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Overview
ISSN
2078-6190 (PRINT)
2078-6204 (ONLINE)
Focus and scope
The South African Family Practice (SAFP) journal is the official journal of the South African Academy of Family Physicians (SAAFP) and is aimed at all SAAFP members (including family physicians, registrars, associate members, students), working within primary care (both private and public health sectors, as well as urban and rural practice settings) within South Africa and the wider Southern African region. SAFP is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, which strives to provide primary care teams, as well as researchers, with a broad range of scholarly work in the practice, training and learning of family medicine, primary care, primary health care, rural medicine, district health and other related fields. SAFP publishes original research, clinical reviews, and pertinent commentary that advance the knowledge base of these fields. The content of SAFP is designed to reflect and support further development of the broad basis of the family medicine and primary health care philosophy through original research and critical review of evidence in important clinical areas; as well as to provide practitioners with continuing professional development material. Other types of scholarly work that might be relevant to the practice, teaching and research of family medicine and primary care are welcome, e.g., evidence synthesis of various kinds (including systematic reviews and scoping reviews), book reviews, as well as submissions on innovative practices in family medicine/primary care. SAFP adheres to the international acceptable editorial standards, as published by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). The journal's editors are supported by an editorial board, which consists of South African members representing the nine academic training programmes as well as a representative from RuDASA (Rural Doctors Association of South Africa), and key members from the international family medicine and primary care community.
Historic data
The South African Academy of Family Physicians (SAAFP) was founded in 1980 and since then is dedicated to the furtherance of the discipline of family medicine at both an academic and a clinical level and is devoted to the welfare of its professional members. SAFP was also founded in 1980. Past editions, as well as an overview of the first 25-years of the academy, are available online at http://www.safpj.co.za. (Note: In January 2003, South African Family Practice merged with Geneeskunde – The Medical Journal to form South African Family Practice incorporating Geneeskunde (SAFP/G), and since January 2004 it is again only known as South African Family Practice (SAFP), becoming the first truly comprehensive professional journal for the generalist medical practitioner in South Africa. As a result the numbering of the journal now begins from Volume 45 in 2003.)
Publication frequency
The journal publishes at least one issue each year. Articles are published online when ready for publication and then printed in an end-of-year compilation. Additional issues may be published for special events (e.g. conferences) and when special themes are addressed. In other words, the journal publishes one issue per year (volume), as a rolling online publication. Individual articles are published as soon as they are ready for publication by adding them to the table of contents of the 'current' volume/issue. In this way, the journal aims to speed up the process of manuscript publication from submission to becoming available on the website. Special thematic issues may be added on an ad hoc basis to the journal throughout a particular year and will form part of consecutive issues thereafter. The online version of the journal is the official version of record, and citations to the journal will refer to the online version. A full print version of each volume/issue the journal will be compiled after the closure of the online volume (year), and will be available on paid order. Parts of content published in the journal online may be published in print from time to time, usually for distribution among members of the South African Family Practice (SAFP).
Open access
This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access. Learn more about the journal copyright, licensing and publishing rights.
Review process
The journal has a double-blinded peer review process. Manuscripts are initially examined by editorial staff and are sent by the Editor-in-Chief to two expert independent reviewers, either directly or by a Section Editor. Read our full peer review process
Affiliation
The journal is published on behalf of the South African Academy of Family Physicians (SAAFP).
Membership
AOSIS is a member and/or subscribes to the standards and code of practices of several leading industry organisations. This includes the Directory of Open Access Journals, Ithenticate, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, CrossRef, Portico and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Learn more here.
DHET Accreditation
The journal is DHET accredited because it is listed on the following approved indexing services:
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- SciELO SA
- SCOPUS
Indexing Services
All articles published in the journal are included in:
- African Index Medicus
- African Journals Online (AJOL)
- CAB Abstracts
- Cabells Journalytics
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
- EBSCO Host
- Embase
- EMCare
- GALE, CENGAGE Learning
- Global Health
- Google Scholar
- Open Access Digital Theological Library
- PubMed / Medline
- PubMed Central
- SciELO SA
- SCOPUS
- Web of Science Other Coverage, Emerging Sources Citation Index, ESCI
We are working closely with relevant indexing services to ensure that articles published in the journal will be available in their databases when appropriate.
Archiving
The full text of the journal articles is deposited in the following archives to guarantee long-term preservation:
- AOSIS Library
- Portico
- SA ePublications, Sabinet
- South African Government Libraries
AOSIS is also a participant in the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) initiative. LOCKSS will enable any library to maintain their own archive of content from AOSIS and other publishers, with minimal technical effort and using cheaply available hardware. The URL to the LOCKSS Publisher Manifest for the journal is, https://safpj.co.za/index.php/safpj/gateway/lockss. Please inform us if you are using our manifest as we would like to add your name to the list above.
Journal Impact
A journal's Impact Factor was originally designed in 1963 as a tool for libraries to compare journals, and identify the most popular ones to subscribe to. It was never intended to measure the quality of journals, and definitely not the quality of individual articles.
The Impact Factor is a journal-level measurement reflecting the yearly average number of citations of recent articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher Impact Factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. Therefore, the more often articles in the journal are cited, the higher its Impact Factor.
The Impact Factor is highly discipline-dependent due to the speed with which articles get cited in each field and the related citation practices. The percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication varies highly amongst disciplines. Accordingly, one cannot compare journals across disciplines based on their relative Impact Factors.
We provide several citation-based measurements for each of our journals, if available. We caution our authors, readers and researchers that they should assess the quality of the content of individual articles, and not judge the quality of articles by the reputation of the journal in which they are published.
Citation-based measurement |
2023 |
Journal Impact Factor, based on Web of Science (formerly ISI) |
1.2 |
1.5 |
|
Source-Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP), based on SCOPUS, Elsevier |
0.44 |
0.28 |
|
22.00 |