Allergo Journal

About Allergo Journal

Allergo Journal — Profile and Guide

Allergo Journal is the German-language journal of allergology published by Springer Medizin Verlag GmbH, part of Springer Nature, in Heidelberg, Germany. Its print ISSN is 0941-8849 and its electronic ISSN is 2195-6405, exactly as listed on the publisher's journal page on Springer Nature Link (journal 15007) and as cross-checked in OpenAlex, which records the same ISSN pair for this title. It is the German-language companion to Allergo Journal International (electronic ISSN 2197-0378, Springer journal 40629), a separate English-language electronic journal with its own ISSN and its own record on this site. Readers should not confuse the two titles: they share an editorial heritage, a publisher and a subject field, and material flows between them, but they are bibliographically distinct journals. This profile is anchored to the German-language Allergo Journal itself — ISSNs 0941-8849 and 2195-6405 — and everything below is written about that record.

Springer describes the journal, in German, as publishing peer-reviewed original work as well as guidelines and position papers on allergological, immunological and environmental-medicine questions. Many of those contributions appear in parallel in English in the electronic journal Allergo Journal International on SpringerLink, while an editorial section with reports from the international specialist literature and congress reports keeps allergologically active physicians informed about current progress in diagnosis and therapy. That short publisher description captures the character of the title well: it is at once a scientific journal and a professional journal for practising allergologists in the German-speaking countries, combining research, authoritative guidance and continuing professional information in a single, regularly appearing package.

Quick Facts

History and Identity

The journal family began as a German journal. The history given for Allergo Journal International on Springer-derived author-guidance pages states plainly that the journal originally started as a German journal called Allergo Journal in 1992, and OpenAlex records coverage of the title from 1993 onward. Over the years, English-language articles came to form a considerable portion of Allergo Journal. That growth was one of the reasons to extract the scientific content and publish it in a separate journal, and so Allergo Journal International was born as the international continuation of the original German journal. Today, according to that same history, all original scientific content is published in Allergo Journal International first; later, selected manuscripts are translated and published in German and included in Allergo Journal.

That two-stage flow explains a great deal about how to read, cite and submit to either title. A researcher who encounters an article in English on SpringerLink under the International title should cite that journal and its own ISSN, 2197-0378. A clinician who reads the German version in the print-oriented Allergo Journal is reading the version prepared for the German-speaking professional audience, under ISSNs 0941-8849 and 2195-6405. Indexing services, library catalogues and citation databases have not always kept the two flows cleanly apart, which is why a careful profile has to begin, as this one does, by fixing the ISSN pair and the language. OpenAlex, treating the German title as a single source, records about 6,433 works for it — a substantial archive accumulated over more than three decades of German allergology publishing.

The society connection is central to the journal's identity. Springer Nature Link describes Allergo Journal as the official organ of the Ärzteverband Deutscher Allergologen e. V. (AeDA), and the International title as the official journal of AeDA and of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Allergologie und Immunologie (ÖGAI), the Austrian Society for Allergology and Immunology. In addition, the International title publishes clinical guidelines and position papers approved by expert panels of the German, Austrian and Swiss allergy societies. A journal that carries society guidelines and position papers occupies a particular place in its field: its pages are not only a record of new findings but also a channel through which agreed clinical practice is communicated to practitioners. That dual role — research forum and professional guidance channel — is the defining feature of Allergo Journal and should shape how authors and readers approach it.

Scope: What the Journal Covers

The scope, as stated by the publisher for the journal family, is to provide state-of-the-art information for all medical and scientific disciplines that deal with allergic, immunological and environmental diseases, and to act as a forum for the communication and exchange of ideas concerning the various aspects of allergy, including related fields such as clinical immunology and environmental medicine. In practical terms, that scope covers the full working territory of a modern allergologist.

