Before submitting an article for consideration, authors are encouraged to review content recently published on Health Affairs Forefront to get a sense of both the style and content that we’re looking for. Authors are also encouraged to specifically review work previously published on your topic in Forefront and elsewhere and to cite that prior work in your own piece when appropriate.

Health Affairs Forefront includes various featured topics, featured series, and book reviews. Authors are encouraged to consider whether their submission might fit within those categories and should indicate such when submitting. 

The most successful articles are written to be accessible to the wide range of Health Affairs readers. We encourage authors not to shy away from complex or specialized topics, but to explain those topics in a manner understandable to readers interested in health policy who may not be completely versed in the particular area being discussed.

Unlike traditional research manuscripts that often begin with a long wind-up and extended background early in the piece, typical Health Affairs Forefront articles are structured like essays or op-eds, with a strong, clear explanation of the issue and key themes up front. We encourage you to discuss how your work may be relevant to policy makers as well as researchers.

In addition, please keep the following guidelines in mind:

• Submit articles as a Word document.
• Include a title.
• Include author bio(s) or links to same (unless you have already supplied these for previous      articles or former articles) when completing the submission portal.
• For sources, do not use footnotes or endnotes; instead, cite sources and others’ work with      embedded hyperlinks to references. 
• Separate your content using subheads so that it’s easier for your readers to navigate.
• Most Forefront articles come in under 2,000 words. Many good articles fall somewhere between 800 and      1,500 words.
• Please indicate any conflicts of interests, financial or otherwise, that would not be obvious from the authors’ bios or the text of the article; this would include any funding sources, as well as undisclosed affiliations that are relevant to the subject/content of your article.
• Submissions under consideration for publication elsewhere will not be considered. 
• Typically, submissions that replicate, in whole or in substantial part, content from previously      published work (e.g., published reports, articles etc.) will also not be considered.
• If you would like to include an exhibit(s) with your article, please upload as a jpg, gif, png,      or tiff. Each exhibit must have a specific source associated with it; please list exhibit titles, sources, and notes within the main      text of the article submission, not in the exhibit file. If the exhibit is the product of your own analysis, please list "Source: author's analysis." For exhibit files, please attach original editable data files in Excel when relevant. If exhibits were created in a software other than Excel, please export figures as either a vector EPS with transparent background, or a high resolution PDF, along with data points in an Excel file.
• If you want to reproduce a previously published exhibit, you must obtain permission from the original publisher.

We can provide quick turnaround for particularly newsworthy articles, but due to the volume of articles it can sometimes take a few weeks from submission to publication. And, as mentioned above, we are not able to publish all submissions.

Authors are welcome to contact HAForefront@healthaffairs.org with additional questions, although due to time and resource constraints the editorial team is generally unable to provide pre-submission assessments. The most efficient way to get the team’s feedback on an article is to go ahead and submit it.