ISSN

2312-0053 (PRINT)
2313-1810 (ONLINE)

Focus and scope

The Southern African Journal of Infectious Diseases (SAJID) publishes topics on all aspects of infectious diseases, particularly those of importance to the FIDSSA societies. Topics around infection include clinical and epidemiological aspects of communicable diseases, laboratory diagnosis of infections, characterisation of infective agents by molecular techniques and the study of transmission patterns of pathogens in institutional and community settings. Other infection related studies cover surveillance of vaccine-controllable and other infectious diseases, drug susceptibility patterns of hospital-acquired and community-acquired pathogens and infection control strategies for the southern Africa region. SAJID also promotes greater collaboration between clinically oriented and laboratory-based divisions within the FIDSSA societies, and the establishment of quality assurance programmes and other measures to enhance and maintain standards of diagnostic and public health microbiology. Manuscripts describing research performed at Southern African institutions and in Southern African settings enjoy a high priority, as do health matters covering Africa and the developing world, as well as global issues such as malaria and other tropical diseases, tuberculosis, sexually transmitted infections and HIV and AIDS. SAJID’s scope of interest is wide and the journal aims to maintain and improve the standard of its publications.

Historic data

The Southern African Journal of Infectious Diseases (SAJID) (2014-current), formerly called the Southern African Journal of Epidemiology and Infection(SAJEI) (1985-2013), first appeared in 1985 as a joint publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of Southern Africa (IDSSA), the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Society of Southern Africa (STDSSA) and the Epidemiology Society of Southern Africa, the latter was subsequently succeeded by the Public Health Association of South Africa (PHASA). Presently SAJID is published under the FIDSSA auspices which is an umbrella organization incorporating IDSSA, STDSSA, the Infection Control Society of Southern Africa (ICSSA), the Southern African Society of Clinical Microbiology (SASCM), the South African Society of Travel Medicine (SASTM) and the Southern African Society of Paediatric Infectious Diseases (SASPID). SAJID subscribes to the Uniform Requirements of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) (www. icmje.org), which state the ethical principles in the conduct and reporting of research and provide recommendations relating to specific elements of editing and writing.

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.

Types of articles published

Read full details on the submissions guidelines page.

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.

Marketing

AOSIS has a number of ways in which we promote publications. Learn more here.

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.

All articles published in the journal are included in:

• African Index Medicus
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
• EBSCO Host
• Embase
• GALE, CENGAGE Learning
• Google Scholar
• Hinari
• PubMed Central
• 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.

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://sajid.co.za/index.php/sajid/gateway/lockss. Please inform us if you are using our manifest as we would like to add your name to the list above.

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.