Annual Review of Cancer Biology

About Annual Review of Cancer Biology

Annual Review of Cancer Biology — A Complete Profile

Annual Review of Cancer Biology is an annual, electronic-only review journal published by Annual Reviews, a nonprofit publisher in the United States. First published in 2017, it was the 47th journal title issued by Annual Reviews, created at a moment when cancer research was being reshaped by cancer genomics, targeted therapies, immunotherapy and a much deeper understanding of how tumour cells interact with their host tissues. The journal does not publish primary experimental papers. Instead, its editorial committee commissions authoritative reviews from leading researchers, organises each volume around three broad themes, and provides the field with syntheses that clinicians, basic scientists and translational researchers can use to orient themselves in areas adjacent to — or central to — their own work. Its electronic ISSN is 2472-3428, the only ISSN listed by the publisher, consistent with its electronic-only format.

The Journals World record for this title lists the publisher as Annual Reviews Inc., the country as the United States, subject coverage spanning biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology together with medicine, an h-index of 44, an SJR value of 2.724 and a Q1 placement. Those figures fit a young, selective review journal: the h-index is lower than that of Annual Reviews titles founded decades earlier, simply because the journal has published fewer volumes, while the per-article citation indicators are strong because commissioned reviews in cancer biology are heavily read and cited. This profile explains what the journal publishes, how its editorial process works, how its Subscribe to Open access model affects readers and authors, and how to judge its metrics without overstating or understating them.

Aims, Scope and the Three Themes

The publisher states that the journal reviews subjects in cancer research that represent important and emerging areas in the field, in light of advances in understanding the basic mechanisms of cancer development and the translation of a growing number of those findings into the clinic in the form of targeted treatments. Each volume is divided into three broad themes: Cancer Cell Biology; Tumorigenesis and Cancer Progression; and Translational Cancer Science. That three-part architecture is more than a contents-page convenience. It enforces a balance that cancer researchers value: a volume should explain the cell-intrinsic biology of cancer, explain how cancers arise and evolve in tissues and organisms, and explain how knowledge becomes diagnosis, prevention or therapy — and where that translation stalls.

Within Cancer Cell Biology, reviews address matters such as oncogenes and tumour suppressor pathways, signalling, cell-cycle and cell-death control, cancer metabolism, epigenetic regulation, DNA damage responses, and the plasticity that lets tumour cells change state under stress or treatment. Within Tumorigenesis and Cancer Progression, the focus widens to initiation, clonal evolution, invasion and metastasis, the tumour microenvironment, interactions with stromal and immune cells, dormancy, and resistance — including the resistance of cancers to particular drugs, which was named among the journal's founding concerns. Within Translational Cancer Science, reviews examine cancer genomes as a basis for classification and treatment, biomarkers, model systems, screening and early detection, drug development, immunotherapies and combination strategies, and the design of studies that carry a laboratory insight toward patient benefit.

Readers should notice what this scope excludes as much as what it includes. The journal is not a venue for a single institution's case series, for unreviewed preprints, for primary trial results, or for narrow technical notes. A topic earns a review when it has accumulated enough primary literature to need synthesis, when its concepts are contested or rapidly changing, or when a translational lesson deserves to be drawn clearly for a wider audience. That commissioning logic explains both the journal's influence and its limits: it will rarely be the first place a finding appears, but it is often the place where a finding's meaning for the wider field is first stated well.

History, Editors and Place Within Annual Reviews

Annual Reviews, founded as a nonprofit, describes its mission as synthesising knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society. The cancer biology title joined a large family of annual review journals across the life, biomedical, physical and social sciences in 2017. Its founding editors were Tyler Jacks and Charles L. Sawyers, two figures whose own work spans cancer genetics, mouse models and targeted therapy. They were succeeded in 2022 by Laura Attardi and Scott A. Armstrong as editors. As with other Annual Reviews titles, the editors are assisted by an editorial committee that includes associate editors, regular members and occasionally guest members; guest members participate at the editors' invitation for one-year terms, while other committee members are appointed by the Annual Reviews board of directors for five-year terms. The committee decides which topics belong in each volume and solicits reviews from qualified authors.

