American Journal of Analytical Chemistry

About American Journal of Analytical Chemistry

American Journal of Analytical Chemistry — Journal Profile

The American Journal of Analytical Chemistry, widely cited under the abbreviation AJAC, is a peer-reviewed international journal devoted to analytical chemistry and to the measurement science that supports it. The journal is published by Scientific Research Publishing, usually shortened to SCIRP, and the record held on this site identifies the United States as its country of publication. Its print ISSN is 2156-8251 and its online ISSN is 2156-8278; those two identifiers are the safest starting point for any reader who wants to confirm that the journal described here is the same title found in library catalogues, in the publisher's own journal pages, and in article citations. The journal has been published since 2010, and its DOI prefix pattern in SCIRP citations, visible in references of the form 10.4236/ajac, ties each article to the journal's own article numbering system.

Analytical chemistry is, at its core, the science of reliable measurement: identifying what a substance is, determining how much of it is present, and doing both with stated accuracy, precision and traceability. AJAC positions itself as a record of the state of the art in that work and as a venue intended to promote study, research and improvement across the specialty's many branches. That breadth matters for readers of this profile, because analytical chemistry is not a single technique. It is a family of methods — spectroscopic, chromatographic, electrochemical, thermal and sensor-based among them — united by the same questions about calibration, selectivity, detection limits, interference and validation. A journal that covers the whole family serves a different purpose from a narrow technique journal, and authors choosing between them should understand that difference before they submit.

Quick Facts

Aims and Scope in Detail

The publisher's own aims and scope statement describes AJAC as a peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to the latest advancement in analytical chemistry, with the goal of keeping a record of state-of-the-art research and promoting study, research and improvement within its various specialties. The topic list published by SCIRP is long, and reading it carefully is the best way to judge fit. The journal explicitly welcomes work on analytical chemistry applications in engineering; atomic and molecular spectroscopy, including ultraviolet, infrared, Raman, nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry, microscopy and fluorescence approaches; chemical sensors, biosensors and related technologies; chemometrics; chemosensitive materials; chromatography and electrophoresis; composite materials; electroanalysis and electroanalytical techniques; environmental, clinical, biological and agrochemical applications; environmental, health and forensic analysis; high-throughput screening; ion exchange materials; novel extraction and microextraction procedures; sample preparation; separation techniques for hazardous substances; and thermal analysis.

Each of those headings corresponds to a real laboratory practice, and it is worth pausing on what kinds of papers they imply. A spectroscopy paper in AJAC might report a new determination of a metal, a dye, a drug or a contaminant, with calibration data and interference studies. A chromatography paper might present a validated separation for a pharmaceutical product, a food matrix or an environmental sample. A sensors paper might describe an electrode, an optical probe or a biosensing platform, with response curves, selectivity testing and application to real samples. An environmental paper might measure pollutants in river water, soil, fish tissue or air, as the journal's own archive illustrates with studies of heavy metals in fish from the River Benue in Nigeria. A thermal analysis paper might characterise a material's behaviour under controlled heating, as in the journal's published work on zirconia-doped ceria for solar fuel production. The common thread is always the measurement: how it was made, how it was validated, and what it can reliably say about the sample.

What the Published Archive Shows

The journal's archive is a useful, concrete guide to its real scope, because editors accept what fits their readership and the archive shows the result. Published AJAC papers have addressed, among many other subjects, the bioaccumulation of heavy metals in fish tissues measured by flame atomic absorption spectrometry; thermogravimetric analysis of doped ceria materials for thermochemical solar fuel cycles; titrimetric determination of the solubility and dissociation of benzoic acid in water across ionic strengths and temperatures; impurity profiling of solid oral drug products; rheological properties of plant gums; high-density solvent-based dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction for pesticide residues in water and sugarcane juice; determination of histamine and mycotoxins in a traditional fermented meal; and stability-indicating liquid chromatography methods for ophthalmic formulations. That spread — environmental, pharmaceutical, food, materials and fundamental solution chemistry — matches the scope list and confirms that the journal is a general analytical venue rather than a single-application title.

The archive also shows the journal's international authorship. Papers originate from university chemistry departments, colleges of education, research institutes and industrial laboratories across Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the Americas. For an author in a laboratory without access to a large subscription journal network, an open-access general journal of this kind offers a route to a citable, DOI-bearing publication that any reader can open. For readers, the same openness means a method can be checked in full — reagents, instrument conditions, calibration ranges and validation tables — without a paywall, which is particularly valuable when the purpose of reading is to reproduce a determination in a different laboratory.

