American Journal of Medical Genetics

About American Journal of Medical Genetics

American Journal of Medical Genetics — the Original, Undivided Journal, 1977 to Its Split

American Journal of Medical Genetics is the name under which one of the defining journals of human and medical genetics published from 1977 until it divided into parts in the 1990s. This Journals World record, storing print ISSN 0148-7299 and electronic ISSN 1096-8628 with publisher Wiley, is the record of that original, undivided journal — the parent title. It is not a duplicate of the records for American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A, Part B or Part C, and it should not be merged with any of them. The relationship is one of descent: until 1996 the field had this single journal; in 1996 it split into Part A and Part B; Part C, Seminars in Medical Genetics, was established in 1999. The National Library of Medicine's catalogue entry for the parent title states the same structure formally, listing the journal's split into Part A (ISSN 1552-4825), Part B, Neuropsychiatric Genetics (ISSN 1552-4841) and Part C, Seminars in Medical Genetics (ISSN 1552-4868). This profile therefore treats the record as what it is — a historical parent journal whose archive remains a primary source for the discipline — and explains the lineage carefully, because confusing the parent with Part A, whose ISSNs are entirely different, is the main error a reader can make on this page.

At a Glance

The Bibliographic Evidence for the Lineage

Because this batch also contains a record for American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A, and because an older Part A record exists on the site as well, the evidence is set out explicitly here. The parent title's ISSNs, as stored on this record and confirmed by bibliographic sources, are 0148-7299 (print) and 1096-8628 (electronic). Part A's ISSNs, as given by the NLM catalogue's split-into listing and by Part A's own records, are 1552-4825 and 1552-4833 — note that even within Part A sources, the print and electronic assignments of that pair are sometimes transposed, a separate cataloguing wrinkle that does not affect the present point. There is no shared ISSN between the parent record and Part A at all. The parent and the part are therefore related as predecessor and successor within a split, which serials librarianship treats as distinct bibliographic records linked by a continues-and-split relationship — precisely the owner-class lineage category this profile reports, and not a duplicate pair under any ISSN-based deduplication rule.

The NLM catalogue entry for the parent title supplies the supporting detail. It records the title's publication start year as 1977, its publisher history as New York, Liss, from 1977, with Wiley-Liss as the latest publisher, its language as English, its subject as medical genetics, and its indexing history in MEDLINE from volume 1, number 1, in 1977 through volume 115, number 4, dated 30 December 2002. Its notes explain the apparent puzzle in those dates: from the 1990s, volumes carried section titles — the neuropsychiatric genetics section, described as the official publication of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics, and from 1999 the Seminars in Medical Genetics section — within the parent journal's continuing volume sequence, before the parts stood fully as separate titles. That is why a catalogue can simultaneously and correctly say that the journal split in 1996 and that the parent entry runs to 2002. The two statements describe the same transition seen from the title level and from the volume level respectively.

History: Opitz, Liss and the Making of a Discipline's Journal

The journal was founded in 1977, published in New York by Alan R. Liss, with John M. Opitz as founding Editor-in-Chief. The timing was significant. Medical genetics in the 1970s was consolidating from a collection of interests — dysmorphology, cytogenetics, biochemical genetics, genetic counselling — into a recognisable clinical and scientific discipline, and it lacked a journal of its own that treated the recognition and delineation of syndromes, the natural history of genetic conditions and their clinical management as central scholarly work. Opitz, himself a central figure in dysmorphology and syndrome delineation, gave the new journal that character from its first volumes. Under his editorship the journal published the phenotype-driven scholarship that defined the field's method: careful clinical description, photography and measurement, family studies, and the naming and nosology of syndromes, alongside the cytogenetic and increasingly molecular work that transformed the discipline across the 1980s and 1990s.

The journal grew with the field it had helped to organise. Its frequency expanded dramatically — the NLM catalogue records it reaching forty numbers a year by 1999, a schedule that itself testifies to submission volume. Growth of that kind is what made the split rational. By the mid-1990s the journal carried at least three distinguishable literatures: the core clinical and phenotypic genetics of congenital anomalies and genetic disorders; a neuropsychiatric genetics literature large and methodologically distinct enough to sustain its own section and its own society affiliation; and a growing demand for authoritative, educational review content. The 1996 division into Part A and Part B, and the establishment of Part C as Seminars in Medical Genetics in 1999, converted those internal sections into free-standing titles, each with its own ISSNs, editorial leadership and readership, while the shared name preserved the lineage and the subscription bundle that libraries had built around the parent.

