About American journal of diseases of children

American Journal of Diseases of Children: Journal Profile

The American Journal of Diseases of Children was a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association (AMA) in the United States, devoted to pediatrics — the health, diseases and care of infants, children and adolescents. It began publication in 1911 and, under this title (with two intervening AMA-prefixed variants in the 1950s), it ran until 1993. It did not simply stop: it is the first and longest-lived title in a continuous lineage that the AMA itself describes as the oldest continuously published pediatric journal in the United States, continued from 1994 as Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine and published today as JAMA Pediatrics. This JournalsWorld record carries four ISSNs for the title — 0002-922X, 0096-8994, 2374-2976 and 2374-3018 — and the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint at the time of checking (OpenAlex source S4210218805) lists exactly those four identifiers together for this journal, with the American Medical Association as publisher. On that record OpenAlex counted approximately 4,779 works and approximately 125,532 citations for the title, with an h-index of 122 — the measurable residue of more than eight decades in which this journal was one of the principal places American pediatrics published itself.

This profile explains what the journal was, how its titles and identifiers fit together, what it published and for whom, why its archive still matters, and where its living successor stands today — including the successor’s current, publisher-stated standing, so that a reader who arrives here from an old citation can travel in either direction along the chain: back into the twentieth-century archive this record describes, or forward to the journal that now occupies its place.

At a Glance

History: 1911 and the Making of American Pediatrics

The journal’s first issue appeared in 1911, at a formative moment for its specialty. The AMA’s own account of its successor journal calls the lineage “the oldest continuously published pediatric journal in the country, dating back to 1911”, and the milestones of American pediatrics that surround that date show why a dedicated journal was needed then: the United States Children’s Bureau was established by Congress in 1912, the first full-time professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins was appointed the same year, and the professional organisation of child health was proceeding on every front at once. A journal devoted to the diseases of children gave the new specialty its scholarly record — a place where clinical observation, the study of infectious disease in childhood, nutrition, growth and the organisation of child-health services could accumulate issue by issue. For the next eight decades, that is the role this title performed, through the transformation of pediatrics from a field dominated by infectious disease and infant feeding into the broad, evidence-based specialty it became by the century’s end.

The archive record of the title, as catalogued in the University of Pennsylvania’s serials archive listing, gives its title history precisely. The American Journal of Diseases of Children began in 1911. It was renamed A.M.A. American Journal of Diseases of Children in 1950, and A.M.A. Journal of Diseases of Children in 1956, before reverting to its original name in 1961. It continued under the restored title until 1993, and was then followed by Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, followed in turn by today’s JAMA Pediatrics. Those 1950s variants matter practically: a citation from that decade may carry either prefixed form, and a catalogue search that uses only the plain title will miss part of the run. They do not indicate different journals — the volume sequence, the publisher and the specialty are continuous throughout — and bibliographic records, including the multi-ISSN record carried here, treat the run as one journal’s history. Researchers verifying a reference from the 1950s should therefore search all three title forms before concluding that a citation is in error.

What the Journal Published

As its title states, the journal’s territory was the diseases of children, understood in the broad way its specialty understood it: original clinical and laboratory investigations bearing on child health; studies of infectious diseases, which dominated pediatric practice for much of the title’s life; work on nutrition, growth and development; clinical reports and case material from children’s hospitals and university departments; and, increasingly across the twentieth century, the epidemiology, prevention and organisation of care for children and adolescents. Its readership was the readership the AMA serves: practicing pediatricians, academic departments of pediatrics, children’s hospitals and the physicians training within them. The longevity of the run is itself the clearest evidence of the journal’s place: a specialty journal does not publish continuously from 1911 to 1993, through two changes of its own name and back, unless the specialty regards it as one of its own central institutions.

The journal’s modern successor describes the inherited mission in current terms, and those terms are a fair guide to what the lineage has always published: JAMA Pediatrics is an international, peer-reviewed journal published twelve times a year (with its online edition appearing weekly), whose stated ancestry runs, in the JAMA Network’s own words, through Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine “and before that, the American Journal of Diseases of Children”. The article types, evidence standards and author instructions in force today are the successor’s, and are described below in their proper place; nothing in them should be projected backwards onto the historical title, whose papers must be read in the context of the medicine of their own decades.

