American Journal of Clinical Pathology

About American Journal of Clinical Pathology

American Journal of Clinical Pathology — Journal Profile

American Journal of Clinical Pathology (AJCP) is a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal covering clinical and anatomic pathology and laboratory medicine, published by Oxford University Press. It is the official journal of the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP) and of the Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists (ACLPS), a relationship stated on the ASCP's own journal page and in the National Library of Medicine cataloguing record. ASCP describes it as the leading peer-reviewed pathology and laboratory medicine research journal available, and states its mission as the publication of clinically oriented manuscripts concerning novel laboratory observations on human disease, with particular emphasis on the application of evolving technologies to pathologic diagnosis and patient care. It carries the print ISSN 0002-9173 and the electronic ISSN 1943-7722, both recorded in this JournalsWorld record and confirmed by the NLM Catalog, by OpenAlex and by the publisher's journal home at Oxford Academic.

This profile is anchored to the JournalsWorld record for the American Journal of Clinical Pathology (post 2296, slug american-journal-of-clinical-pathology, ISSNs 0002-9173 and 1943-7722). The stored record carried a short SCImago-based summary — a 2025 quartile of Q2, an SJR of 0.705 and an h-index of 149 — and this profile keeps those stored figures, clearly attributed to the imported SCImago 2025 dataset, separate from the figures published by Oxford Academic itself and from the OpenAlex counts fetched for this profile. Where different sources count the journal differently, both numbers are given with their source named, and neither is silently averaged into the other. Where a field could not be verified from a source actually consulted, it is stated here as not published, not publicly disclosed, or could not be verified — never filled in by guesswork.

Quick Facts

History and Identity

The NLM Catalog gives 1931 as the publication start year of the American Journal of Clinical Pathology, records its early publishing history in Philadelphia with Lippincott among its earlier publishers, and names Oxford University Press as the latest publisher from 2016 onward. That long publishing history matters for readers, because the journal's archive reaches back into a period when clinical pathology was still separating itself, as the ASCP's own historical writing explains, from experimental pathology: in the journal's founding era the discipline covered the diagnostic examination of tissues, the analysis of blood and body fluids, and the other work of the hospital laboratory, and over time the tissue side came to be called surgical pathology in the United States while the laboratory disciplines — medical microbiology, clinical chemistry, transfusion medicine, haematology, coagulation and clinical immunology — formed the core of clinical pathology. A journal founded in 1931 has therefore documented, issue by issue, the transformation of the diagnostic laboratory from a small hospital service into the data engine of modern medicine, a point the ASCP illustrates by noting that a very large share of the information in modern health records is generated in clinical laboratories.

The journal's identity is inseparable from its two sponsoring societies. As an official journal of ASCP, it speaks to practising pathologists and laboratory professionals, the society's core membership; as an official journal of the Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists, it also carries the academic laboratory-medicine community, whose members train residents, run reference laboratories and develop new diagnostic methods. That dual anchoring explains the characteristic mix of the journal's contents: original research on diagnostic tests and disease characterisation sits alongside review articles, education material and journal-based continuing medical education. The ASCP notes that selected AJCP articles each month are offered as CME activities, with one credit per article, so the journal functions in part as a continuing-education channel for its professional readership and not only as a research archive.

Readers should not confuse this title with similarly named publications. The abbreviated title is recorded by the NLM as "Am J Clin Pathol", and the journal is commonly cited as AJCP. A separate, unrelated open-access title trading on the name "American Journal of Clinical Pathology Research" exists on the web; it is not this journal, it does not carry these ISSNs, and it is not published by Oxford University Press. Checking the ISSN pair 0002-9173 and 1943-7722, and the Oxford Academic journal home, is the reliable way to confirm that a citation, a submission page or a metrics claim really belongs to the journal profiled here.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's stated mission, in the ASCP's wording, is the publication of clinically oriented manuscripts concerning novel laboratory observations on human disease, with particular emphasis on the application of evolving technologies to pathologic diagnosis and patient care. In practice that scope spans both halves of the discipline named in its title. On the clinical pathology side it covers clinical chemistry, medical microbiology and infectious disease diagnostics, haematology and coagulation, transfusion medicine, clinical immunology, molecular pathology and laboratory informatics. On the anatomic pathology side it covers surgical pathology across the organ systems, cytopathology, autopsy and forensic pathology, and the subspecialty areas reflected in its editorial board structure, which is organised by sections such as autopsy and forensic pathology, breast pathology, dermatopathology, gastrointestinal and genitourinary pathology, gynaecologic pathology, head and neck and endocrine pathology, hematopathology, neuropathology, paediatric and perinatal pathology, and pulmonary and thoracic pathology.

