A public health journal is a scientific journal devoted to the field of public health, including epidemiology, biostatistics, and health care (including medicine, nursing and related fields). Public health journals, like most scientific journals, are peer-reviewed. Public health journals are commonly published by health organizations and societies, such as the Bulletin of the World Health Organization or the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (published by the British Medical Association).

The increase in public health research in recent decades has seen a rapid increase in the number of articles and journals. As such, many public health journals have emerged with a specialized focus, such as in the area of policy (e.g. Journal of Public Health Policy), a specific region or country of the world (e.g. Asia-Pacific Journal of Public Health, Pan American Journal of Public Health or Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal), a specific intervention/practice area (e.g. Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention), or other particular focus (e.g. Human Resources for Health).

Fiona Godlee (born August 4, 1961) has been editor in chief of the BMJ since 2005; she is the first female editor appointed in the journal's history.

Educated at Bedales, she qualified as a doctor in 1985 at the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, having studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, then trained as a general physician in London, and is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. Since 1990 she has written on a broad range of issues for BMJ, including the impact of environmental degradation on health, the future of the World Health Organisation, the ethics of academic publication, and the problems of editorial peer review.

In 1994, she spent a year at Harvard University as a Harkness Fellow evaluating efforts to bridge the gap between medical research and practice. On returning to the UK, she led the development of BMJ Clinical Evidence, which evaluates the best available evidence on the benefits and harms of treatments and is now provided worldwide to over a million clinicians in 9 languages. In 2000, she moved to Current Science Group to help establish the open access online publisher BioMedCentral as Editorial Director for Medicine. In 2003, she returned to the BMJ Group to head up its new Knowledge division. She has served as President of the World Association of Medical Editors (from January 2000 to December 2001) and Chair of the Committee on Publication Ethics (from 2004 on) and is co-editor of Peer Review in Health Sciences.

Andrew Jeremy Wakefield (born 1957) is a British former surgeon and medical researcher, known as an advocate for the discredited claim that there is a link between the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, autism and bowel disease, and for his fraudulent 1998 research paper in support of that claim.

Four years after the publication of the paper, other researchers' results had still failed to reproduce Wakefield's findings or confirm his hypothesis of a relation between childhood gastrointestinal disorders and autism. A 2004 investigation by Sunday Times reporter Brian Deer identified undisclosed financial conflicts of interest on Wakefield's part, and most of his coauthors then withdrew their support for the study's interpretations. The British General Medical Council (GMC) conducted an inquiry into allegations of misconduct against Wakefield and two former colleagues. The investigation centred on Deer's numerous findings, including one that autistic children were subjected to unnecessary invasive medical procedures, such as colonoscopy and lumbar puncture, and that Wakefield acted without the required ethical approval from an institutional review board.