Why Publish in WestJEM?

As an author, your work will have the greatest impact by reaching the most readers possible in the shortest time. As the premier open-access emergency medicine journal in North America, WestJEM is dedicated to free exchange of ideas and access to scholarly work without impediment. Publishing with WestJEM means:

  • Our open access policy exposes your article to the wide audience at the time of electronic publication. Full-text is freely available and widely disseminated to the public through PubMed Central, WestJEM.com, and WestJEM.org. Readers and authors can access, print, and redistribute WestJEM content without restriction or cost, further spreading your work by following the copyright guidelines.
  • Authors retain copyright: You can place your published manuscript anywhere freely, including on your own or department website, on University post script data warehouse, or email it to friends, and include the hard link on your CV to the open access article on PubMed Central, WestJEM.com, and WestJEM.org.
  • Your work will be indexed in MEDLINE and PubMed, as well as all major indexing services such as Medscape, EBSCO/CINAHL, SCOPUS, EMBASE, and DOAJ. Click here for a full list.
  • Your article will be critiqued by experienced, blinded peer reviewers and academic editors. The peer-review process provides authors an unbiased, quality, efficient review.
  • There is never a fee to submit an article to WestJEM. The APF can be waived ifthe first or last author is a member of a subscribing department. (Departments can subscribe to WestJEM for $1000 per year for up to 2 articles. For full details please see http://westjem.com/article-processing-fee.)
  • Your article can be read on multiple devices.
  • You will stay up to date with monthly eScholarship reports on the number of hits and downloads for your article received on WestJEM.org.
  • Select articles are placed and highlighted on Medscape, which receives 2.6 million page views per month.
  • Your article will be actively publicized, as we send out monthly electronic newsletters to all our subscribers and sponsoring society members of California ACEP, ACOEP, and CAL/AAEM. We use social media (Twitter and Facebook) to highlight articles. We also encourage more media coverage by publishing your article with Physician News Network.
  • If your article is highlighted or recognized in anyway, we would post the recognition in our Press Releases on our website.

Warning Regarding Predatory Open Access Journals:

We advise you to take precautionary measures to avoid falling victim to “predatory” open access journals. These journals are infamous for “preying” on junior or unsuspecting researchers by:

  • Charging thousands of dollars for hidden submission and publication fees
  • Offering submission-to-publication times so short that make peer review impossible
  • Plagiarizing credible journals
  • Creating falsified editorial boards using the names of doctors who are unaware of their existence
  • Developing websites that mimic those of legitimate journals

WestJEM is proud to be open access, reputable, and peer-reviewed. We allow authors to keep their copyright, never charge to submit and have one of the lowest article-processing fees of any scientific journal for accepted manuscripts. We also waive the article-processing fee for department subscribers.

We are a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association and are indexed in MEDLINE and Pub Med Central. We encourage you to submit your scholarly work to WestJEM and to direct questions to our editorial office at editor@westjem.org.

REFERENCE:
Beall J. Predatory publishers are corrupting open access. Nature 2012; 489:179-179.

Mission Statement

WestJEM focuses on how the systems and delivery of emergency care affects health, health disparities, and health outcomes in communities and populations worldwide, including the impact of social conditions on the composition of patients seeking care in emergency departments.

Population Health, per the Journal’s use, is broadly defined as research that examines systems of medicine related to the emergency department and environs. While the focus of the Journal is broadly on, “Integrating Emergency Care with Population Health,” the journal focus is NOT narrowly defined as only public health or epidemiology. Likely the only category of research paper that the journal does not consider are pharmaceutical company studies of investigational drugs.

Further description of the types of papers the journal encourages for submission follow:

  1. All ages (pediatrics/adult/geriatrics)
  2. Community, academic and critical access practice settings
  3. All countries and regions, even if emergency care, per se, is not yet a formally recognized specialty
  4. Abuse of all types (child, sexual, domestic violence, elder)
  5. Injury prevention (gun violence)
  6. Immigrant health
  7. Psychiatric conditions and addiction medicine
  8. Clinical practice of EM within the ED for all traditional medical and surgical specialties
  9. Critical care delivered within the ED
  10. Observation medicine
  11. ED Operations, including throughput, boarding/crowding/finance/transfers/extension to outpatient care paths
  12. Social determinates of health
  13. Education of medical students, residents and fellows
  14. Computers/technology use in and around the ED
  15. Infectious diseases, epidemics, and pandemics
  16. Prehospital care
  17. All associated sub boards of emergency medicine (pediatrics, EMS, US, ED admin, tox, critical care, medical informatics)

WestJEM has dedicated subspecialty content experts for the following sections. Submitted papers will undergo peer review from both reviewers with specific interest in the topic of submitted papers, as well as synthesis and further review from subspecialty content experts, including:

  1. Behavioral Emergencies
  2. Cardiac Care
  3. Climate Change
  4. Clinical Practice
  5. Critical Care
  6. Disaster Medicine
  7. Education
  8. ED Administration
  9. Emergency Medical Services
  10. Geriatrics
  11. Health Equity
  12. Infectious Disease
  13. Injury Prevention
  14. International Medicine
  15. Legal Medicine
  16. Musculo-Skeletal conditions
  17. Neurosciences
  18. Pediatric Emergency Medicine
  19. Public Health
  20. Statistics and Methodology
  21. Technology in Emergency Medicine
  22. Trauma
  23. Toxicology
  24. Ultrasound
  25. Women’s Health

If you are unsure whether your potential submission fits the niche of the journal, please email the Editor at milangdo@uci.edu and editor@westjem.org with an abstract.

Updated June 2025

Contact Information

WestJEM/ Department of Emergency Medicine
UC Irvine Health

3800 W Chapman Ave Ste 3200
Orange, CA 92868, USA
Phone: 1-714-456-6389
Email: editor@westjem.org

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WestJEM
ISSN: 1936-900X
e-ISSN: 1936-9018

CPC-EM
ISSN: 2474-252X

WestJEM is indexed in:

Our Philosophy

Emergency Medicine is a specialty which closely reflects societal challenges and consequences of public policy decisions. The emergency department specifically deals with social injustice, health and economic disparities, violence, substance abuse, and disaster preparedness and response. This journal focuses on how emergency care affects the health of the community and population, and conversely, how these societal challenges affect the composition of the patient population who seek care in the emergency department. The development of better systems to provide emergency care, including technology solutions, is critical to enhancing population health.

Copyright © 2018 WestJEM / eScholarship University of California.. All rights reserved.