About Infectious Diseases of Poverty

Infectious Diseases of Poverty

Infectious Diseases of Poverty (IDP) is an open-access, English-language public health journal launched on 25 October 2012 by BioMed Central in partnership with the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases (NIPD) of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Shanghai; the Chinese Medical Association later became a co-sponsor. Built on a "One Health, One World" mission, it publishes transdisciplinary research on infectious diseases that mainly affect poor populations — spanning pathogen and vector biology, diagnosis, treatment, epidemiology, health systems, environmental management and new technologies. Its founding editor-in-chief is Xiao-Nong Zhou, director of NIPD, who remains editor-in-chief. The journal's electronic ISSN is 2049-9957, and it is indexed in Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus and Embase.

The journal's premise is in its title. A class of infectious diseases — neglected tropical diseases above all, together with malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS — persists primarily because of poverty, and persists in turn as a cause of poverty. IDP was founded to study that relationship as a whole, rather than disease by disease, and to do so from a base in China, a country whose own experience of eliminating or controlling diseases of poverty, from schistosomiasis to malaria, informs the journal's perspective.

Founding and Launch

IDP was launched on 25 October 2012, with a launch ceremony in Beijing on 2 November 2012 at the Second Global Symposium on Health Systems Research. The journal grew directly out of the Global Report for Research on Infectious Diseases of Poverty, published in April 2012 by TDR, the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases; the journal's founding editorial stated that it aimed to build on the "One Health, One World" approach recommended by that report. The inaugural issue focused on the health-system framework for controlling infectious diseases of poverty, linking policy-level questions with academic research, and included a challenge to prevailing assumptions about infectious disease emergence and global change.

The journal's stated aim at launch was to identify and assess the research and information gaps that hinder progress toward new interventions for public health problems in the developing world — a scoping, gap-finding mission that explains the prominent place of scoping reviews in its content. The timing also mattered: the journal appeared as the international community was working toward the Millennium Development Goals, three of whose eight goals bore directly on poverty alleviation and public health, and it later reoriented its framing toward the succeeding Sustainable Development Goals.

Publisher, Partners and Editorial Leadership

IDP is published by BioMed Central, the open-access publisher, in partnership with the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases at the China CDC — now also styled the Chinese Center for Tropical Diseases Research — in Shanghai. The Chinese Medical Association later became a co-sponsor, adding the weight of China's national medical association to the partnership. The journal is served by an established, global editorial board, as its publisher notes.

Its editor-in-chief, Professor Xiao-Nong Zhou, was the director of NIPD — he held posts from deputy director to director of the institute between 1999 and 2023 — and is chief scientist of parasitic disease control at the China CDC, director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Tropical Diseases, and vice-dean of the School of Global Health at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine. Trained in ecology, population biology and epidemiology, with a doctorate from the University of Copenhagen in 1994, Zhou is a leading proponent of One Health approaches to tropical disease control, with more than forty years of experience in the implementation research and control of tropical diseases. The journal's editorial identity and its editor's research identity are thus unusually aligned: both are built around One Health and the control of diseases of poverty.

Scope: A Transdisciplinary Remit

The journal publishes research addressing essential public health questions relating to infectious diseases of poverty. Its listed topics cover the biology of pathogens and vectors; diagnosis and detection; treatment and case management; epidemiology and modelling; zoonotic hosts and animal reservoirs; control strategies and implementation; and new technologies and applications. Alongside these, it considers transdisciplinary and multisectoral work on health systems, ecohealth, environmental management and innovative technology.

That breadth is the point. A conventional medical journal might take the pathogen biology and the clinical treatment; a veterinary journal the zoonotic reservoirs; an environmental journal the ecohealth dimension. IDP was designed to hold them in one venue, under the One Health principle that human, animal and environmental health are interdependent. Content analyses of its first five years confirm the resulting profile: neglected tropical diseases accounted for the largest share of publications, followed by the "big three" of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis and by infectious diseases in general — together 88 percent of all publications — while its article mix was dominated by research articles (69.5 percent) and scoping reviews (21.5 percent), supplemented by editorials, opinions, commentaries and letters.

