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About the Journal
PLOS Medicine publishes articles of general interest on biomedical, environmental, social and political determinants of health. The journal emphasizes work that advances clinical practice, health policy or pathophysiological understanding to benefit health in a variety of settings.
PLOS Medicine also seeks to publish articles in the area of translational medicine that provide substantial, novel mechanistic insights into disease processes, with potential implications for clinical care.
Easy Submission
We use an easy, format-free submission process for all research articles to help save you time and effort.
- Initial submission. Upload your manuscript and cover letter. Choose to submit either a single PDF, or separate manuscript and figure files. There are no formatting requirements, and our mini initial submission form takes just 10 minutes to complete.
- Editorial evaluation. We’ll evaluate your submission within about a week.* If the editors select your manuscript for external peer review, we’ll invite you to provide additional information.
- Full submission. Complete the full submission form. In preparation for external peer review, we’ll ask you to give more details, like the full author list and a competing interest statement. No journal-specific formatting is required until a manuscript is close to acceptance.
*91% of research submissions receive an initial decision within 5 days, 94% within a week
Non-research articles are submitted as full submissions. Read the complete guidelines.
Preparing an Initial Submission
All research articles are eligible for our easy, three-part submission process.
Your initial submission will consist of:
- Manuscript, with a title page listing all the authors
- A cover letter
- Supporting information files, if relevant
You can choose to format your initial submission as either:
- A single PDF containing the manuscript, figures, and supporting information, or
- A PDF or Word document manuscript, with figures and supporting information uploaded individually
In either case, upload your cover letter as a separate file.
Preparing a Full Submission
If the editors decide to send your manuscript for peer review, we’ll invite you to make a full submission. At this stage, you’ll need to provide:
- Full author list and details
- Competing interest statement
- Funding disclosure statement
- Data availability statement
- Human and Animal ethics statements, if relevant
For research articles, you can also choose to have PLOS forward your manuscript to medRxiv for consideration for posting as a preprint.
Author Resources
Consult these resources to make sure that your manuscript is ready for submission, and find out what to expect later on in the editorial assessment and peer review process.
| Submission guidelines | Information about the article types available for primary research and guidelines for manuscript style and formatting |
| Editorial and publishing policies | Information about the requirements that apply to our submissions, including policies on data availability, competing interests, disclosure of funding sources, authorship, and reporting standards. |
| Other article types | Information about preparing submissions to the PLOS Medicine magazine. |
| Revision guidelines | Information about preparing a revised submission. |
| Publication fees and fee assistance | Information about publication fees and fee assistance options. Publication fees will be billed upon acceptance. Authors seeking fee assistance must apply at submission, using the form in the submission system. An author’s ability to pay publication fees is never a consideration in the publication decision process. |