First, it covers the diseases themselves: allergic rhinitis and rhinoconjunctivitis, asthma in its allergic forms, food allergy and anaphylaxis, atopic dermatitis and other allergic skin disease, drug allergy, venom allergy and occupational allergy. OpenAlex topic data for the journal, offered here as a secondary, algorithmic picture of the archive rather than as an editorial statement, is consistent with that reading: the largest topic clusters are allergic rhinitis and sensitisation, asthma and respiratory diseases, and food allergy and anaphylaxis research, followed by dermatology and skin diseases, drug-induced adverse reactions and contact dermatitis. A prospective author can use that pattern as a sense-check — work that speaks to sensitisation, respiratory allergy or food allergy is speaking to the journal's established centre of gravity.

Second, the scope covers diagnosis. Allergology depends on precise diagnostic method — history-taking, skin testing, laboratory measurement of specific IgE, component-resolved diagnostics and provocation testing — and the journal family explicitly addresses the latest developments in diagnosis as part of its subject matter. Papers that validate a diagnostic approach, compare testing strategies or clarify how a test result should be interpreted in clinical routine are squarely in scope.

Third, the scope covers therapy, including allergen immunotherapy, pharmacotherapy and the newer biological treatments that have changed the management of severe allergic and related inflammatory disease, as well as aspects of occupational and environmental medicine — how workplaces, housing, air quality and a changing environment shape allergic disease. The environmental strand matters: the publisher lists environmental medicine in the journal's own description, not as an afterthought, and readers should expect coverage that connects exposure, prevention and clinical outcome.

Fourth, and distinctively, the scope includes authoritative guidance. Guidelines and position papers approved by expert panels of the German, Austrian and Swiss allergy societies appear in this journal family. Such papers set out agreed recommendations on matters such as allergen standardisation and skin testing, and they are written for direct use in practice. An author preparing a position-type manuscript should understand that it will be judged not only on scholarship but also on clarity, implementability and consensus.

Article Types and What Each One Must Do

The author guidelines published for the journal family (in the guidelines for Allergo Journal International, which shares the submission system and article architecture) describe the main article types in detail, and they give a reliable picture of the forms used across the family. Original articles present and discuss methods and results from the authors' own investigations or studies. They require a title and four to six keywords, a structured summary with background, methods, results and discussion, and a clearly structured text under those same headings; the guideline text gives a maximum character length for original articles and a reference limit, and figures and tables are welcomed. A manuscript that arrives without that structure is asking the editors to do work the guidelines have already assigned to the author.

Review articles provide state-of-the-art overviews of a defined topic. In a journal whose readers include busy practitioners, a good review does more than summarise: it organises a fast-moving literature into decisions a clinician can act on, states where evidence is strong, and says plainly where it is thin. Continuing medical education articles — CME articles — are a further, distinctive type in this journal family: the guidelines note that participants can receive CME credits and authors can receive a certificate, reflecting the journal's professional-education role for practising physicians in Germany. Case studies (case reports) present specifics from actual clinical practice, diagnostic pitfalls and unusual disease manifestations; the guidelines structure them into background, case representation and conclusion, with a small reference limit — a form that rewards a clear teaching point over exhaustive detail. Letters to the editor present clinical results or laboratory observations that do not offer sufficient scope or depth for an original article, in a tightly limited format. Short communications complete the range of shorter scientific forms.

Choosing the right type is a substantive decision, not a formatting one. A single striking case belongs in the case format, where its limits are understood; a dataset that can support background, methods, results and discussion belongs in an original article, where reviewers will test it accordingly; and a topic that needs synthesis rather than new data belongs in a review. Editors and reviewers for a society journal read with the practising allergologist in mind, and the most common reason for a poor fit is a manuscript whose chosen form promises more — or less — than its content delivers.

Peer Review, Ethics and Editorial Standards

Manuscripts for the journal family are accepted on the basis of evaluation by at least two peer reviewers, according to the published author guidelines. The International title's ethics page on Springer Nature Link states that research content published in the journal is peer reviewed in single-anonymous fashion, that the journal has a competing-interest policy in place, and that it is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and subscribes to COPE's principles for addressing misconduct, including investigating allegations of misconduct to maintain the integrity of the research record. All Springer Nature journals require authors to comply with international, national and institutional standards of research reporting, which the ethics page singles out as particularly important for studies involving human or animal participants, their data and biological material, and informed consent.

