While SJPH has mostly published peer-reviewed original articles (both qualitative and quantitative), short reports and commentaries in the past, we also welcome literature reviews (for which the word limit is increased to 6000 words and 60 references), glossaries and lectures by leading international scholars. Further, while SJPH particularly focuses on the Nordic regions, we will increasingly publish research from other European and non-European countries, which also should be of interest and relevance to our Nordic audience.

We encourage contributors to take an interdisciplinary approach involving, for example, sociology, psychology, technology, social medicine, epidemiology, public health and preventive medicine, but also an inter-sectoral approach, including of course academia, but also people working in governments, NGOs, think-tanks, the UN and in health care.

The unequal distribution of health and its determinants (both within and outside the health care system) taps into many other areas of public health, which will allow for a large variety of research topics, however SJPH will focus particularly on (in alphabetical order):

• Ageing and health
• Global health/child health
• Mental health
• Migration/ethnicity/refugee health
• Occupational health

However, when the editorial board first came together, we also agreed upon a wider research agenda which is not restricted to these areas. We are interested in publishing work that focuses on a broad range of health outcomes, including mortality, self-reported health, mental health, cardiovascular health, cancer, infectious diseases, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and disability/functional limitations. We are interested in determinants, including but not limited to housing and living conditions, occupational health, including working conditions, lifestyle, stigma, childhood conditions, social capital and institutional arrangements (such as the welfare state).

We also welcome contributions on both formal and informal health care, and health services research in general. Regarding study groups, we wish to focus on the whole life course, from children and childhood conditions, to adolescents/youth, and ageing. More broadly speaking, we welcome contributions with a global health/child health focus, cross-national research, and theory and methods in public health research. We are also very interested in studies that take advantage of Nordic health registers, which provide unique research opportunities within many of our key areas.

Finally, regarding the stratification of study populations, we welcome contributions focusing on migration/ethnicity/refugees, and we also encourage our authors to submit work split by socioeconomic status and gender. Intersectionality, which explores how these different ‘axes of inequality’ are experienced, not just separately but in combination, is also appreciated.