The Identifiers, Explained

This record carries four ISSNs, and a careful reader deserves an explanation rather than a bare list. The OpenAlex source record for this journal (S4210218805), resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 0002-922X at checking, groups all four — 0002-922X, 0096-8994, 2374-2976 and 2374-3018 — under this single title, with the AMA as publisher. The first of them, 0002-922X, is the identifier by which the historical print journal is principally catalogued and the one under which its archive is generally cited. The presence of several identifiers on one long-lived title is normal in modern bibliographic practice: identifiers accumulate across a journal’s print life, its later digitisation and the registration of its electronic and reissued forms, and aggregators consolidate them under the title they belong to. What a researcher should not do is treat any of the four as evidence of a different journal, or transfer them to the successor titles: Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine and JAMA Pediatrics carry identifiers of their own (the current journal’s are in the 2168- series), belong to their own records, and are documented separately. Where a secondary source attaches one of this title’s ISSNs to a different name, the combination of publisher, dates and title history in this profile is the check to apply.

The Archive in Numbers

The OpenAlex figures for this title, quoted at checking time and attributed to that source, were approximately 4,779 works, approximately 125,532 citations, an h-index of 122 and an i10-index of 2,929. Read properly, those numbers describe influence of a particular kind. The article count is modest beside the mega-journals of the present day, because twentieth-century specialty journals published far fewer, longer papers in far fewer issues. The citation count is the telling figure: an average well into double figures per paper across a run that ended in 1993 means the archive continued to be used — as the record of landmark clinical descriptions, early trials and the baseline data of child-health research — for decades after the title closed. The h-index of 122 says the same thing in its own way: at least 122 papers in this archive have each been cited at least 122 times. The two-year mean citedness on the record is 0.0, which is the expected artefact for a title that has published nothing new since 1993 and carries no implication about the archive’s value; recent-window measures simply have nothing to measure here. OpenAlex maintains its graph continuously, so these totals may shift as records are merged or corrected; cite them, if at all, as OpenAlex’s position at the date you check them.

Among the most-cited work in the lineage’s later archive are papers whose subjects show the specialty’s modern agenda forming: the prevalence of a metabolic syndrome phenotype in adolescents, drawn from the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey; overweight prevalence and trends for children and adolescents across the national surveys from 1963 to 1991; and a school-based interdisciplinary intervention to reduce obesity among youth. Those examples are drawn from the successor-era literature most often listed for this journal family, and they illustrate the direction the journal had already taken by the end of this title’s run: away from a purely clinical case literature and towards population evidence about the conditions that shape children’s health at scale.

From 1994: Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, and JAMA Pediatrics

In 1994 the journal continued as Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine — one of the AMA’s “Archives” specialty titles — which carried the lineage through the rest of the 1990s and the 2000s before the AMA’s JAMA Network rebranding renamed it JAMA Pediatrics in 2013. The continuity is institutional, not merely nominal: same publisher, same specialty, same place in the publisher’s portfolio, and the publisher’s own journal information states the chain in a single sentence. For JournalsWorld’s purposes the three titles are three records, not one, because each has its own title, period, identifiers and archive; but a reader researching the journal should hold the chain together mentally, because literature searches that stop at 1993 will miss the continuation of every research conversation the historical journal started.

The current journal’s standing, as the JAMA Network states it on its author pages at the time of checking, is formidable: a Journal Impact Factor of 17.1, described by the publisher as the highest-ranking pediatrics journal in the world; more than 12.5 million annual article views and downloads; submissions from outside the United States accounting for 56 percent of the total; a 10 percent acceptance rate across submissions; and median times to first decision of 3 days without external peer review and 41 days with review. Research articles become freely available on the journal’s website twelve months after publication, authors of research articles may choose immediate open access, and the journal deposits published research articles into PubMed Central. Those are the successor’s present-day figures, published by the JAMA Network on its JAMA Pediatrics pages (updated July 2026 in the version checked), and they are quoted here to show where the lineage now stands — not as metrics of the historical title, which has none of its own in any current reporting system.

