Call for Papers: JECP Special Issue on Philosophy of Medicine

Submission deadline: Friday, 29^th January 2016

The Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice (JECP) is calling for submissions in any area of the philosophy of medicine and health care for a special edition to be published in 2016.

The philosophy of medicine has grown as an area of research to  encompass questions about evidence, values (and the relationship between them), clinical judgment, health policy, public health, and preventive medicine.

We particularly welcome work that examines the implications of developments in computer-aided medical practice, including the impact of algorithmic approaches to clinical reasoning, as well as the philosophical dimensions of the “hollowing out” phenomenon of cognition, whereby some are arguing that computers will be replacing much of the factual and reasoning dimensions of clinical care and robotics increasingly displacing surgical skills.

We also welcome responses to papers published in previous thematic editions (16:2, 17:5, 18:5, 19:3, 20:6. 21:3), in line with the ethos of encouraging on-going critical debate that has generated so many enlightening exchanges in the pages of the journal. But we are just as keen to receive contributions in entirely new areas of this expanding field, representing excellent examples of the application of philosophy to questions of substantive import in medicine and healthcare.

The JECP is an international health sciences journal (Impact Factor 1.52) that focuses on the evaluation and development of clinical practice in medicine, nursing and the allied health professions.  It has a large and diverse readership including practitioners and academics from a vast range of areas, and a twenty-year tradition of publishing papers raising epistemological, metaphysical and ethical issues underlying clinical policy and practice.  Since 2010, its annual special issues in the philosophy of medicine have stimulated debate on numerous topics, via a combination of original papers, commissioned responses and conference reports. Themes covered have included the nature of causation and explanation in medicine, causal inference, epidemiology, values-based practice, evidence-based medicine, person-centred care, psychiatric diagnosis and practice, medical phenomenology, narrative explanation, casuistry, probabilistic and clinical reasoning, as well as fundamental debates in medical epistemology.

Manuscripts can be submitted online using the link http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jecp – please mark the submissions clearly with the words “Philosophy thematic issue”.

The deadline for submission of manuscripts is Friday, 29^th January 2016.  Original papers are usually no more than 5000 words in length, and detailed author guidelines are available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1365-2753/homepage/ForAuthors.html

Informal enquiries: please contact Jonathan Fuller (jonathan.fuller@mail.utoronto.ca).