A reinvigorated Health and Quality of Life Outcomes: recent successes and renewed aims & scope

The editorial team at Health and Quality of Life Outcomes is pleased to announce that Springer Nature appointed Fanni Rencz (Department of Health Policy, Corvinus University of Budapest) as Co-Editor-in-Chief (CEiC) of the journal, succeeding Oliver Rivero-Arias, in April 2025. Mark Oremus (School of Public Health Sciences, University of Waterloo) remains Co-Editor-in-Chief and Brendan Mulhern (Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation, University of Technology Sydney) remains Deputy Editor.

Over the last five years, Drs. Oremus and Rivero-Arias implemented changes to sharpen the focus of the journal and position it among the top journals in the field of health-related quality of life (HRQoL). This was done by giving preferential treatment to manuscripts of rigorous methodological quality that pertained directly to the HRQoL theme. These changes, originally outlined in 2021 [1], included revitalizing the editorial board to align with a focus on HRQoL and introducing a triage process after initial manuscript submission to ensure associate editors could devote more time to the peer-review process. Potential authors now experience a first editorial decision within a median of nine days after submission. Further, the CEiCs implemented a set of work rules to ensure manageable workloads for associate editors, which improved the selection of quality peer reviewers and reduced turn-around times for submitted manuscripts. Lastly, the CEiCs recruited Dr. Mulhern as Deputy Editor to accelerate the triage process and reduce the timeline from initial submission to first decision.

The above changes took effect and raised the journal’s impact factor without self-citations from 3.0 in 2020 to 3.3 in 2024. The changes also allowed the journal to reposition itself in the first quartile of impact factors, which indicates it is among the highest ranked journals in the field of HRQoL [2]. The editorial board has reflected on all these improvements while simultaneously recognizing that methodological developments and changing priorities in the field have created an appropriate time for further refinement of Health and Quality of Life Outcome’s aims and scope. Therefore, effective immediately, the CEiCs wish to announce updated aims and scope for the journal. These updates align with the growing importance of capturing wider measures beyond HRQoL to understand disease impact on patients’ wellbeing. The updated aims and scope are as follows: Health and Quality of Life Outcomes is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal primarily focused on original research related to the measurement and valuation of HRQoL and wider measures of health, including quality of life, wellbeing, and carer-related outcomes, provided the central focus is on health. We welcome contributions in the following areas:

1. Articles creating or applying theoretical frameworks to develop, validate, or use instruments specific to HRQoL, wellbeing, or carer-related outcomes;

2. Submissions evaluating the psychometric properties of new or existing instruments measuring HRQoL, well-being, or carer-related outcomes (using any applicable method, such as item-response theory, structural equation modelling, etc.);

3. Articles describing theoretical or applied valuation research using existing preference elicitation exercises (e.g., time trade-off, discrete choice experiment) to explore societal and patient preferences or to estimate value sets;

4. Development of new empirical approaches to validating health, wellbeing, or carer-related outcomes;

5. Hypothesis-based or theory-driven primary or secondary epidemiological research containing HRQoL, wellbeing, or carer-related outcomes (measured using generic or disease-specific HRQoL/wellbeing instruments), but not research exclusively measuring clinical outcomes such as disease incidence or prevalence, mortality, etc.; and

6. Systematic reviews or meta-analyses of studies containing HRQoL, wellbeing, or carer-related outcomes, given the same restrictions outlined in point 5 above.

Please note the following important items:

1. To encourage the submission of high-quality work, all manuscripts submitted to the journal should conform to relevant reporting guidelines (e.g., PRISMA, MOOSE, STROBE, CONSORT, SRQR, COREQ);

2. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses must be pre-registered or preceded by a published protocol;

3. Health and Quality of Life Outcomes will immediately reject study protocols or manuscripts focused exclusively on providing univariate or bivariate descriptions of data;

4. Manuscripts whose intent is to validate the use of existing HRQoL or well-being instruments in specific contexts (e.g., linguistic, geographical, or cultural groups, new populations) will be considered on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of the CEiCs – please contact Drs. Oremus and Rencz before submitting a manuscript, noting the journal will give preference to papers employing advanced analytical methods in the validation exercise (e.g., item response theory, structural equation modeling);

5. The CEiCs welcome suggestions for special collections and thematic issues that fall within the journal’s aims and scope – please contact Drs. Oremus and Rencz for more information; and

6. The CEiCs welcome opportunities to publish conference proceedings from scientific meetings that fall within the journal’s aims and scope – please contact Drs. Oremus and Rencz for more information.

The changes to the aims and scope may not be immediately obvious to readers because Health and Quality of Life Outcomes will continue to process manuscripts in peer review that do not adhere to the new guidelines.

We believe the revised aims and scope will build upon the reinvigorating efforts described above and raise the impact of articles published in Health and Quality of Life Outcomes. This will help the journal become a stronger platform for communicating scientific information to the health outcomes research community and beyond, thereby contributing to the advancement of the measurement of HRQoL, health-related well-being, and care-related health outcomes. 

Author contributions

All authors contributed equally to the conception of the editorial. MO drafted the editorial and BM, ORA, and FR revised the draft for important intellectual content. MO and FR are Co-Editors-in-Chief of Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, BM is Deputy Editor, and ORA is Editor Emeritus. The authors read and approved the final editorial.

Declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.