Focus and Scope

1. Agricultural Systems, Agribusiness, and Economic Resilience

This pillar covers the biophysical, economic, and managerial foundations of sustainable food and agricultural systems: soil science and crop production as the biophysical basis of agricultural output; agribusiness strategy, agricultural economics, and market systems as the mechanisms through which that output is organized and monetized; and risk management as the discipline governing resilience across both domains, from climatic and biological risk in production to financial and market risk in agricultural enterprise. Research in this pillar is treated as foundational to broader questions of economic and food security and is expected, where relevant, to engage the human-development concerns addressed in Pillar III.

2. Health, Clinical, and Pharmaceutical Sciences

This pillar addresses the clinical, managerial, and regulatory dimensions of health systems as an integrated structure rather than a set of separate specialties. It spans clinical medicine and dentistry as the direct sites of patient care; public health as the population-level framework within which clinical practice operates; healthcare and hospital management as the organizational infrastructure determining the efficiency and accessibility of care; and pharmacy, health law, and medical ethics as the regulatory and normative systems governing the safe and equitable delivery of health interventions. These domains are treated as a single continuum, from clinical encounter to institutional policy, reflecting the fact that clinical outcomes cannot be assessed apart from the managerial and ethical systems in which they occur.

3. Digital Innovation, Education, and Human Systems

This pillar addresses the technological and social infrastructures that enable institutions and communities to adapt and develop. It includes information technology, computer science, and digital innovation as the technical infrastructure increasingly embedded within agricultural, health, and educational systems alike, including precision agriculture, health informatics, and digital learning platforms; education and pedagogy as the mechanism through which human capital and institutional capacity are built; and sociology and institutional management, including hospital and organizational management, as the social-science lens through which the adoption, governance, and equity implications of these systems are assessed. This pillar functions as the connective layer of the journal's scope, since digital infrastructure, educational capacity, and institutional design are recurring enabling conditions for advances in both agricultural and health systems.

Editorial Position on Scope. The three pillars are not independent subject categories offered for the convenience of authors working in unrelated fields; they are the components of a single applied-systems research program, and JASSS particularly welcomes manuscripts that examine their intersections — digital agriculture, health informatics and health-system governance, workforce-development interventions in health or agricultural sectors, and institutional or policy analyses spanning economic, health, and educational systems. A manuscript confined to a single pillar remains within scope where it makes a substantive, well-evidenced contribution to that pillar's own body of knowledge; manuscripts are, however, expected to situate their contribution explicitly within the pillar's stated boundaries, and editors reserve the right to request revision or to decline manuscripts whose subject matter falls outside the three pillars as defined above, or whose treatment of a cross-pillar claim is asserted rather than demonstrated. All submissions are assessed through double-blind peer review by reviewers with directly relevant subject-matter expertise, so that the breadth of the journal's remit is matched by the depth of its editorial scrutiny.