Two emphases run through that scope. The first is clinical relevance: the journal favours work that changes, confirms or sharpens a diagnosis, a prognosis or a laboratory practice, rather than purely descriptive reporting. The second is technology in transition — new assays, new molecular and genomic methods, digital and computational pathology, laboratory automation and quality systems — assessed by whether they improve pathologic diagnosis and patient care. The editorial board's inclusion of dedicated sections for education and training, global health, informatics and biostatistics signals that manuscripts on how laboratories are taught, organised, measured and improved also sit inside the journal's remit, alongside bench and clinic-facing research. OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's output, fetched for this profile, is consistent with that picture: its largest topic clusters concern clinical laboratory practice and quality control, lymphoma diagnosis and treatment, and bacterial identification and susceptibility testing.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

The ASCP editorial board page consulted for this profile names Steven H. Kroft, MD, MASCP as Editor of the American Journal of Clinical Pathology, supported by associate and assistant editors and by a large board of section specialists whose names are listed by subspecialty area on that page. The board's structure is itself informative for authors: manuscripts are handled within a subspecialty framework, so a submission is likely to be assessed by editors and reviewers whose own practice matches the paper's area, whether that is cytopathology, molecular pathology, microbiology or transfusion medicine. The page also describes the work expected of its editorial volunteers — overseeing peer review in their topic area, working in the ScholarOne manuscript submission system, recruiting authors and reviewers, and mentoring reviewers and authors — which gives prospective contributors a fair picture of a conventional, professionally run society-journal review operation.

AJCP is a peer-reviewed journal. Its articles include original research, reviews and shorter clinically focused items, and selected published articles carry associated CME activities prepared under the society's education programme. Authors should expect the standard Oxford University Press journal workflow: submission through the publisher's online system, editorial screening, external review, revision, and production through Oxford Academic, where the journal's current issues, archive, author resources and submission guidance are hosted. Specific requirements — article types, word limits, figure and reference formats, reporting expectations for diagnostic accuracy and molecular studies, and the journal's current policies on data and ethics — are set out in the journal's author guidelines on Oxford Academic, and those guidelines, rather than any third-party summary, are the authoritative source at the moment of submission; they could not all be reproduced here and authors should read them directly.

Metrics: What Each Source Actually Says

Three different measurement systems describe this journal, and this profile keeps them apart because they do not measure the same thing. First, the publisher's own journal home on Oxford Academic, fetched for this profile, displayed a 2025 Impact Factor of 2.3, a 2025 five-year Impact Factor also of 2.3, a 2025 CiteScore of 3.9, a CiteScore rank of 77 out of 209 journals in Pathology and Forensic Medicine, and a cited half-life of 15.8 years. The long cited half-life is characteristic of a diagnostic journal whose older articles — on classification, staining, assay behaviour and disease definitions — continue to be cited in routine practice literature long after publication. Second, the SCImago figures stored in this JournalsWorld record come from the imported SCImago 2025 dataset: quartile Q2, SJR 0.705 and h-index 149, with subject categories Medicine (miscellaneous) at Q2 and Pathology and Forensic Medicine at Q2, listed coverage running from the 1930s and 1940s through 2026, and 213 documents with 1,084 citations reported across the latest three-year reporting window. Third, OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint to source S15871148 at the time of checking, counted 31,362 works and 646,537 citations for the journal, with an h-index of 223, an i10-index of 11,774 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.83.

Those h-index figures — 149 from SCImago and 223 from OpenAlex — are not in conflict in any way that requires one of them to be wrong; they are counts over different underlying databases, with different coverage of the journal's long back archive and different rules for matching citations. The correct way to use them is the way they are presented here: with the source named next to the number. Similarly, OpenAlex gives a first publication year of 1826 for its source record, which is a coverage artefact of its aggregated data and is not the journal's founding date; the NLM Catalog's 1931 start year is the bibliographically reliable figure, and it is the one used in this profile's history section. Readers comparing journals for a submission decision should compare like with like — Impact Factor with Impact Factor, CiteScore with CiteScore, and SJR with SJR — and should treat any website that blends these into a single unexplained score with caution.