The journal's open-access history is a notable part of its story. In 2020 it was one of the titles in Annual Reviews' Subscribe to Open pilot: its 2020 volume was published open access, a first for the journal, with articles under a Creative Commons CC BY licence, and its back volumes dating from 2017 were made freely available in that conversion. The publisher later reported that the volume 6 (2022) conversion followed the same pattern. The general Subscribe to Open principle, explained in the access section below, is that libraries continue to subscribe; if subscription support is sufficient, the year's volume is published open access without article processing charges to authors; if support is insufficient, the paywall is retained. Annual status can therefore vary by year and should be checked on the publisher's page for the specific volume you need, rather than assumed for all years from a single announcement.

Format history is simple and important for librarians: the journal is not published in print and is only published electronically. There is no print ISSN to record, no print subscription to claim when an issue is missing, and no shelf run to consult. Cataloguing, linking and preservation all depend on the electronic ISSN 2472-3428, the publisher's platform, and the digital preservation arrangements of the subscribing library. That is increasingly common for newer Annual Reviews titles and should not be read as a lesser status; it reflects a readership that works online and a publisher moving its portfolio toward open digital distribution.

Editorial Process: Commissioned, Reviewed, Not Unsolicited

The editorial process is stated plainly by the publisher and summarised consistently in reference sources: unsolicited manuscripts are not accepted. The editorial committee determines the topics for each volume and solicits reviews from qualified authors. Accepted manuscripts then undergo peer review undertaken by the editorial committee. For prospective authors, the practical implications are direct. You cannot submit a review manuscript on spec and expect consideration; you should not pay any third party that promises to place a paper in this journal; and if you are invited, you should expect active editorial shaping — of scope, length, balance and timing — because your chapter must fit a planned volume alongside other commissioned pieces.

For readers, the commissioned model is a quality signal with a known trade-off. The signal is that topics and authors were chosen by editors who survey the whole field, that manuscripts were reviewed, and that the resulting volume is coherent rather than accidental. The trade-off is perspective: a commissioned review reflects its authors' judgement about which studies matter and how controversies should be framed. Good reading practice is therefore to use the journal to map a topic, note the primary papers it foregrounds, and then read the most important of those papers — and, where a controversy is live, a review or primary paper from a different research group — before adopting a position in your own work. That habit uses the journal at its best, as a guide, without treating any single synthesis as the final word.

Annual Reviews' editorial policies and principles, linked from the journal's page, govern matters such as authorship, conflicts, corrections and the responsibilities of editors and reviewers across the publisher's portfolio. Authors who receive an invitation should read those policies and the journal's specific instructions at the time of invitation, because requirements on disclosure, figure permissions, reference style and licence can be updated between volumes. Fees are a frequent source of confusion: under Subscribe to Open, authors do not pay article processing charges for a volume that is opened; the model is funded through library subscriptions. If a website lists a generic submission fee or a fast-track charge for this journal, treat it as a warning sign of a misleading intermediary and verify directly with the publisher — no such charge was published in the official sources consulted for this profile.

Metrics, Indexing and Reputation — Reading the Numbers Carefully

The publisher's journal page lists an impact factor of 5.5. Reference reporting of Journal Citation Reports data places the journal, as of 2026 reporting, at 5.5 and ranked 76th of 333 titles in the Oncology category. Earlier and alternative indicators tell a consistent story of a respected specialist review title: the Journals World record lists SJR 2.724, h-index 44 and Q1 placements in cancer research, cell biology and oncology in SCImago-based data; Scopus-based listings report a CiteScore around 10 and coverage beginning in 2017, with the expected early-volume patterns of a new title. Indexing reported across sources includes Scopus, Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded, and Embase, among others. As always, the exact set and coverage years should be confirmed in the database you are actually using, because indexers update coverage and a listing in one service does not guarantee identical coverage in another.