Editorial succession after the split belongs properly to the parts' own profiles, but the outline is part of the parent journal's story and is recorded in reference sources: John C. Carey succeeded Opitz in the journal's leadership and continues as Editor-in-Chief of Part C, while Maximilian Muenke became Editor-in-Chief of Part A. Those names are given here as lineage context drawn from secondary reference sources, attributed as such; readers who need the current masthead of any part should consult that part's Wiley page, which is the version of record.

What the Undivided Journal Published: Scope of the Parent Era

The scope of the parent journal is best understood from what its successor parts inherited, because the parts divided its territory rather than inventing new ground. Part A's own description of its domain — adapted, as it notes, from its journal website — covers the cause and pathogenesis of human congenital anomalies and genetic disorders, including molecular analyses; their delineation, including phenotype analyses, natural history, variability, nosology and newly recognised syndromes; and their management, including genetic counselling, care guidelines and treatment. It emphasises phenotypically driven analyses of disorders of morphogenesis, metabolism and neurogenetics, especially intellectual disability and related neurodevelopmental conditions, together with the epidemiology of congenital malformations, behavioural phenotypes of syndromes, and astute clinical observations. Every element of that description was parent-journal content before 1996: the undivided journal was where syndrome delineation, natural-history studies and clinical management guidance appeared side by side, in the same volumes as the molecular papers that increasingly explained the conditions described.

The other two territories were likewise the parent's. Neuropsychiatric genetics — the experimental and clinical investigation of genetic mechanisms underlying neurologic and psychiatric disorders — appeared in the parent as a named section tied to the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics before becoming Part B. The seminar and review function — in-depth, educational retrospectives for students, practitioners and associated professionals in human and medical genetics — appeared as the Seminars in Medical Genetics section within parent volumes from 1999 before standing as Part C. A reader working through the parent archive will therefore encounter, in sequence, the full intellectual range of late-twentieth-century medical genetics: dysmorphology and syndrome reports, cytogenetic and early molecular studies, population and epidemiological work on congenital malformations, psychiatric genetics, twin studies, fetal pathology and teratology, animal models of human genetic disorders, and ethical, legal and social discussion — the subject list that Part A's profile still carries because it was first assembled under the parent title.

The archive's continuing importance follows from that breadth. Syndrome delineations and natural-history descriptions published in the parent era remain the reference descriptions for many rare conditions, cited by the parts themselves and by clinical genetics practice. Researchers tracing a condition's literature must search the parent title and its Am J Med Genet abbreviation for the pre-split decades, then continue into the relevant part; a search confined to Part A's ISSNs begins, in effect, in 1996, and will silently miss the journal's first nineteen years.

How to Cite and Search the Parent Journal

Citations to the parent journal use the title American Journal of Medical Genetics and the standard abbreviation Am J Med Genet, with the parent ISSNs 0148-7299 and 1096-8628 identifying the record in catalogues. Citations from the section period require care: a paper in the neuropsychiatric genetics or seminars sections of a late parent volume may be cited by its section identity, and databases variously file such items under the parent or the emerging part. The reliable practice is to cite exactly what the article's own title page and the database record state, and to give the volume and year, since the volume sequence continued across the transition and disambiguates records that title wording alone can confuse. Librarians maintaining holdings should keep the parent record linked to all three parts with explicit continues and split-into notes, as the NLM catalogue models, rather than closing the parent record without successors or merging it into Part A.

Metrics: Why This Profile Quotes None for the Parent

Third-party sites frequently attach metric figures to this title that in fact belong to Part A, because databases and aggregators often roll the lineage into the successor's record or present the successor's figures under the family name. The parent journal, having ceased as an undivided title a generation ago, has no current Journal Impact Factor, quartile or acceptance rate of its own, and this profile does not borrow Part A's figures to fill the gap — doing so would attribute one journal's measured performance to another, which is exactly the kind of quiet misattribution the no-fabrication standard exists to prevent. What can be said truthfully is historical and structural: the parent was indexed in MEDLINE across its full run, as the NLM record documents; it grew to a very high publication frequency by the end of the 1990s; its archive is carried and sold by Wiley alongside the parts, including in bundle form through library channels; and its successor parts are established, indexed titles in their own right. A research manager who needs a current metric should take it from the specific part they are evaluating, from that part's own record, and should treat any metric printed beside the parent title on an aggregator site as a lineage artefact until proven otherwise.

