About Us

The Malaysian Family Physician (MFP) is the official journal of the Academy of Family Physicians of Malaysia (AFPM). It is jointly published by the Family Medicine Specialist Association (FMSA) of Malaysia. Up to December 2022, the MFP published three issues per year. It also started an Online First section in January 2021, where accepted articles are published online ahead of the issue. Starting from January 2023, the MFP is adopting continuous publication as soon as each article is ready for publication. This is to ensure knowledge is disseminated in a timely manner.

Goal: The MFP is an international journal that disseminates quality knowledge and clinical evidence relevant to primary care. The journal acts as the voice of family physicians, researchers and other members of the primary care team on clinical practice issues.

Scope: The MFP publishes:

  1. Research – Original Articles and Reviews
  2. Education – Case Reports/Clinical Practice Guidelines/Test Your Knowledge. We only encourage case reports that have the following features:
    • Novel aspects
    • Important learning points
    • Relevant to family practice
  3. Invited debate, commentary, discussion, letters, online, comment, and editorial on topics relevant to primary care.
  4. A Moment in the Life of a Family Physician – We encourage submission of a short narrative to share perspectives, voice, views and opinions about a family physician’s experience that has affected their practice or life.
    Read our Information for Authors section to learn more about these article types.

Strength: MFP is the only primary care research journal in Malaysia and one of very few in the region. It is open access and fully online. The journal is indexed in Scopus and has a strong editorial team and an established pool of readers with increasing recognition both locally and internationally.

Circulation: The journal is freely available online.

Indexing: All articles published in MFP are included in:

  • Web of Science (Emerging Sources Citation Index)
  • Scopus
  • PubMed Central
  • DOAJ
  • EBSCOHOST
  • Proquest
  • Google Scholar
  • EMCARE
  • Open J-Gate
  • MyAIS
  • MyCite
  • WPRIM

Publisher: Academy of Family Physicians of Malaysia

All correspondence should be addressed to:

Professor Dr Ping Yein Lee
Editor-in-Chief
Malaysian Family Physician
ACADEMY OF FAMILY PHYSICIANS OF MALAYSIA
Akademi Kedoktoran Keluarga Malaysia
Unit 3.11, Level 3, Medical Academies Malaysia
No. 5, Jalan P8H, Presint 8,
62250 Putrajaya,
Wilayah Persekutuan Putrajaya, Malaysia.
Tel: +603 – 8861 5511 / 5335 / 6151
Email: editor_mfp@afpm.org.my
Editorial Manager: Dr Chin Hai Teo, PhD

ISSN:
1985-207X (Print)
1985-2274 (Electronic)

Publication Ethics and Policies

RESEARCH ETHICS: Evidence of ethics approval from a recognised ethics committee and informed consent should be included in the manuscript for studies involving animal experiments or human participants. When manuscripts describe studies with vulnerable populations (refer ICH-GCP guideline) and there is a risk of coercion or incomplete consent, the manuscript will undergo further evaluation by an internal editorial oversight committee (Chief Editor, Deputy Chief Editor and Editorial Advisors). Consent is necessary for all personally identifiable data, encompassing biomedical, clinical, and biometric information. If requested, documentary proof of consent must be provided.

COMPETING INTERESTS: MFP requires authors to declare all conflicts of interest in relation to their work. All submitted manuscripts must include a ‘competing interests’ section at the end of the manuscript (before references) listing all competing interests.

AUTHORSHIP CRITERIA: Authorship credit should be based only on:

  1. Substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
  2. Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and
  3. Final approval of the version to be published.
  4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

POLICY ON PLAGIARISM AND MISCONDUCT: The journal takes a serious view on cases of plagiarism and research misconduct. All submitted articles are checked for plagiarism. If plagiarism or research misconduct is suspected, a thorough investigation will be carried out and action taken according to COPE guidance found HERE.