Interpretation matters more than the headline. A review journal's impact factor reflects that review articles are cited often and that the journal publishes relatively few, carefully chosen articles per year; it is not a measure that can be compared naively with a large primary-research journal that publishes thousands of papers. The h-index of 44, for a journal founded in 2017, means 44 articles have each been cited at least 44 times at the time of the Journals World snapshot — a strong accumulation in under a decade, and one that will mechanically rise as more volumes and more citation years accumulate. The Q1 labels mean that, in the relevant SCImago categories and year, the journal sat in the top quarter by SJR; they are category- and year-specific, so a careful writer names the category, the source and the year instead of writing simply that a journal is Q1 as if it were a permanent property.

Perhaps the most useful reputation evidence is qualitative: who edits the journal, who is invited to write for it, and how its reviews are used. Founding and succeeding editors are senior figures in cancer research; commissioned authors are typically leaders of the subfields they review; and the journal's reviews are used in graduate teaching, in grant introductions, and as orientation reading when a research group enters a new area of cancer biology. None of that replaces checking a specific review's date and references. Cancer biology moves fast: a 2018 review of a therapeutic area may predate pivotal trial results, new approvals, or a revised understanding of resistance. Always note the volume year, and search for later primary literature and later reviews before relying on a treatment-related statement clinically or in a grant proposal.

Access: Subscribe to Open, Explained for Readers and Librarians

Subscribe to Open, often shortened to S2O, was developed by Annual Reviews as an alternative to author-pays open access. In outline: existing institutional subscribers continue their subscriptions, historically with a modest discount in the pilot offers; if enough subscriptions are received to sustain the title, that year's volume is published open access under a Creative Commons licence and back volumes are made freely available; if support proves insufficient, access remains gated for that year. The model uses ordinary library procurement, avoids article processing charges and their barrier for authors without large grants, and renews year by year so that libraries cannot permanently free-ride on a single year's collective decision. Annual Reviews has reported substantial usage increases when titles are opened, including for public-health and cancer-biology content during the pilot period — an outcome that matters in oncology, where relevant readers include clinicians, patient advocates, policy staff and researchers in lower-resource settings who may lack a major medical library subscription.

For an individual reader, the practical advice is straightforward. Start on the publisher's platform: if the volume you need was opened, you can read and reuse it under its stated CC BY terms, with attribution. If a volume or article appears gated in your location, access it through your institution's subscription, ask your library about its Annual Reviews package, or request help from a librarian before turning to informal copies. For a librarian, the key tasks are to confirm which Annual Reviews titles and years your package covers, to record the S2O status year by year in your holdings notes, and to communicate to faculty that the absence of author charges is a feature of the model — authors at your institution should not expect an invoice, and should be warned if a third party sends one in the journal's name.

For authors, open status also affects reuse and compliance. A CC BY article can be included in teaching materials, deposited and shared as the licence allows, and used to satisfy many funder expectations for open availability, subject to the exact licence and any third-party material within the article that carries its own permissions. Invited authors should confirm, at acceptance, the licence that will apply to their volume, how figures reproduced from other publishers will be handled, and whether their funder requires a particular repository deposit. Those details are set volume by volume and are not publicly disclosed as a single permanent rule in the sources consulted, so direct confirmation with the editorial office at the time of writing is the correct course.

Who Should Read It, and How to Use It in Practice

The core readership is cancer researchers in basic, translational and clinical settings, together with advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, oncologists and other clinicians who need a rigorous entry point to a neighbouring specialty, and scientists in pharmaceutical and biotechnology research who must judge where a mechanism, a target or a resistance pathway stands. A cell biologist moving into immuno-oncology, a computational researcher beginning to work with cancer genomes, a clinician-scientist preparing a trial rationale, and a new doctoral student writing a first literature review all face the same initial problem — too many papers, too little map — and that is precisely the problem this journal exists to solve.

