American Journal of Medical Genetics, Part C: Seminars in Medical Genetics

About American Journal of Medical Genetics, Part C: Seminars in Medical Genetics

Overview

The American Journal of Medical Genetics Part C: Seminars in Medical Genetics is the review and education part of the American Journal of Medical Genetics (AJMG), one of the longest-running journals in human genetics. Where Part A publishes original clinical and laboratory research on genetic disorders and birth defects, and Part B covers neuropsychiatric genetics, Part C is built entirely around the thematic review issue: each of its four issues a year is guest-edited by a specialist in a featured area and gathers a coordinated set of in-depth reviews from experts around the world, so that a single issue functions as a compact, citable state-of-the-field volume on one topic — a syndrome family, a technology, a screening programme, a counselling problem, or an emerging area of genomic medicine.

The journal is published by Wiley (historically Wiley-Liss) in the United States, with print ISSN 1552-4868 and electronic ISSN 1552-4876, CODEN AJMGFC. Those identifiers match both this Journals World record and its partner record on this site (see the duplicate note at the end of this profile). Part C was established in 1999, when the Seminars in Medical Genetics stream — which had appeared within the unified AJMG during the 1990s — was constituted as a separate part. The editor-in-chief of Part C in the sources consulted is John C. Carey, himself a central figure in the journal family’s history: the parent journal was founded in 1977 under founding editor John M. Opitz, Carey succeeded to senior editorial leadership in the family, and Part A is edited by Maximilian Muenke in the same reference sources.

At a Glance

History Within the AJMG Family

The parent journal began in 1977 as a single title, the American Journal of Medical Genetics (original ISSN 0148-7299), founded under John M. Opitz at a moment when clinical genetics was professionalising: dysmorphology, syndrome delineation and genetic counselling were becoming organised medical activities, and they needed a journal that took phenotype — careful clinical description — as seriously as laboratory data. Through the 1980s and early 1990s the single journal carried original research, neuropsychiatric genetics material (from 1993, one volume a year bore that section title), and the Seminars in Medical Genetics review stream. Growth forced structure: in 1996 the journal split into Part A and Part B, and in 1999 the Seminars stream became Part C in its own right, with its own ISSNs and quarterly schedule, while keeping the AJMG name and numbering heritage that connects it to the 1977 founding.

That origin explains Part C’s distinctive character among review journals. It did not start as a general review outlet accepting unsolicited reviews on any topic; it grew out of a clinical genetics community’s seminar tradition, and it retains the habits of that community — attention to natural history, to phenotype variability, to management and counselling, and to the patient and family perspective alongside molecular mechanism. Its most-cited single item illustrates the formula at its most influential: the 2017 international classification of the Ehlers-Danlos syndromes, published in Part C, became the reference classification for that group of connective-tissue disorders and accumulated hundreds of citations because clinicians worldwide needed exactly the synthesis a guest-edited thematic issue is designed to provide.

Scope and Subject Coverage

Genetic disorders and syndromes

The core coverage is the delineation, natural history, diagnosis and management of human genetic conditions — single-gene disorders, chromosomal conditions, imprinting disorders, connective-tissue disorders, skeletal dysplasias, neurodevelopmental conditions and rare-disease groups of every kind. Thematic issues typically work through a condition group systematically: genetics and mechanism, clinical features across the lifespan, diagnostic pathways, surveillance and treatment, and recurrence-risk and counselling issues.

Clinical genetics and genetic counselling

Practice-facing material is a defining strand: how genetic services are organised, how testing is chosen and interpreted, how results are communicated, and how families are supported. Reviews on genetic counselling practice, on the return of genomic results, and on the psychosocial dimensions of genetic conditions recur, and the journal explicitly values patient- and family-centred perspectives — narratives and analyses of how genetic conditions affect lives and health systems, not only how they present in clinic.

Genomics, technology and screening

Successive waves of technology have each received thematic treatment: chromosomal microarray, exome and genome sequencing, gene-targeted therapies, newborn screening programmes and their public-health evaluation, and more recently computational and artificial-intelligence methods in clinical genetics. Public-health genetics — population screening, cascade testing, and the ethics and economics of genomic programmes — is treated as part of the journal’s remit rather than an adjacent field.

Neurodevelopmental and psychiatric interfaces

Although psychiatric genetics is Part B’s territory, Part C’s syndrome-focused issues necessarily cover the behavioural and psychiatric phenotypes of genetic conditions — intellectual disability, autism-spectrum features and psychiatric manifestations of defined syndromes — and some of its most-cited reviews, on family and twin studies in bipolar disorder and on genetics of suicidal behaviour, come from thematic issues working that interface from the syndrome side.

