
    0.854 - SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)

    2023 Speed
    2 days submission to first editorial decision for all manuscripts (Median)
    120 days submission to accept (Median)

    2023 Usage 
    674,195 downloads
    3,119 Altmetric mentions