Article Types and Editorial Expectations

SCIRP states that all manuscripts submitted to AJAC must be previously unpublished and may not be under consideration elsewhere at any time during the journal's review period. That exclusivity condition is standard, but authors should note it before submitting a manuscript that is also being prepared for a conference proceedings volume or a repository with a formal publication status. The publisher also states an interest in short papers in letter form that address a specific narrow problem clearly, and in papers that survey problems and new results on a topic; the publisher notes that authors may be invited to write short papers on the same topic in more than one successive issue. In practice, the journal's archive is dominated by full research articles presenting experimental work, alongside such shorter and survey contributions.

Analytical papers carry discipline-specific expectations that authors should build into a manuscript from the start. A credible AJAC submission normally states the analytical problem and why a new or improved method is needed; describes instrumentation, reagents, standards and sample preparation in enough detail for replication; presents calibration and linearity data; reports limits of detection and quantification and how they were calculated; gives precision and accuracy evidence, such as recovery experiments or comparison with a reference method; tests interferences that are plausible in the real matrix; and applies the method to real samples rather than standards alone. Papers that omit validation are weak in any analytical journal, because the field's central claim is trust in a number. Reviewers for an analytical title can be expected to look for exactly those elements, and the journal's published papers routinely include them.

Open Access, Charges and Licensing

SCIRP's journal pages state that all content published in its journals is made freely available online under an open-access model, with no subscription, institutional access or pay-per-view charge for readers. To support publication infrastructure, editorial management and peer review, an article processing charge is levied on acceptance, ordinarily met by the author's institution or research funder. The publisher states that reduced charges are extended to authors affiliated with lower- and middle-income countries, that no separate submission charge is requested, and that there are no additional per-page or colour-figure charges of the kind some publishers impose. Payment routes described by the publisher include PayPal, international bank transfer, credit card and money transfer services, with authors asked to reference their paper identifier in transfer details and to retain receipts.

The exact current charge for this specific journal should always be confirmed on the journal's own pages or with the editorial office before submission, because publishers revise charge schedules and the figure that matters is the one in force on the acceptance date; a specific amount is therefore not stated in this profile, as it could not be verified as current at the time of writing. Authors should also confirm the licence that will apply to their article and how their institution's open-access fund, if one exists, handles charges from this publisher. None of that is a criticism of the journal; it is the normal due diligence that applies to any author-pays open-access venue, and doing it before submission prevents the common problem of an accepted paper stalled by an unbudgeted invoice.

Publication Pattern and Timelines

The publisher's archive shows AJAC appearing in monthly issues grouped into annual volumes: volume 3 carried an issue 11 in November 2012, and volume 13 carried a number 12 in December 2022, a pattern consistent with twelve issues a year and with a volume numbering that began with volume 1 in 2010. SCIRP states that, generally, accepted papers appear online within about three weeks, followed by a printed hard copy edition; the journal's print ISSN exists because a print edition is produced alongside the online edition. Monthly publication with online-first appearance suits analytical work, where methods are often needed by other laboratories quickly and where a long queue for a quarterly issue would reduce a paper's usefulness.

Authors should nevertheless treat any publisher timeline as an indication rather than a guarantee. Review time depends on reviewer availability and on the revisions requested, and analytical manuscripts frequently need a revision round to add validation data, clarify a calibration procedure or expand an interference study. Building a realistic schedule — submission, review, revision, acceptance, charge payment, online appearance — matters for researchers working toward a thesis deadline, a grant report or a promotion case, and the editorial office is the authoritative source for the journal's current average handling times.

How to Judge Whether AJAC Fits Your Manuscript

Fit is the first decision, and the scope list makes it straightforward. If the manuscript's main contribution is a measurement — a new method, an improved method, a sensor, a separation, a sample preparation procedure, or a careful application of established methods to a new matrix or problem — AJAC is within its stated territory. If the contribution is primarily synthetic organic chemistry, purely theoretical chemistry with no measurement component, or clinical medicine with analysis as an incidental detail, the fit is weaker and a more specialised journal may serve the work better. Reading three or four recent AJAC papers in the same technique area is the quickest calibration: their structure, validation depth and reference patterns show the level a submission will be compared against.

