Submissions

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Author Guidelines

Authors are invited to submit work to PluriMed: Critical Studies in Medicine, Healing & Health. PluriMed welcomes submissions that contribute to critical, comparative, ethnographic, historical, theoretical, ecological, and interdisciplinary studies of medicine, healing, and health.

All submissions will first be assessed by an editor to determine whether they fit the journal’s aims and scope. Submissions considered suitable for PluriMed may then be sent for peer review, editorial review, or archival review, depending on the submission type.

PluriMed publishes both peer-reviewed scholarship and selected non-peer-reviewed materials connected to conferences, workshops, field reports, interviews, translations, and living-archive documentation. The review status of each published item will be clearly indicated.

Before making a submission, authors are responsible for ensuring that their work is original, properly prepared, and ethically sound. Authors must obtain permission to publish any copyrighted or third-party material included in the submission, including photographs, images, documents, datasets, interview excerpts, archival materials, translations, or other media. All listed authors must consent to being identified as authors.

Where appropriate, research should be approved by a relevant ethics committee, institutional review board, or equivalent body in accordance with the legal and ethical requirements of the country or countries in which the research was conducted. For ethnographic, collaborative, Indigenous, community-based, or practitioner-facing research, authors should also demonstrate appropriate attention to consent, attribution, confidentiality, reciprocity, and the politics of representation.

Editors may desk reject a submission if it does not meet the journal’s scope, ethical standards, formatting requirements, or minimum standards of scholarly quality. Before submitting, authors should ensure that the title is concise, the abstract stands on its own, the argument is clearly articulated, and the manuscript is carefully structured and proofread.

PluriMed especially encourages submissions that engage with medical anthropology, medical pluralism, healing traditions, ritual and religious therapeutics, public health, Indigenous and non-state knowledge systems, environmental and medical humanities, history of medicine, critical global health, Highland Asia, the Global South, postcolonial health ecologies, and emerging therapeutic worlds.

Preparing your submission

Files. Submissions to Articles are peer reviewed double-anonymously, so we ask for two separate documents: an anonymised manuscript, and a cover page carrying everything that identifies you. The Upload Files step explains what belongs in each. For other categories a single file is fine, though a cover page is still welcome.

Length. A guide rather than a limit, including notes and references: articles 7,000–10,000 words; field notes 2,000–4,500; reviews 800–3,000; interviews 2,000–7,000; translations 1,500–9,000; conference documents 500–6,000. If your submission sits outside these, tell us why in the note to the editors. We would rather read a good piece of the wrong length than lose it.

Style. We do not impose a house citation style or a spelling variety. Either US or UK spelling is welcome, provided it is consistent throughout, and any established citation system is acceptable, provided it is applied consistently. Please check that every in-text citation appears in your reference list, and that every entry in the list is cited in the text.

Use of generative AI

We ask every author for a short statement — in the note to the editors, or on your cover page — describing any substantive use of generative AI in preparing the submission: which tools, at what stage, and for what purpose. “None” is a complete answer, and the question goes to everyone.

You do not need to declare AI used only to edit language, correct grammar, or translate your own prose. Many of our contributors write in their second, third or fourth language, and we would rather people used the help than went without it.

Our position follows the Committee on Publication Ethics and the ICMJE.

  • AI tools cannot be listed as authors and cannot carry responsibility for any part of the work.
  • Authors are responsible for all content, including every reference. Please confirm that each work you cite exists and that its details are correct. An inaccurate reference is a small thing to fix before review and a serious one after publication.
  • Generative AI should not be used to create or alter photographs, figures or data presented as a record of what was observed.
  • We do not use AI detection tools, and we do not treat their output as evidence. If we have a question about your sources, we will ask you.

Participant material, transcription and community knowledge

If you used AI to transcribe, translate, code or summarise interview recordings, clinical information, or other material concerning identifiable people, please tell us and describe how consent covered it. We follow the recommendations of Samuel and Wassenaar’s 2025 joint editorial in the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics: consent should be explicit about AI processing; participants should be able to decline AI transcription and still take part; AI transcripts should be checked and corrected by a human; and researchers should satisfy themselves that the service used protects the data.

For work involving Indigenous, community-held or otherwise collectively governed knowledge, we ask authors to consider whether processing that material through a commercial AI service is compatible with the permissions they hold and with the data-governance commitments their work claims — the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, Traditional Knowledge Labels, or agreements made with the community itself. We do not require a particular answer. We ask that the question has been asked. The field’s guidance has not settled this, and we would rather work it out with our contributors than after publication.

How your submission will be read

Every submission receives an editorial intake reading before any decision about review. You will get comments on the argument, methods, evidence and ethics, together with a checklist covering anonymisation, referencing, permissions and metadata. The purpose is to let you strengthen the work while there is still time, so that reviewers spend their attention on what you are arguing rather than on how it is presented.