Editorial Information and How to Use This Record

No current editorial board exists for the historical title, and the names of the editors who conducted it across eighty-two years belong to the printed mastheads of its volumes and to the AMA’s institutional history rather than to any live publisher page; details that cannot be checked against a surviving official source are therefore recorded here as not publicly disclosed in a verifiable current source, rather than reconstructed from unsourced listings. The editor-in-chief named in the JAMA Network’s general information for the successor journal in the material checked was Frederick P. Rivara, MD, MPH, of the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s; because editorial leadership of the current journal changes over time, readers who need the present incumbent should take the name from the live JAMA Pediatrics pages on the JAMA Network rather than from this profile. In practical terms: cite papers from this archive under the title as printed on the paper, with its year and volume; search the three title forms for the 1950s; use ISSN 0002-922X as the principal identifier for the historical journal; and send any new pediatric manuscript to the successor, whose instructions for authors and submission system are maintained by the JAMA Network.

Indexing, Access and Preservation

The historical archive is part of the AMA’s journal backfile, and its contents are discoverable through the standard medical bibliographic infrastructure that indexes the JAMA Network’s titles and through the OpenAlex record described above. Individual papers from the run are held by medical libraries worldwide in print and, increasingly, in digitised form, and the University of Pennsylvania’s online-books serials listing provides an open catalogue record of the title’s full publication history, including its 1950s variants and its continuation chain. A specific current statement about this ceased title’s presence in any particular commercial index could not be verified from a present-day official page devoted to the title itself — the AMA’s live pages describe the current journal — and this profile accordingly makes no indexing claim for the historical title beyond the verifiable discovery routes named here. No submission, fee or article-processing information applies to this title, because it accepts nothing: all such questions belong to JAMA Pediatrics, whose current terms are on its own author pages.

Similar and Related Journals

The related titles a reader of this archive will meet most often are, first, its own successors on their separate records: Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine and JAMA Pediatrics. Alongside them stand the other long-lived general pediatrics journals of the same tradition — Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics; The Journal of Pediatrics; and, in Europe, Archives of Disease in Childhood, whose very title echoes this journal’s — each a separate publication with its own publisher, history and ISSNs, and none a duplicate of this record. The comparison worth making is historical: for much of the twentieth century, the American Journal of Diseases of Children was the AMA’s voice in that company, and its archive, read alongside theirs, is one of the primary sources for the history of the specialty itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of the American Journal of Diseases of Children?

This record carries 0002-922X, 0096-8994, 2374-2976 and 2374-3018, and the OpenAlex source record resolved via the ISSN endpoint lists the same four identifiers together for this title under the American Medical Association.

When did the journal begin, and when did it end?

It began in 1911 and continued under this title until 1993. From 1994 its lineage continued as Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, and from 2013 as JAMA Pediatrics.

Did the journal change its name in the 1950s?

Yes, twice and reversibly: A.M.A. American Journal of Diseases of Children from 1950, A.M.A. Journal of Diseases of Children from 1956, and the original title again from 1961, as catalogued in its serial archive record.

Who published it?

The American Medical Association, which also publishes the successor titles in the JAMA Network.

Can I submit a paper to this journal?

No — the title ceased in 1993. New pediatric research in this lineage goes to JAMA Pediatrics, under the JAMA Network’s current instructions for authors.

How influential was the journal?

OpenAlex, at checking, credited the title with about 4,779 works, about 125,532 citations and an h-index of 122, and the AMA describes its lineage as the oldest continuously published pediatric journal in the United States, dating to 1911.

Is JAMA Pediatrics the same journal?

It is the same lineage and the same publisher’s journal, under a new title with its own identifiers and its own record. This profile covers the 1911–1993 title only.

Sources consulted for this profile: the serial archive listing for the American Journal of Diseases of Children (Online Books Page, University of Pennsylvania) for the 1911 start, the 1950 and 1956 title variants, the 1961 reversion, the 1993 end and the continuation chain; JAMA Network material for the successor journal, including its statement that JAMA Pediatrics was formerly Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine and before that the American Journal of Diseases of Children, the oldest continuously published pediatric journal in the country dating to 1911, its editor-in-chief as named in that general information, and its current author-page figures (Journal Impact Factor 17.1, acceptance rate, decision medians, international submission share, free-access and PubMed Central arrangements, updated July 2026 in the version checked); and the OpenAlex source record resolved via the ISSN endpoint for 0002-922X (S4210218805) for the four-ISSN grouping, publisher and archive metrics at checking time. DOAJ search-API output for these ISSNs returned no listing and no DOAJ claim is made; the historical title predates that directory’s purpose.