Publication History and Content

In its first five years, from the inaugural issue of 25 October 2012, the journal published 256 manuscripts, produced by 1,081 contributing authors from 323 affiliations across 68 countries, territories and regions — figures that document an genuinely international authorship for a journal edited from Shanghai. A series of ten thematic issues, containing 118 publications, appeared as parts of its first five volumes. It received its first impact factor in 2015.

By its tenth anniversary in 2022, the journal had produced 36 thematic series, grouped into four types: series providing information for the control of diseases such as Ebola, malaria and COVID-19; series on drug efficacy and resistance in malaria, coronavirus and other infections; series of transdisciplinary work, including social innovation in health-care delivery and the economic impact of infectious diseases; and further thematic collections. The journal's retrospective at ten years emphasised its role during the COVID-19 pandemic as a platform through which scientists anywhere — in its words, from urban cities or remote rural areas — could both access and publish research on infectious diseases of poverty. Its publisher reports that over half of its publications in recent years relate to one or more of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals.

Open Access Model

IDP is a fully open-access journal: all of its articles are free to read immediately on publication through BioMed Central's platform. For this journal's subject matter, open access is a substantive choice, not merely a business model. The researchers and practitioners who work on diseases of poverty are disproportionately located in low- and middle-income countries and in institutions with limited subscription budgets; a paywalled journal on poverty-related disease would exclude much of its natural readership and authorship. The journal's founding statements made exactly this argument, presenting open access as part of its mission to serve the least developed countries, which it places at the epicentre of its publication activities.

The model also matches its partnership structure: a Chinese national institute and an international open-access publisher jointly producing a journal whose content is globally available, with the Chinese Medical Association's later co-sponsorship broadening its domestic professional base.

Indexing and Standing

IDP is indexed in the major international biomedical databases, including Web of Science (Science Citation Index Expanded), PubMed, Scopus and Embase, and in the Directory of Open Access Journals. It received its first impact factor in 2015, four years' publication having established its citation record with unusual speed for a new journal — a reflection of the size of the global community working on neglected tropical diseases and health systems that the journal convened.

Within its niche, the journal has a clear identity: it is the dedicated transdisciplinary journal for infectious diseases of poverty, edited from the Chinese national institute for parasitic diseases and published internationally by BioMed Central. Its editor-in-chief's standing — as a WHO collaborating centre director and a leading One Health figure — reinforces its position as a convening platform for the field, a role visible in its thematic series on successive emergencies from Ebola to COVID-19.

Readership and Community

The journal's readers and authors are the global community working on neglected tropical diseases and poverty-related infection: parasitologists and entomologists, epidemiologists and modellers, clinicians, health-systems researchers, veterinarians and environmental scientists, and the programme managers who implement control interventions. Its first-five-years authorship — 68 countries, territories and regions — shows a community that extends well beyond China, while its Shanghai base and Chinese partnerships give researchers from China and Asia a home journal in a field historically centred in Europe and North America.

The journal explicitly addresses the research–policy gap: its scoping reviews and thematic series are designed to synthesise evidence for decision-makers, and its founding documents describe identifying information gaps for interventions in the developing world as a core purpose. It is therefore read in ministries, agencies and non-governmental programmes as well as in universities.

Access and Identification

Infectious Diseases of Poverty is published online by BioMed Central at its journal site (idpjournal.biomedcentral.com), with all content open access. Its electronic ISSN is 2049-9957. Articles are discoverable through PubMed Central, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and the other services that index it.

From its launch on 25 October 2012 under the "One Health, One World" banner, IDP has maintained a consistent identity: a Shanghai-partnered, internationally published, fully open journal for the transdisciplinary study of the infections that afflict poor populations — their biology, their control, their health systems and their environments — edited throughout by Xiao-Nong Zhou of the National Institute of Parasitic Diseases.