For authors, the practical implications are straightforward and worth stating in full. Declare competing interests honestly and completely; a society journal in a field with active pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries will expect precise disclosure, and an incomplete declaration discovered later damages the paper far more than a declared interest damages it at review. Secure and document the ethics approvals and consent arrangements that apply to the study design, and state them in the manuscript rather than leaving reviewers to ask. Report the study so that its methods can be judged — sampling, inclusion criteria, test methods, statistical handling — because a two-reviewer process in a specialist field will be conducted by readers who know the methods well. And do not submit the same work in parallel elsewhere: the bilingual publication flow within this journal family is an editorial arrangement managed by the journal, not a licence for authors to duplicate submission on their own initiative.

Indexing, Metrics and How to Read Them

The publisher's page for Allergo Journal lists the services in which the German title is abstracted and indexed as: CLOCKSS, CNPIEC, Dimensions, EBSCO, the Emerging Sources Citation Index, Google Scholar, OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service, Ovid Discovery, Portico, ProQuest and TD Net Discovery Service. That is the publisher's own list for this ISSN pair and it is the list that should be quoted for this journal. Scopus-derived listings record that Scopus coverage of Allergo Journal ran from 1994 and was discontinued in 2017 — a secondary-source statement, attributed here as such, that authors with an institutional requirement for current Scopus coverage should verify directly against the Scopus source list before submitting, and should weigh alongside the journal's continuing presence in the Emerging Sources Citation Index and the other services above. The companion International title has a different and wider indexing list, including Scopus and Embase on its publisher page; the two lists must not be interchanged.

On metrics, Springer Nature Link's allergology subject listing shows a Journal Impact Factor of 1.0 (2024) in the entry for the journal family, with downloads of 480,385 recorded for 2025 in the same listing; readers should treat that figure as the publisher's listing for the family entry and check the individual journal page for the current year's figure before quoting it formally, because the German and International titles are presented together in parts of the Springer site. OpenAlex, as a secondary source, gives the German title an h-index of 21 and a two-year mean citedness close to zero in its current snapshot — a pattern typical for a primarily German-language professional journal whose citations accrue largely within a national-language literature and in guidelines, rather than in the international English-language citation circuit. Neither number, on its own, describes the journal's value to its actual audience: a guideline read and applied by thousands of German-speaking allergologists has a clinical reach that citation counts in international databases understate. Authors should therefore choose this journal for audience fit — German-speaking allergology practice and the societies behind it — and not on the basis of a single metric in either direction.

Who Should Read and Publish Here

The natural readership is the allergologically active physician in Germany and Austria — the audience the publisher's own description names — together with clinical immunologists, dermatologists, paediatricians, ear, nose and throat specialists, pulmonologists and occupational and environmental physicians whose work overlaps with allergic disease. Researchers in German and Austrian allergy science form the author base the International title says it promotes in an international context, and the German title is where that community speaks to itself in its own language, including the society news, congress reporting and literature reports of the editorial section.

For an author deciding between the German title and the International title, the journal family's own workflow offers guidance: original scientific content is now published in the International journal first, in English, with selected manuscripts then translated and published in German in Allergo Journal. An author whose primary aim is international scientific visibility should therefore normally submit with the English-language title in mind, through the shared submission route, and let the editors manage translation and German publication where they judge it appropriate. An author whose aim is to reach German practising physicians — with a practice-oriented review, a CME contribution, a case with a clear teaching point or a contribution to a German guideline discussion — is aiming at exactly what the German title exists to do. In both cases the submission system named in the guidelines is Editorial Manager for the journal family, and the guidelines reproduced on PubMed Central set out file formats (text in Rich Text Format or Word, figures as high-resolution TIFF or JPEG), the instruction not to include figures inside text files, and the corresponding author's responsibility for names, affiliations, addresses and author sequence at proof stage, after which corrections require editorial approval and an erratum. The current article-processing or subscription charges for either title are not published in the sources consulted for this profile, so authors who need a figure for a grant or institutional decision should obtain it from the publisher's current pages rather than from any third-party listing.