Reputation checks are equally part of a sensible decision, and they should be done with primary sources. Confirm the ISSN pair on the journal's own site; confirm that recent issues exist and are complete; read the editorial and author pages on the publisher's site; check whether the journal appears in the scholarly indexes that matter for your institution; and ask colleagues in analytical chemistry about their experience. This profile deliberately avoids repeating third-party impact figures, because the publisher's own pages have historically presented a Google-based journal metric rather than a Journal Citation Reports impact factor, and conflating the two would mislead readers. Where a metric is not publicly disclosed in a form that can be checked, the honest course is to say so and to rely on the visible evidence — the archive, the scope, the publisher's stated processes — instead.

Preparing a Strong Submission

Because the journal publishes across the whole of analytical chemistry, a strong submission makes its measurement claim easy to evaluate. State the analyte, the matrix and the purpose in the title and abstract. Give instrument models and operating conditions, reagent grades and sources, standard preparation, and the exact statistical treatment used for detection limits and precision. Present figures of merit in a table. Include real-sample results and, where possible, a comparison against a reference method or a certified reference material. Discuss interferences honestly, including any that limit the method. Follow the publisher's current author instructions for file format, reference style and declarations, and ensure the manuscript is not simultaneously under consideration elsewhere, in line with the publisher's stated condition.

Ethical declarations matter in applied analytical work. Studies involving human or animal samples, clinical material or field sampling on private or protected land should state the permissions under which samples were obtained. Environmental papers should give sampling locations and dates with enough precision for the work to be understood. Data availability is increasingly expected across chemistry publishing; authors who can deposit raw calibration and measurement data, or state clearly where it can be obtained, strengthen both the review and the long-term value of the paper.

Reading and Using AJAC Papers

For readers rather than authors, AJAC functions as a practical methods resource. A laboratory setting up a determination — of a metal in water, a drug in a formulation, a pesticide in produce, a contaminant in food — can search the archive by analyte, matrix or technique and find full-text procedures with validation data, free to read. The correct way to use such a paper is critically: check whether the matrix matches your own, whether the reported detection limit is adequate for your regulatory or research purpose, whether the instrumentation is available to you, and whether the authors validated against anything independent. Analytical literature rewards that scepticism, and a journal archive read in that spirit is a working tool rather than a trophy shelf.

The journal also illustrates a broader pattern in contemporary chemistry publishing: the growth of open-access, author-pays, broad-scope journals alongside the older society and subscription titles. AJAC's publisher, Scientific Research Publishing, operates many such journals across the sciences, and AJAC, running since 2010 with monthly issues and a large archive, is one of its established chemistry titles. Understanding that model — who pays, who can read, how quickly papers appear, and what validation a reader should still perform — is part of using the journal well, whichever side of the submission system you are on.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 2156-8251 and online ISSN 2156-8278. Use the online ISSN for the digital edition and the pair together when checking library records.

Who publishes the journal? Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP), identified on this site's record as a United States publisher.

Is the journal open access? Yes. The publisher states that all content is freely available online to readers, with costs supported by an article processing charge levied after acceptance; reduced charges for authors from lower- and middle-income countries are described on the publisher's pages. The exact current charge for this journal should be confirmed with the publisher before submission, as it is not stated in this profile.

What subjects does it cover? The publisher's scope list includes spectroscopy, chromatography and electrophoresis, electroanalysis, sensors and biosensors, chemometrics, sample preparation and microextraction, thermal analysis, and environmental, clinical, biological, agrochemical and forensic applications, among other analytical topics.

How often does it appear? The archive shows monthly issues within annual volumes, and the publisher states that accepted papers generally appear online within about three weeks, followed by the print edition.

Can I submit a short paper? The publisher states an interest in short letter-form papers addressing a specific narrow problem, alongside full research articles and survey papers.

May I submit a manuscript that is under review elsewhere? No. The publisher states that submissions must be previously unpublished and may not be under consideration elsewhere during the journal's review period.

Verification Notes for This Profile

This profile is based on the journal's record on this site — title, publisher, country and ISSN pair — checked against the publisher's own aims and scope, frequently-asked-questions and article pages, and against citations and issue data visible in the journal's published archive. Facts that could not be verified from those sources, including a current specific processing charge and a Journal Citation Reports impact factor, are described above as not publicly disclosed in verifiable form rather than filled in from third-party listings. Readers should confirm time-sensitive details, especially charges and submission requirements, on the publisher's journal pages before submitting.