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JMIR Formative Research

Process evaluations, early results, and feasibility/pilot studies of digital and non-digital interventions

Editor-in-Chief:

Amaryllis Mavragani, PhD, Scientific Editor at JMIR Publications, Canada


Impact Factor 2.1 More information about Impact Factor CiteScore 3.5 More information about CiteScore

JMIR Formative Research (JFR, ISSN 2561-326X) publishes peer-reviewed, openly accessible papers containing results from process evaluations, feasibility/pilot studies and other kinds of formative research and preliminary results. While the original focus was on the design of medical- and health-related research and technology innovations, JMIR Formative Research publishes studies from all areas of medical and health research.

Formative research is research that occurs before a program is designed and implemented, or while a program is being conducted. Formative research can help

  • define and understand populations in need of an intervention or public health program
  • create programs that are specific to the needs of those populations
  • ensure programs are acceptable and feasible to users before launching
  • improve the relationship between users and agencies/research groups
  • demonstrate the feasibility, use, satisfaction with, or problems with a program before large-scale summative evaluation (looking at health outcomes)

Many funding agencies will expect some sort of pilot/feasibility/process evaluation before funding a larger study such as a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT).

Formative research should be an integral part of developing or adapting programs and should be used while the program is ongoing to help refine and improve program activities. Thus, formative evaluation can and should also occur in the form of a process evaluation alongside a summative evaluation such as an RCT.

JMIR Formative Research fills an important gap in the academic journals landscape, as it publishes sound and peer-reviewed formative research that is critical for investigators to apply for further funding, but that is usually not published in outcomes-focused medical journals aiming for impact and generalizability.

Summative evaluations of programs and apps/software that have undergone a thorough formative evaluation before launch have a better chance to be published in high-impact flagship journals; thus, we encourage authors to submit - as a first step - their formative evaluations in JMIR Formative Research (and their evaluation protocols to JMIR Research Protocols). 

JMIR Formative Research is indexed in MEDLINEPubMed, PubMed CentralDOAJ, Scopus, Sherpa/Romeo, EBSCO/EBSCO Essentials, and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI).

JMIR Formative Research received a Journal Impact Factor of 2.1 according to the latest release of the Journal Citation Reports from Clarivate, 2025.

With a CiteScore of 3.5 (2024) JMIR Formative Research is a Q2 journal in the field of Medicine (miscellaneous), according to Scopus data.

Recent Articles

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of telehealth as a key strategy within Brazil’s Unified Health System. In São Paulo State, digital health initiatives have been developed to implement telehealth-based care models across all 3 levels of health care.

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Development and Evaluation of Research Methods, Instruments and Tools

Approximately 3.8 billion people lack access to essential health services, and diagnostic interpretation remains a major bottleneck in remote and resource-constrained settings. Limited access to specialists and the complexity of biomedical signal interpretation (eg, electrocardiogram [ECG] and electroencephalogram) contribute to delays in recognizing cardiovascular and neurological conditions.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

Extracting accurate medication information from Thai hospital records presents challenges due to the narrative style of medical notes, which often combine Thai and English terminology. Named entity recognition (NER) serves as the foundational step for advanced clinical information extraction (IE) tasks, including medical concept normalization and relation extraction. This study aimed to establish a robust NER framework to address these difficulties by leveraging ontology-based annotation and pretrained transformer models.

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Research Letter

Incorporating prespecified Google Trends indicators into leakage-controlled stacked-ensemble models improved a 2025 holdout prediction of subjective well-being by using 2022-2025 data from Japan’s 47 prefectures, reducing the mean squared error from 0.0050 to 0.0045.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

The experiences of patients with COVID-19 and their families manifested the most devastating effects of family separation since the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic and, with it, a call for solutions to patient isolation and its effect on family mental health.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

Physical activity (PA) has an important role in the prevention and treatment of type 2 diabetes (T2D). Interventions with mobile-based technology (mobile health [mHealth]) seem promising in PA promotion, but their behavioral framework is often vague, and the implementation is seldom reported.

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Research Letter

Although a general purpose (GPT-5), and a fine-tuned (ASReviewLab) artificial intelligence were able to rank abstracts for likely inclusion in a variety of Cochrane systematic reviews, some actually included studies were not highly ranked, necessitating human review of all abstracts.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

Personalized behavioral recommendations through mobile apps have proven effective in preventing serious chronic diseases such as diabetes. Recent studies have primarily focused on optimizing personalized recommendations using reinforcement learning. However, the main problem with these approaches is that they focus on behavioral changes and overlook clinical outcomes.

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Formative Evaluation of Digital Health Interventions

Immune checkpoint inhibitors are widely used in oncology but can cause immune-related adverse events (irAEs), which may be severe or life-threatening if not detected early. Electronic patient-reported outcome (ePRO) symptom monitoring systems may facilitate timely recognition and management of irAEs. Usability testing is a critical stage in ePRO system development, yet no published examples of formal usability and acceptance testing exist.

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Development and Evaluation of Research Methods, Instruments and Tools

Smartwatches have gained popularity for their potential to provide accurate measurements of various physiological parameters. However, the validity of energy expenditure (EE) across different smartwatch models remains a topic of ongoing investigation. Discrepancies between results obtained from different models and gold standard methods are particularly critical across varying exercise intensities and types, as validation studies have demonstrated overestimation when wearable activity monitors are compared with indirect calorimetry.

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Research Letter

Prospective integration of large language model tools into a classical hematology challenging-cases conference was feasible, increased clinician familiarity and interest, and was perceived as diagnostically and educationally valuable.

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Research Letter

This study analyzed social media posts from patients with congenital ichthyosis and their caregivers across Europe and found that users, primarily young women, discussed hygiene care, psychological impact, therapeutic challenges, and lack of disease awareness. This allowed for the identification of unmet needs and potential actions to improve patients’ quality of life.

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