Practical Guidance for Authors

Prepare the manuscript to the guideline structure from the first draft: title, four to six keywords, structured summary where the article type requires one, and text organised under background, methods, results and discussion for original work, or background, case representation and conclusion for a case. Respect the character and reference limits in the current guidelines for the relevant title; they are stated as maxima, and a society journal with eight issues a year has limited pages to allocate. Write the summary so that it can stand alone in a database — background, what was done, what was found, what it means — because for many readers, especially outside the German-speaking core audience discovering the paper through the English parallel version, the summary is the paper's first and sometimes only reading.

Think about the bilingual life of the work from the start. Terminology that translates cleanly, tables that do not depend on German abbreviations, and a title that makes sense in both languages all help the editors if they select the paper for translation and German publication. Declare funding, competing interests and ethics arrangements completely. Check, before submission, that the work has not already appeared — in a congress abstract collection, a thesis repository or another journal — in a form that would count as prior publication under the publisher's policies, and disclose any such appearance to the editors rather than leaving it to be found. Finally, verify at submission time, on the publisher's own pages, the current editor instructions for the specific title, because article-type limits and submission routes are the details most likely to have been updated since any secondary guide, including this profile, was written.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Allergo Journal?
Print ISSN 0941-8849 and electronic ISSN 2195-6405, as listed on the publisher's Springer Nature Link page for journal 15007 and confirmed in OpenAlex.

Is Allergo Journal the same as Allergo Journal International?
No. They are companion titles from the same origin and publisher, but Allergo Journal International is a separate English-language electronic journal with its own electronic ISSN, 2197-0378. Original content is now published there first, with selected papers then translated into German for Allergo Journal.

Who publishes Allergo Journal?
Springer Medizin Verlag GmbH, part of Springer Nature, in Heidelberg, Germany.

Which societies is the journal connected to?
It is described by Springer Nature Link as the official organ of the Ärzteverband Deutscher Allergologen (AeDA); the International title is the official journal of AeDA and of the Austrian Society for Allergology and Immunology (ÖGAI), and the family publishes guidelines approved by expert panels of the German, Austrian and Swiss allergy societies.

Is the journal peer-reviewed?
Yes. The published guidelines state that manuscripts are accepted on the basis of evaluation by at least two peer reviewers, and the journal family's ethics statement describes single-anonymous peer review and membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics.

Where is it indexed?
The publisher lists CLOCKSS, CNPIEC, Dimensions, EBSCO, Emerging Sources Citation Index, Google Scholar, OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service, Ovid Discovery, Portico, ProQuest and TD Net Discovery Service for this title. Scopus-derived listings record Scopus coverage as discontinued in 2017; verify current status in the Scopus source list if it matters for your decision.

How often does it appear?
Eight issues per year, as recorded in Scopus-derived journal listings.

What does it cost to publish?
The charges that would apply to a specific article are not published in the sources consulted for this profile and could not be verified from them; check the publisher's current journal pages or contact the publisher for the figure that applies to your article type and access route.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on the publisher's pages for Allergo Journal (Springer Nature Link, journal 15007) for the ISSN pair, publisher and indexing list; on the publisher's page and aims-and-scope text for Allergo Journal International (journal 40629) for the society connection, the 1992 German origin and the translation workflow; on the author guidelines for the journal family reproduced on PubMed Central for article types, structure, review and submission detail; and on OpenAlex (source S2764485268) as a secondary source for the archive size and topic pattern. Scopus-derived listings were used, with attribution in the text, for frequency and for the statement that Scopus coverage was discontinued in 2017. Where a fact could not be verified from those sources — notably current charges — the profile says so rather than estimating it.