This reading is prepared with AI assistance under the supervision of an editor, which means your manuscript is processed through an AI system. We hold ourselves to what we ask of you: if your submission contains material that should not be handled that way — unpublished community-held knowledge, identifiable clinical records, or data under an agreement that forbids third-party processing — say so in the note to the editors and an editor will read it by hand instead.

Submission Preparation Checklist

All submissions must meet the following requirements.

  • The submission fits the aims and scope of PluriMed: Critical Studies in Medicine, Healing & Health.
  • The submission has not been previously published and is not currently under consideration by another journal, unless it is being submitted as an archival, conference, translation, or living-archive item whose prior status has been clearly disclosed to the editors.
  • The author has selected the correct submission category, such as Article, Field Note, Review, Interview, Translation, Conference Document, or other appropriate format.
  • The title is concise, informative, and appropriate for the submission type.
  • The abstract clearly summarizes the submission and can stand on its own.
  • The manuscript has been carefully proofread and is structured clearly.
  • All references have been checked for accuracy and completeness.
  • All tables, figures, images, maps, and other visual materials have been numbered, titled, and properly cited.
  • Permission has been obtained to publish all photographs, images, documents, datasets, translations, archival materials, or other third-party content included in the submission.
  • All listed authors have approved the submission and consent to being identified as authors.
  • Any relevant funding, institutional support, conflicts of interest, or acknowledgements have been disclosed.
  • Where appropriate, ethics approval, informed consent, or community permission has been obtained and described.
  • The author understands that peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed materials will be clearly distinguished in the published record.
  • For submissions to Articles: two separate files have been uploaded — an anonymised manuscript, and a cover page carrying the author’s name as it should appear in publication, affiliation, email, ORCID, funding, acknowledgements, ethics approval and any conflicts of interest.
  • The author’s name has been removed from the manuscript’s document properties as well as from its text. In Word: File → Info → Inspect Document → Remove Personal Information.
  • Any substantive use of generative AI in preparing this submission has been described in the note to the editors, or it has been confirmed that none was used.
  • Where AI was used to transcribe, translate or summarise material concerning identifiable people, participant consent and ethics approval cover that processing.

Articles

The Articles section publishes original peer-reviewed scholarship contributing to critical studies of medicine, healing, and health.

This section welcomes full-length research articles, theoretical essays, ethnographic essays, historical studies, methodological reflections, and interdisciplinary work. Submissions may address medical pluralism, healing practices, public health, Indigenous and local knowledge systems, biomedicine, ritual and religious therapeutics, environmental health, pharmaceuticals, colonial and postcolonial medicine, epistemic justice, speculative medicine, or related themes.

Articles normally undergo double-anonymous peer review. Authors should remove identifying information from the manuscript file where appropriate and provide any author details separately through the submission system.

Copyright Notice

Authors retain copyright of their work published in PluriMed: Critical Studies in Medicine, Healing & Health.

By submitting to PluriMed, authors grant the journal the right of first publication and the right to publish, reproduce, distribute, display, preserve, index, and archive the submitted work in print, digital, and other formats associated with the journal.

Unless otherwise stated, published articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). This license allows others to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, link to, share, adapt, and reuse the work, provided that appropriate credit is given to the author or authors and to the original publication in PluriMed.

Authors are permitted and encouraged to share their published work in institutional repositories, disciplinary archives, personal websites, teaching platforms, and scholarly networks, provided that the original publication in PluriMed is properly cited.

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any copyrighted or third-party material included in their submission, including images, photographs, maps, archival documents, datasets, translations, interview excerpts, and other media.

For conference documents, workshop materials, translations, interviews, field notes, and other living-archive materials, copyright and licensing arrangements may vary depending on contributor permissions and the nature of the material. Any exceptions to the standard license will be clearly indicated in the published item.

Submission to PluriMed confirms that all authors agree to this copyright notice and that the work does not infringe upon the rights of others.

Privacy Statement

PluriMed is committed to protecting the privacy of authors, reviewers, editors, readers, and contributors.

The names, email addresses, affiliations, biographical details, and other personal information entered into this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of the journal, including editorial communication, submission management, peer review, publication, indexing, archiving, and journal administration.

Personal information will not be sold, rented, or made available to third parties for commercial purposes. Author and reviewer information will be handled securely and will not be shared beyond the normal operation of the journal without explicit consent, except where required by law.

Reviewer identities are treated as confidential in accordance with the journal’s review policies. Editorial correspondence, review reports, and unpublished submission materials will not be made public without permission.

By registering with or submitting to PluriMed, users consent to the collection and use of their information solely for legitimate scholarly, editorial, and publishing purposes.