More Than An Index – What the Inclusion of PLOS Global Public Health and PLOS Digital Health in PubMed means for researchers around the world

We are thrilled to announce that PLOS Global Public Health and PLOS Digital Health are now fully indexed in PubMed Central (PMC), expanding our reach and furthering our mission of ensuring research content is accessible and discoverable as widely as possible.

Both journals have an explicit mandate to promote equity in research that can tackle the most urgent priorities for the field, such as access to healthcare, or addressing bias in AI and developing machine learning tools for underserved communities. We are proud to feature perspectives from all over the world, and we make sure that research is peer reviewed by experts with significant, context-appropriate expertise.

Dr. Madhu Pai, co-Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Global Public Health along with Dr. Catherine Kyobutungi, says, “With over 1000 published articles, a diverse editorial board of over 600 editors, and now indexing in PubMed Central, PLOS Global Public Health is excited to continue our vision of enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion in global public health.”

Dr. Leo Anthony Celi, Editor-in-Chief of PLOS Digital Health, says, “Indexing in PubMed acknowledges the time and effort that our authors, reviewers, and editors have contributed to creating a community that values diversity in the research at the intersection of technology and healthcare. I’m excited to grow this village whose goal is to improve health equity through digital technologies.”

What does this mean for the journal communities? Work published in PLOS Digital Health and PLOS Global Public Health will now be accessible to an even wider audience, meeting researchers where it is convenient for them to access knowledge. With the vast majority of article views coming from PMC or Google Scholar searches, it is imperative that research in both journals be highly-visible on these platforms.

Critically, the inclusion of PLOS Digital Health and PLOS Global Public Health in PMC is an endorsement of the rigor and reliability of the work published within and is the principle reason that researchers prefer to browse research on the platform. Journals indexed in PMC have undergone both technical and scientific benchmarking checks, allowing researchers to trust the findings, methods, and datasets shared. Of particular importance to the mission of both journals, this means local perspectives and expertise reported in rigorously reviewed published research will receive the attention and visibility that it deserves. 

For PLOS Global Public Health, we hope that this discoverability will help connect research and researchers from different parts of the world and will ultimately further our fundamental mission: to broaden the range and diversity of perspectives at the forefront of public health and advance the health of all humankind.

This news serves as an important milestone for a journal like PLOS Digital Health, which actively promotes code sharing and data accessibility as a means to further inclusive participation, trust and reproducibility within this growing field of research. Accessibility beyond the journal platform for a high-quality body of open research, as well as open research artifacts extends the reach, impact, and use of authors’ work. It’s a testament to the growing desire for researchers to share their work in a reputable Open Access title that encourages transparency. We hope to see this trend continue.

PLOS welcomes authors interested in advancing knowledge in healthcare to create fairer outcomes for patients and communities – we invite you to learn more about PLOS Digital Health and PLOS Global Public Health and submit today.