Indexing and Discoverability

The NLM Catalog records the journal as currently indexed for MEDLINE, with indexing in Index Medicus and PubMed reaching back to volume 44 in 1965 in its listing, and classifies it among the core clinical journals (AIM). For a pathology and laboratory medicine title, MEDLINE and PubMed visibility is the single most important discovery channel, because its readers search the clinical literature there first. The publisher's metrics display also implies Scopus coverage, since the CiteScore it quotes is a Scopus-based measure, and the SCImago record itself is built on Scopus data, with the subject categories recorded above. A listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals could not be verified from the sources consulted for this profile, which is unsurprising in form — this is primarily a subscription society journal with an optional open-access route for individual articles — but the point is recorded here as unverified rather than asserted either way.

Costs, Open Access and How to Submit

AJCP is published on a subscription basis, with full online access provided to ASCP Fellow Members as a membership benefit, as the ASCP states on its journal page. Authors who want their individual article to be openly accessible can use the publisher's optional open-access route; OpenAlex's journal record listed an open-access article processing charge of USD 4,660 at the time of checking, with its by-year list showing USD 4,800 for 2024 and USD 4,440 for 2023, figures that move over time and that an author must confirm in the publisher's current author documentation before relying on them. No charge for publishing by the ordinary subscription route is stated in the sources consulted, and this profile does not invent one: if a fee matters to a funding decision, the Oxford Academic author pages for this journal are the place to verify it on the day of submission.

To submit, an author starts from the journal's home on Oxford Academic, which hosts its author resources, submission link and guidelines. Preparation should follow the journal's subspecialty logic: state the diagnostic or laboratory question plainly in the title and abstract, describe methods in enough detail for a laboratory to reproduce them, report patient-care relevance explicitly, and observe the reporting and ethics requirements the guidelines specify for human-subjects, molecular and diagnostic-accuracy work. Because the board is organised by named subspecialty sections, a manuscript that is clearly framed for its section — a transfusion medicine paper written for transfusion specialists, a microbiology paper written for laboratory microbiologists — starts with an advantage over one written generically for "pathology" at large. Timelines for review and decision are not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted for this profile, and authors planning around a thesis, promotion or grant deadline should ask the editorial office rather than rely on third-party estimates.

Similar Journals

Authors weighing AJCP against neighbouring titles are usually comparing it with other pathology and laboratory medicine journals that share part of its readership. Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine is the closest society neighbour in the United States and covers a similar breadth of anatomic and clinical practice. Journal of Clinical Pathology serves a comparable generalist pathology audience from a British base. Modern Pathology and the American Journal of Surgical Pathology lean further toward anatomic and surgical pathology research. Laboratory Investigation carries more experimental and mechanisms-focused pathology work. Histopathology offers another established general surgical pathology outlet with a strong morphology tradition. None of these is a substitute ranking of AJCP; they are the titles a reader browsing this profile is most likely to be cross-checking, and each has its own ISSNs, publisher and metrics that should be verified on its own record.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of the American Journal of Clinical Pathology? The print ISSN is 0002-9173 and the electronic ISSN is 1943-7722, confirmed by the NLM Catalog, OpenAlex and the publisher's journal record. The print ISSN also serves as the ISSN-L.

Who publishes the American Journal of Clinical Pathology? Oxford University Press publishes the journal, and has been its latest publisher since 2016 according to the NLM Catalog. It is the official journal of the American Society for Clinical Pathology and the Academy of Clinical Laboratory Physicians and Scientists.

When was AJCP founded and how often does it appear? The NLM Catalog gives a publication start year of 1931, and records monthly frequency from 1940 onward; current listings describe it as a monthly journal.

Who edits AJCP? The ASCP editorial board page consulted for this profile names Steven H. Kroft, MD, MASCP, as Editor, supported by associate editors and a subspecialty-organised board.

What impact factor and CiteScore does AJCP have? The publisher's Oxford Academic journal home displayed, at checking time, a 2025 Impact Factor of 2.3 and a 2025 CiteScore of 3.9 (rank 77/209 in Pathology and Forensic Medicine). The SCImago 2025 dataset stored in this record gives Q2, SJR 0.705 and h-index 149; OpenAlex counted an h-index of 223 over its own database. The figures come from different systems and should be cited with their source.

Is AJCP indexed in PubMed and MEDLINE? Yes — the NLM Catalog records it as currently indexed for MEDLINE, with PubMed coverage listed from 1965 in that record.

Can I publish open access in AJCP, and what does it cost? An optional open-access route exists through the publisher. OpenAlex listed a charge of USD 4,660 at checking time, but charges change; confirm the current figure in Oxford's author documentation before submitting. A DOAJ listing for the journal could not be verified from the sources consulted for this profile.

How do I submit a manuscript? Through the journal's submission system, reached from its home on Oxford Academic, following the author guidelines hosted there. Manuscripts are handled within the journal's subspecialty editorial structure and undergo peer review.