Open calls for papers that will take an evidence synthesis

Special issues are an under-used route to publication for evidence syntheses. Editors assemble them around questions rather than study designs, guest editors are usually reachable before submission, and a collection with a stated deadline gives a review team something most reviews lack: a date.

The problem is that finding them is tedious and the listings are unreliable. So we checked.

Everything below was opened and read on the publisher's own page. Deadlines are quoted as the publisher states them. Nothing here is inferred from a listing page, a search result or an aggregator.

The collection pages checked were BMC Public Health, BMC Medicine, BMC Geriatrics and BMC Sports Science, Medicine and Rehabilitation.

How to read this list

The "fits" column is our editorial judgement about what kind of synthesis would land well, based on the scope text. It is not a publisher statement. Entries marked with a star are ones where the publisher explicitly names reviews, meta-analyses or literature reviews among the study types sought, which is a materially stronger signal.

Deadlines were verified on 27 August 2026. Publishers extend and occasionally withdraw collections without notice. Confirm before you commit anything to a timeline.

Four worth a second look

The Systematic Reviews realist synthesis collection closes on 18 November and explicitly encourages early-career researchers. Realist review is the method most people want to use and fewest have executed, and a collection with a guest editorial team is a better first attempt than going it alone.

The Frontiers cryotherapy call asks for a standardised comparative framework across whole-body cryotherapy, local cryotherapy and cold-water immersion. Those three modalities are compared constantly and almost never on common ground. That is a network meta-analysis brief written by an editor who may not have realised they were writing one.

The BMC Public Health call on epidemiologic methods for missing data closes on 30 March 2027 and is one of the few genuine methods openings in the list. Missing data in meta-analysis sits squarely inside its scope.

Both ongoing Systematic Reviews collections take methodology papers with no deadline pressure, which makes them a sensible home for work on screening automation or overlap assessment.

What we could not verify

Two items need a human eye and should not be quoted until resolved.

The Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care collection on sustainability in primary health care contradicts itself. The header deadline field reads 08 March 2027; the body text reads March 8th 2026. Both strings were confirmed on the page. Systematic reviews are explicitly named as a welcome study type, so it is worth an email to the journal, but no date should be relied on until they answer.

The European Journal of Sport Science call on exercise and the brain exists, but Wiley returned a 403 to every automated attempt. No deadline is claimed here. Open it manually.

Three publishers could not be checked at all. Wiley blocks automated access, ScienceDirect disallows it, and JAMA is behind a CAPTCHA. That means the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, the Journal of Physiotherapy and the Scandinavian sport-science journals are absent from this list because they could not be read, not because they have nothing open.

The Frontiers coverage is a strong sample rather than a census. Frontiers publishes deadlines only on individual topic pages, and the journal-level listings are paginated; roughly one page per journal was worked through. More open topics almost certainly exist in Public Health and Nutrition.

One warning that will save someone a wasted submission. Legacy BMC collection URLs on biomedcentral.com now redirect to link.springer.com, and the old pages still display 2023 deadlines marked as open. Anything read off a biomedcentral.com collections page should be treated as wrong.

References

Springer Nature. (2026). BMC geriatrics: Collections. https://link.springer.com/journal/12877/collections?filter=Open

Springer Nature. (2026). BMC medicine: Collections. https://link.springer.com/journal/12916/collections

Springer Nature. (2026). BMC public health: Collections. https://link.springer.com/journal/12889/collections?filter=Open

Springer Nature. (2026). BMC sports science, medicine and rehabilitation: Collections. https://link.springer.com/journal/13102/collections

Note. All entries were verified on the publisher's own collection or research topic page on 27 August 2026. Deadlines are quoted as stated by the publisher and are subject to change without notice.