The Thematic-Issue Model

Each issue is guest-edited by a researcher in the featured area, who commissions a collection of reviews from specialists internationally. For readers, the model has three practical consequences. First, depth is structural: instead of one reviewer’s view of a topic, an issue assembles mechanism, clinical, diagnostic, management and counselling perspectives in one place, cross-referenced by design. Second, the journal functions unusually well as teaching material — it describes itself as an educational resource and review forum for students, practitioners and associated professionals in human and medical genetics, and a thematic issue is a ready-made curriculum unit for fellowship teaching. Third, authorship is largely invitational: prospective contributors generally reach the journal through guest editors and thematic planning rather than by submitting unsolicited reviews, and anyone hoping to write for Part C should approach the editorial office with a thematic proposal or respond to a planned issue, rather than sending a finished review unannounced.

Editorial and Publishing Arrangements

Part C is published by Wiley within the AJMG family, distributed through Wiley Online Library, and sold both separately and in bundles with Parts A and B (the three-part bundle is, for example, the form in which the family is offered on the Ovid platform to institutional subscribers). Peer review and editorial handling follow Wiley’s journal systems and the family’s editorial offices; guest editors shape individual issues under the editor-in-chief’s oversight, which keeps commissioned review content to refereed standards. Access is primarily by subscription, with open-access options under Wiley’s standard arrangements for authors who choose or whose funders require that route. Current submission and proposal routes, article processing details for open-access choices, and the forthcoming-theme list are maintained on the journal’s Wiley pages; where this profile could not verify a current operational figure from the publisher, it does not invent one.

Metrics and Standing

Part C is indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science (Science Citation Index Expanded, in the Genetics and Heredity category in the sources consulted), as well as in MEDLINE/PubMed for its clinically relevant content. SCImago-derived listings place it in the second quartile (Q2) for its genetics categories in recent vintages, with an SJR around 0.8–1.2 depending on the year consulted and an H-index in the low 120s (122 in one current listing; this Journals World record’s source data gives 124, a snapshot difference of the kind that arises between database updates, and not a disagreement about the journal’s identity). Its citation profile is unusual for a review journal of its size because a small number of classification and consensus papers — the Ehlers-Danlos classification chief among them — carry very large citation counts, while the typical thematic review accumulates steady specialist citations over a long tail. That pattern is the signature of a journal whose issues are used as reference works, and it is why the title’s influence in clinical genetics is larger than a simple papers-per-year comparison would suggest.

Readership and Use

The readership is clinical geneticists, genetic counsellors, paediatricians and other specialists who manage genetic conditions, laboratory geneticists, trainees in medical genetics, and researchers in rare disease who need authoritative synthesis rather than another primary dataset. In practice the journal is used in three ways: as the first stop when a clinician meets an unfamiliar syndrome group and needs mechanism-to-management in one sitting; as teaching material in genetics training programmes; and as the citable source for classifications, nomenclature and management frameworks that later primary papers then apply. Researchers in genomics and rare diseases — the themes flagged in this record’s source data, together with connective-tissue disorders and neurodevelopmental genetics — form the citing community that sustains its metrics.

How to Cite and Verify

Cite the journal as Am J Med Genet C Semin Med Genet (NLM abbreviation), with ISSN 1552-4868 (print) or 1552-4876 (online). Verify identity in the NLM Catalog, which records the title’s split from the parent journal and its ISSNs, or through the ISSN records and the journal’s Wiley Online Library pages. When verifying, take care to distinguish the three parts: Part A (1552-4833 / 1552-4825) and Part B (1552-4841 / 1552-485X) share the family name but are different journals with different content models, and citations must name the part actually used.

Duplicate Record Note

Journals World carries a second record for this same journal: post 9865, slug american-journal-of-medical-genetics-part-c-seminars-in-medical-genetics, titled with the punctuated form “American Journal of Medical Genetics, Part C: Seminars in Medical Genetics”. That record was verified directly for this profile: it carries the identical ISSN pair (1552-4876, 1552-4868), the same Q2 standing and an H-index of 122. The two records are therefore one journal listed twice under title variants — the present record’s slug carries a “-2” suffix for the same reason. The partner record is thin and carries no depth profile, so this depth profile has been published on the present record as assigned, and the pair is flagged in the worker report for the site’s standing merge process, under which the depth content should survive on the retained record.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Part C a research journal or a review journal?

A review journal. Its content model is the guest-edited thematic issue of commissioned reviews. Original research belongs in Part A; neuropsychiatric genetics research belongs in Part B.

Can I submit an unsolicited review?