Guidance for Authors and Readers Today

Authors cannot submit to the parent title, and any website inviting submissions to “American Journal of Medical Genetics” under the parent ISSNs should be treated with the same suspicion as any solicitation in a ceased title's name. Manuscripts go to the parts: clinical, phenotypic and syndrome work of the kind described above to Part A; neuropsychiatric genetics to Part B; and review and seminar proposals to Part C, whose content is largely commissioned and educational in character. Each part has its own Wiley journal page, author guidelines and editorial office, and those pages — not this historical profile — are where submission decisions should be made.

Readers, by contrast, should use the parent title actively. Systematic reviewers in medical genetics should include the parent title and abbreviation in their search strategies for any topic with a pre-1996 literature. Clinicians following a rare syndrome should expect its defining descriptions to sit in the parent archive. Historians and sociologists of medicine will find in its volumes a compact record of how a specialty named itself, organised its knowledge and then outgrew a single journal — the 1996 and 1999 divisions being among the clearest publishing artefacts of the field's growth.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this record a duplicate of American Journal of Medical Genetics Part A? No. The parent title's ISSNs are 0148-7299 and 1096-8628; Part A's are 1552-4825 and 1552-4833. There is no ISSN overlap. The relationship is predecessor and successor within a split — an owner-class lineage relationship, reported as such, and not a duplicate pair.

When did the journal split? The undivided journal divided into Part A and Part B in 1996; Part C, Seminars in Medical Genetics, was established in 1999. Sections corresponding to Parts B and C had appeared within parent volumes, which is why the NLM parent entry extends to 2002.

Who founded the journal? It was founded in 1977, published by Alan R. Liss in New York, with John M. Opitz as founding Editor-in-Chief.

Who publishes the journal family now? Wiley, through its Wiley-Liss lineage; this record's stored publisher, Wiley, is correct for the family's current ownership.

Can I submit a paper to this title? No. The parent title is closed to submissions. Submit to Part A, Part B or Part C according to subject, via their own Wiley journal pages.

What was the parent journal's impact factor? No current figure exists for the ceased parent title, and figures shown for this name on aggregator sites generally belong to Part A. This profile therefore quotes none, rather than misattributing a successor's metric.

A Note on Names, Abbreviations and Look-Alike Records

Researchers will meet this journal family under several closely similar names, and a short guide prevents the commonest filing errors. The parent title is American Journal of Medical Genetics, abbreviated Am J Med Genet, ISSNs 0148-7299 and 1096-8628. Part A keeps the family name with the suffix Part A and is abbreviated Am J Med Genet A; its subject is the clinical and phenotypic core of the discipline. Part B adds the subtitle Neuropsychiatric Genetics and is abbreviated accordingly; it also serves as an official publication channel for the psychiatric genetics community, a role its predecessor section held within the parent. Part C carries the subtitle Seminars in Medical Genetics and publishes thematic, educational review issues rather than primary research reports in the usual sense. A further source of confusion is the parent journal's supplement, which the NLM catalogue records as a related title; supplement items belong to the parent record's history and should not be mistaken for a fifth part. Finally, none of these titles should be confused with the American Journal of Human Genetics, a separate and older journal of a different society and publisher, despite the similarity of name — a conflation that search engines and hurried readers both make, and that checking the ISSN immediately resolves.

Verification Notes

This profile is anchored on the live Journals World record for post 331241, storing publisher Wiley and ISSNs 01487299 and 10968628. The split structure, the parts' ISSNs, the 1977 start, the Liss and Wiley-Liss publisher history, the CODEN AJMGDA, LCCN 77643407, the MEDLINE coverage through volume 115 in December 2002 and the section notes explaining the transition are taken from the National Library of Medicine catalogue entry for the parent title. The 1996 and 1999 split dates, the founding editorship of John M. Opitz and the succession outline are taken from reference sources on the journal and are attributed as such in the text. Part A's domain description is taken from the published aims text of Part A and is used only to characterise the territory the parent originally covered. The duplicate analysis was performed directly: the Part A records in this batch and on the site carry ISSNs with zero overlap with this record, and the pair is reported as an owner-class predecessor–successor lineage, not a confirmed duplicate. Metrics for the parent title are recorded as not published in their own right, rather than borrowed from a successor.