The Pan African Medical Journal -

With over 15,000 published articles and counting, PAMJ has become a critical tool for:

The Pan African Medical Journal is not trying to compete with Nature or JAMA . It is playing a different game.

General medical research, public health, and clinical studies relevant to Africa. Accessibility: Open-access ensures wide dissemination. Core Focus Areas and Impact

PAMJ operates on a model. This means that the author or their institution pays an Article Processing Charge (APC) after acceptance, and the article is immediately free for everyone to read. The Pan African Medical Journal

By empowering African researchers to tell their own stories, the Pan African Medical Journal is not just a publication—it is a movement toward health equity and scientific independence.

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Despite its success, PAMJ faces persistent challenges. The rapid growth in submissions has put pressure on operational resources, including the availability of peer reviewers and editorial staff. Many young African researchers, who form the bulk of submitters, often lack basic scientific writing skills, leading to high rejection rates on grounds of poor writing quality. PAMJ also operates in a global publishing environment where there can be unconscious biases against African journals and where large, predatory publishers threaten the emergence of a local scientific industry. With over 15,000 published articles and counting, PAMJ

As of 2025, PAMJ does not yet have a traditional Journal Impact Factor (JIF) from Clarivate’s Web of Science. However, many African universities and promotion committees have explicitly recognized PAMJ as a trustworthy, peer-reviewed source. Increasingly, funding bodies like the Wellcome Trust and the NIH accept PAMJ publications for grant reporting due to its PMC indexing.

Over the years, PAMJ has expanded into a comprehensive service ecosystem for researchers. In addition to its flagship journal, the PAMJ portfolio includes:

PAMJ frequently publishes thematic supplements in collaboration with international bodies. Notable recent supplements include: Accessibility: Open-access ensures wide dissemination

This is not a failure of individual clinicians. It is a failure of horizontal health system strengthening. Without robust primary care infrastructure that manages longitudinal health (tracking blood pressure over decades, not curing pneumonia in a week), the NCD epidemic will overwhelm tertiary hospitals.

The Pan African Medical Journal was founded in early 2008 by Dr. Raoul Kamadjeu and Dr. Landry Tsague. Recognizing a significant gap in publication opportunities for researchers in Africa, they envisioned a platform that would allow African voices to be heard in the global scientific conversation. A key part of their vision was linguistic inclusivity. The founders designed PAMJ to accept submissions in both English and French, the two most widely spoken official languages on the continent, thereby ensuring that a broader range of research could be shared without language barriers.