The journal’s model is invitational and thematic. The realistic routes are a thematic-issue proposal to the editorial office, or an invitation from a guest editor planning an issue in your area. Check the journal’s current Wiley pages for the proposal route in force.

How often does Part C appear?

Four issues per year, each devoted to a featured theme in medical genetics.

What is the journal’s ranking?

Recent SCImago-derived listings place it in Q2 in its genetics categories, with an H-index in the low 120s. Take the live quartile and any impact figure from Scopus, SCImago or Journal Citation Reports for the year you need, since these are revised annually.

Thematic Issues in Practice

The clearest way to grasp what Part C does is to look at the kinds of questions its issues are built to answer. A clinician facing a child with a newly identified connective-tissue disorder needs, in one place, the current classification, the gene-by-gene clinical picture, surveillance recommendations and the counselling conversation — the 2017 Ehlers-Danlos issue supplied exactly that assembly and became a standard citation for the field. A genetics service introducing genome sequencing needs the evidence on diagnostic yield, the interpretation pitfalls, the consent and return-of-results frameworks and the health-system experience of early adopters; Part C issues on genomic medicine gather those strands from the centres that ran first. A public-health geneticist evaluating a newborn-screening expansion needs assay performance, follow-up systems, treatment availability and the ethics of screening for conditions of varying actionability side by side. In each case the unit of publication is not the single review but the curated set, and the guest editor’s work — choosing the questions, assigning them to the groups with the deepest experience, and keeping the set coherent — is the journal’s core editorial product. That is also why the journal’s issues age comparatively well: a well-built thematic issue remains the orientation point for its topic until the field moves enough to justify a successor issue, and libraries treat the run as a reference shelf rather than as disposable periodical literature.

Part A, Part B or Part C? Choosing Within the Family

Because the three parts share a name, authors and readers regularly need the distinction stated plainly. Part A is the family’s original-research journal for clinical and laboratory medical genetics: cohort studies, syndrome delineation, phenotype and natural-history research, genotype–phenotype analysis and management studies of congenital anomalies and genetic disorders, published at high frequency across the year. Part B, Neuropsychiatric Genetics, is the research journal for the genetics of neurologic and psychiatric conditions — association and sequencing studies, family and population genetics of psychiatric disease — and is the official publication associated with the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics. Part C is not a research journal at all in that sense: it commissions and publishes synthesis. A research group with new data belongs in A or B according to subject; a group asked to define the state of knowledge on a topic belongs in C, usually within a guest-edited theme. Citations follow the same discipline: the part letter is part of the journal’s identity, the ISSNs differ by part, and a reference that omits the part or merges the parts’ metrics misdescribes all three. Bibliometric comparisons should likewise be made part by part — Part C’s quarterly review output is deliberately smaller in volume than Part A’s research flow, and its influence runs through classification and consensus citations rather than through article counts.

For institutional subscribers the family is commonly licensed as a bundle, which is why readers often meet the three parts through a single library link; the bundle presentation, including the Ovid package described in the sources for this profile, groups the parts for access purposes without merging their editorial identities. Individual article DOIs under the 10.1002/ajmg.c stem identify Part C items specifically, giving readers a further mechanical check that the item in hand belongs to this part of the family.

Who Should Read Part C First?

Three reader situations account for most first encounters with this journal, and naming them helps new readers use it well. The first is the clinician who has just received a genetic diagnosis they did not train on — a syndrome named in a laboratory report — and needs the condition’s full clinical picture quickly and reliably; the relevant thematic issue, where one exists, is the fastest defensible route from name to understanding. The second is the trainee preparing for case conferences and board-style study, for whom a guest-edited issue provides the organised survey that primary papers deliberately do not. The third is the researcher entering a neighbouring sub-field — a molecular biologist moving toward clinical translation, or a clinician moving toward genomics — who needs the field’s questions framed by the people who set them. In all three situations the journal succeeds for the same reason: it publishes synthesis as a first-class scholarly product, edited to reference standard, rather than treating review content as a by-product of research publishing.

Summary

The American Journal of Medical Genetics Part C: Seminars in Medical Genetics (ISSN 1552-4868 / 1552-4876, Wiley) is the thematic review part of the AJMG family: quarterly, guest-edited, and built to give clinicians, counsellors and trainees a complete, referenced synthesis of one area of medical genetics at a time. Descended from the 1977 parent journal and constituted as Part C in 1999 under the editorial line that runs from John M. Opitz to John C. Carey, it is best known for classification and consensus issues — the 2017 Ehlers-Danlos classification above all — that the worldwide genetics community cites as reference points. A duplicate Journals World record for the same ISSN pair exists at post 9865 and is flagged for merge; this profile stands on the record assigned for depth work.