Socialmedicinsk tidskrift

The Swedish journal of Social Medicine (Socialmedicinsk tidskrift, smt) has since 1924 been a forum for Swedish researchers to present and discuss research questions related to social medicine and social sciences – primarily in Swedish for Swedish readers, but with English summaries. Some articles are also presented in other languages like, Danish, English or Norwegian.

The policy for the content has changed over the years to include also public health issues. Since 2022 in addition research about the role of civil society has been included.

The objective of smt is to support public health in Sweden with knowledge based presentations theoretically and in praxis. Smt is a foundation run by the departments of social medicine and public health at the Swedish universities.

This imply that the journal is important when fulfilling the third mission of the universities in Sweden, i.e. presenting research findings.

Since the year of 2003 all articles in smt are presented as” open access” articles (www.socialmedicinsktidskrift.se). When smt became an open access journal the numbers of subscribers have substantiality diminished. At the same time analyses show that readers on internet have dramatically increased.

During the last years there has been an annual increase of readers of the articles of about 10 percent. Year 2020 smt had more than 80 000 readers, whereof the majority from Sweden.

The department of Ideas and History of Science at the Uppsala University has started a digitalization project of articles published in the journal from 1924-2002. Since year 2009 smt has been supported by Fas / Forte. This support is needed in order to publish this journal.

In addition a substantial amount of voluntary work from authors at the universities have been the basis for the journal´s publications.