Advancing clinical epidemiology, research methods, evidence synthesis, and evidence-informed healthcare.
Archives of Clinical Epidemiology (ACE) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to advancing scientific knowledge in clinical epidemiology, clinical research methodology, and evidence-informed healthcare.
The journal provides a multidisciplinary platform for epidemiologists, clinicians, biostatisticians, methodologists, health-services researchers, educators, and other scholars working to improve the quality and application of clinical evidence.
ACE publishes scientifically rigorous, ethically conducted, transparently reported, and clinically relevant research that contributes to patient care, evidence-based practice, professional education, research methodology, and the development and evaluation of healthcare systems.
The journal welcomes Original Articles, Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses, Narrative Reviews, Brief Reports, Case Reports, Clinical Images, Editorials, Perspectives, and scholarly Correspondence.
The scientific scope of ACE includes:
The journal also welcomes work addressing digital health, artificial intelligence, machine learning, clinical informatics, biomedical technologies, and other emerging approaches relevant to study design, clinical measurement, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment evaluation, and the improvement of healthcare.
ACE particularly encourages interdisciplinary, translational, methodological, educational, and health-services research that strengthens the connection between rigorous methods, clinical evidence, and healthcare decisions across diseases, populations, and care settings.
The journal considers positive, negative, neutral, confirmatory, and replication findings when the research question is relevant and the study is methodologically appropriate and transparently reported. Publication decisions are not based solely on statistical significance.
Archives of Clinical Epidemiology (ACE) is published electronically in English and operates under a Continuous publication model. Articles are published online as the Version of Record after completion of peer review, final editorial acceptance, and production.
The journal is published by Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences and co-published by Treata Scholars.
Scientific and editorial responsibility for individual manuscripts rests with the Editor-in-Chief and the journal's academic editorial structure. The publisher and co-publisher support the journal's publishing activities but do not determine the acceptance or rejection of individual manuscripts.
The Editor-in-Chief has overall academic responsibility for the scientific direction and editorial content of the journal.
ACE uses a Double-anonymized peer-review process.
Manuscripts first undergo editorial assessment. Submissions considered suitable for external review are normally evaluated by at least two independent reviewers with relevant scientific, clinical, or methodological expertise.
Reviewer recommendations inform editorial decisions but do not determine them by numerical majority. Final editorial responsibility remains with the responsible academic editor and the Editor-in-Chief.
Detailed information is provided in the journal's Editorial and Publication Policies.
ACE is a fully open-access journal.
All published articles are freely available online immediately upon publication without subscription charges, reader fees, mandatory registration, or an access embargo.
ACE does not charge authors submission fees, article processing charges (APCs), publication fees, page charges, or mandatory color-figure charges.
Authors retain copyright in their published work. Unless otherwise stated, articles are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
Complete information concerning copyright, reuse, licensing, permissions, and author self-archiving is available on the journal's Open Access, Copyright and Licensing page.
ACE is an online-only journal and publishes articles continuously throughout the year. The journal maintains one volume for each calendar year. Articles are published individually after completion of the editorial and production process rather than being delayed solely for assembly of a conventional issue. The final published article constitutes the Version of Record.
ACE records the manuscript's Received, Accepted, and Published dates to provide a transparent editorial history.
ACE expects submitted manuscripts to meet internationally recognized standards of research ethics, scientific reporting, and publication integrity.
The journal's policies are informed by relevant guidance from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and reporting guidelines available through the EQUATOR Network.
Reference to these organizations describes the standards informing ACE policies and does not imply formal membership unless membership is explicitly stated by the journal.
ACE maintains policies addressing peer review, authorship, contributorship, competing interests, human and animal research, clinical trial registration, data availability, artificial intelligence, plagiarism, research misconduct, corrections, retractions, complaints, appeals, and other aspects of responsible scholarly publishing.
Detailed publication-integrity requirements are set out in the journal's Editorial and Publication Policies.
ACE maintains bibliographic metadata and discovery information as part of its online publishing infrastructure. Information concerning the journal's publication model, visibility, and continuity is maintained within the journal website.
For long-term digital preservation, ACE uses LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) as an active preservation mechanism. LOCKSS provides distributed preservation of scholarly content to support the continued availability and integrity of the journal's published record over time.
Related operational information is available in the journal's Publishing Model section and Editorial and Publication Policies.
Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences
Tehran, Iran
Co-Publisher
Treata Scholars
The respective responsibilities of the publisher, co-publisher, Editor-in-Chief, Editorial Board, and Editorial Office are described in the journal's Journal Governance statement.
Last updated: October 2026