POLICY ON THE USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: MFP adopts the World Association of Medical Editors’ (WAME) recommendations on chatbots and generative artificial intelligence use in scholarly publications. Please visit WAME’s website to read the detailed recommendations. Below is the AI use policy applicable to authors, reviewers and editors of MFP:

FOR AUTHORS:

  • AI cannot be an author: AI and AI-assisted tools cannot be listed as authors. Only human beings can meet the criteria for authorship and be accountable for the work.
  • Authors are responsible for content: Authors should not use AI tools to generate content of a study. Data fabrication and falsification are considered serious research misconduct. If an AI tool was used in any way to support manuscript preparation, authors must carefully review, edit, and fact-check any outcomes generated by the AI tools. Authors must ensure that the output of any AI tool does not plagiarise or misrepresent existing work.
  • Authors must disclose any use of AI tool: If an AI tool was used in any way during the preparation of the manuscript, it must be disclosed in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript. Authors should describe the use as detailed as possible for transparency purposes. If AI was used as part of the research methodology (instead of generative AI tools for writing assistance), it should then be described in the Methods section.

FOR REVIEWERS/EDITORS:

  • Reviewers/editors should not upload or input confidential information from unpublished manuscripts to AI tools: All manuscripts assigned to reviewers/editors should be treated as confidential. If a manuscript is uploaded to an AI tool, confidentiality may be breached as the manuscript has been retained on a third-party cloud server. Reviewers/editors should also not upload any part of the manuscript such as a selected paragraph, table or figure to an AI tool.
  • Reviewers/editors should disclose any use of AI tools to assist the reviewing work: If an AI tool was used to assist with the reviewing activities (e.g., to improve comment writing, summarise key points or look for references), it must be disclosed to the editor/Chief Editor.
  • Reviewers/editors are fully responsible for the evaluation of a manuscript: Reviewers/editors are responsible for all comments, suggestions, and recommendations in the review, even if an AI tool was used in their generation.
  • Reviewers/editors should flag their concerns to the editors/Chief Editor if inappropriate AI use by authors is suspected: MFP now requires authors to disclose any AI use for manuscript preparation in the Acknowledgement section. If inappropriate AI use by the authors is suspected, it should be escalated to the editorial board for further investigation.

POLICIES ON CORRECTIONS, RETRACTIONS AND EXPRESSIONS OF CONCERN: Minor errors that are detected in an article post-publication will be announced via the publication of an erratum or a corrigendum. The article will be corrected while the previous version will be achieved on MFP’s website. Major errors that could invalidate an article’s results and conclusions may lead to the article being retracted. Retraction also applies to any publications that are found to contain elements of scientific misconduct such as data falsification; manipulation of images; failure to disclose relationships and activities; and plagiarism. A retraction note will be published to explain the reason for retracting the article. All cases will be investigated as per case-by-case basis. An expression on concern notice will be published to alert readers about any concerns raised on an article while the investigation is being carried out.

OPEN ACCESS POLICY: Once published, all articles in the Malaysian Family Physician are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. All MFP articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original author(s) and source are properly cited. Read HERE for more details. By publishing in MFP, all authors acknowledge that the article will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0).

POLICY ON PRE-PRINTS: MFP does not accept pre-prints for consideration of publication. However, in the case of original articles where pre-prints have been published, an exception may be made but this will need to be strongly justified.

POLICY ADHERENCE: The editorial board conducts regular review of the journal’s contents to ensure they are up to date and adhere to the journal’s policies.

DISCLAIMER: Although an official publication, the Malaysian Family Physician provides a forum for free expression and exchange of views among those in the profession. Therefore, views expressed in published articles are not necessarily those of the Journal, AFPM or FMSA. The views of the editor need not reflect the views of the Academy. No portion of any matter appearing in the Malaysian Family Physician may be quoted or republished in any form without the prior written consent of the author, editor and the AFPM.

Last update: 11 Sep 2025