Use it in three passes. First, survey: read the introduction and headings of the most recent review on your topic to learn the field's current vocabulary, its agreed facts and its open disputes. Second, trace: follow the review's citations to the primary papers that support the claims you actually intend to use, and read those papers in full; do not cite a review for a specific experimental result that you have not checked, when the primary paper is accessible. Third, update: because each volume is annual and cancer research moves quickly, search the literature from the review's closing date to the present for trials, approvals, retractions or new mechanisms that change the picture. A literature review, introduction or grant background built in that order — synthesis, primary verification, update — will be both efficient and defensible.

Teachers will find the three-theme structure helpful for course design. A module can pair a Cancer Cell Biology review with a Tumorigenesis and Progression review on the same cancer type, then close with a Translational review, asking students to identify exactly where a biological insight succeeded or failed to become a therapy, and why. Students should be assessed not on summarising the reviews, but on critiquing them: which primary studies were foregrounded, which were omitted, what date the evidence closes at, and what experiment or trial they would want to see next. That exercise teaches the central skill the journal models — synthesis with judgement — rather than mere accumulation of facts.

Strengths, Limits and Alternatives

Strengths include editorial authority, thematic coherence, open-access progress through Subscribe to Open without author charges, and a scope that deliberately joins basic mechanism to clinical translation in a single volume. For a young journal, its citation standing in oncology is strong, and its parent publisher's long experience with commissioned review publishing shows in production quality, linking and discoverability.

Limits are inherent to the format. It publishes no primary data, so it cannot substitute for journals that report trials and experiments. It is annual and commissioned, so coverage of a suddenly emerging topic waits for a planned volume. Its reviews, however good, age: statements about therapies, biomarkers or resistance must be date-checked. And its invitation-only model means most researchers will interact with it as readers and citers for much of their careers, which is normal for Annual Reviews titles and should not be mistaken for a submission opportunity.

Alternatives and complements include primary oncology and cell-biology journals for new data, disease-specific and therapy-specific review journals for narrower depth, and the other Annual Reviews titles in adjacent areas — such as genetics, genomics, immunology, pathology and pharmacology — when a cancer question sits at a disciplinary boundary. A well-built reading list will usually contain this journal for orientation, one or two narrower reviews for detail, and the primary papers themselves. That combination, rather than any single title, is what supports sound research and sound clinical reasoning.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was the Annual Review of Cancer Biology founded, and by whom as editors? It was first published in 2017 by Annual Reviews. The founding editors were Tyler Jacks and Charles L. Sawyers; they were succeeded in 2022 by Laura Attardi and Scott A. Armstrong.

What is its ISSN and format? Electronic ISSN 2472-3428. The journal is published only electronically; it is not published in print, so no print ISSN is listed by the publisher.

Can I submit an unsolicited review? No. Unsolicited manuscripts are not accepted. Topics are chosen by the editorial committee and reviews are solicited from qualified authors; accepted manuscripts are peer reviewed by the editorial committee.

Is it open access? It has been published open access under Subscribe to Open in the years when that programme applied and subscription support was sufficient, beginning with the 2020 volume in the pilot, with articles under CC BY and back volumes made freely available at conversion. Check the publisher's page for the specific volume you need, because S2O operates year by year.

What is its impact factor and quartile? The publisher lists an impact factor of 5.5, with Journal Citation Reports reporting, as of 2026, a rank of 76th of 333 in Oncology. SCImago-based data in the Journals World record lists SJR 2.724 and Q1 placements; always cite metric, source, category and year together.

What subjects does it cover? Cancer cell biology, tumorigenesis and cancer progression, and translational cancer science — including cancer genomes, tumour–host interactions, microenvironment and metabolism, targeted and immune therapies, biomarkers and drug resistance, as organised under those three themes.

Verification Notes for This Profile

This profile is based on the publisher's journal page for the Annual Review of Cancer Biology, the Journals World record for post 389081, and reference and SCImago-based listings consulted for editorial history and indexing context. No conflict was found between the record and official sources on publisher, country, ISSN or subject scope. An acceptance rate and a general article processing charge are not published for this commissioned title in the official sources consulted and are therefore described as not publicly disclosed in that form, rather than estimated. No duplicate record for this title was identified from the records checked during this enrichment, and no merge is proposed here.