Antiviral chemistry & chemotherapy

About Antiviral chemistry & chemotherapy

Antiviral Chemistry & Chemotherapy — Full Profile

Antiviral Chemistry & Chemotherapy (ISSN 0956-3202; online 2040-2066), founded in 1990 and now published by SAGE, is the International Society for Antiviral Research's specialist journal for the preclinical development of antiviral drugs, from compound synthesis and biochemistry to pharmacology, mechanism of action, virology and animal models.

At a glance

• Title: Antiviral Chemistry & Chemotherapy (Antiviral Chemistry and Chemotherapy)
• ISSN: 0956-3202 (print); 2040-2066 (online); CODEN ACCHEH; ISO 4: Antivir. Chem. Chemother.
• Founded: January 1990; Blackwell Publishing to 1997; then International Medical Press; current publisher SAGE Publishing
• Official publication of the International Society for Antiviral Research; sister journal: Antiviral Therapy
• Submission: ScholarOne portal for the journal (mc.manuscriptcentral.com/avcc)
• Article charges: could not be verified from a single authoritative source; listings conflict, so confirm on the SAGE journal page at submission

Overview and identity

Antiviral Chemistry and Chemotherapy, abbreviated in ISO 4 form as Antivir. Chem. Chemother. and carrying the CODEN ACCHEH, is a specialist peer-reviewed journal for the preclinical science of antiviral drugs. Its print ISSN is 0956-3202 and its online ISSN is 2040-2066. It was established in January 1990, was published by Blackwell Publishing until 1997, and subsequently by International Medical Press; its current publisher is SAGE Publishing, whose journal platform now presents it as a peer-reviewed open-access title. It is an official publication of the International Society for Antiviral Research, the professional society for scientists working on antiviral development, and its sister title in the same family is Antiviral Therapy, which covers the clinical side of the field.

The division of labour between the two titles is the fastest way to understand this one. Antiviral Therapy takes clinical development: trial results, resistance in patients, diagnostics in practice, drug safety and pharmacoepidemiology. Antiviral Chemistry and Chemotherapy takes everything that must happen before and alongside that clinical work: the design and synthesis of compounds, their biochemistry and mechanism of action, their pharmacology, their behaviour in cell culture and in animal models, and the virology that explains why a compound succeeds or fails against a given virus. A medicinal chemist with a new nucleoside analogue, or a virologist characterising how a virus escapes an inhibitor, is writing for this journal; a clinician reporting a treatment cohort is usually writing for its sister.

The journal's historical editor-in-chief, Hugh J. Field of the University of Cambridge, is recorded in standard references for the title, and the journal's authorship over three decades reads as a roll of the antiviral research community, including the nucleoside-analogue school associated with the late Professor Chris McGuigan, to whom SAGE devoted a special collection of the journal on advances in antiviral nucleoside analogues and their prodrugs. That collection, with contributions on hepatitis C prodrugs, on nucleoside analogues against arthropod-borne flaviviruses, and on nucleosides for respiratory RNA virus infections, is a compact portrait of the journal at its best.

Scope in detail

The journal covers research on all aspects of antiviral compounds, including their chemistry, therapeutic effects, biochemistry, pharmacology and virology, and it publishes original research alongside reviews, pointers, short communications and correspondence. In practical terms its core territories are these. First, medicinal chemistry: the synthesis and characterisation of new antiviral compounds, including heterocyclic chemistry, nucleoside and nucleotide analogues and their prodrug strategies, and organophosphorus and other scaffold work aimed at a viral target. Second, mechanism and biochemistry: how a compound interacts with a viral polymerase, protease, integrase or other enzyme, how resistance mutations arise and what they cost the virus, and how structure-activity relationships explain potency and selectivity.

Third, virology and evaluation models: antiviral testing in cell systems, combination studies, spectrum-of-activity studies across virus families, and studies in animal models that bridge from bench potency to a plausible therapeutic. The journal's archive illustrates the breadth within that frame: all six nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors then licensed for HIV treatment were tested against a panel of seven retroviruses from the traditional subfamilies, with zidovudine the most broadly active and lamivudine the least, and with potency varying even between closely related viruses in ways that could not have been predicted from HIV data alone. That kind of careful, comparative, preclinical evaluation is the journal's staple contribution.

The virus coverage is correspondingly wide. HIV and the retroviruses, herpesviruses including herpes simplex and cytomegalovirus, hepatitis B and C viruses, influenza and other respiratory viruses, and flaviviruses such as dengue and Zika all recur in the archive, and the special-collection programme shows the journal responding to emerging threats, with work relevant to Ebola, norovirus, respiratory syncytial virus and coronaviruses gathered alongside the chronic-infection literature. Review and pointer articles that map a fast-moving corner of the field for non-specialist antiviral researchers form a valued part of the mix, because the journal's readers are typically deep specialists in one virus or one chemistry who need reliable orientation in the neighbouring territory.

History and publishing development

Founded at the start of 1990, the journal belongs to the generation of antiviral publishing created by the HIV epidemic, when the first antiretroviral drugs made antiviral chemotherapy a discipline in its own right rather than a branch of general antimicrobial work. Blackwell Publishing carried it through its first seven years, a period in which the nucleoside era defined the field, and International Medical Press, a specialist medical publisher closely associated with the International Society for Antiviral Research and with Antiviral Therapy, then became its home. Under SAGE the journal has moved to an open-access presentation on a major international platform, which changes its economics and its reach while keeping its society association and its specialist identity.

The frequency recorded in standard references for the print era is bimonthly, six issues a year, and the journal's long archive is organised in annual volumes reaching back to 1990. More recent publishing follows the continuous online pattern normal for SAGE open-access titles, in which accepted articles appear online as they are ready and are gathered into the volume record. Authors checking a citation should therefore expect to meet both forms in the wild: older articles with volume, issue and page numbers, and newer articles identified primarily by volume and DOI in the SAGE style, with DOIs built on the journal's print ISSN stem, in the pattern 10.1177/09563202 followed by the article sequence.

Longevity cuts both ways and a careful profile should say so. A journal founded in 1990 that remains the official publication of its field's international society has a durable institutional anchor, and its back archive is a genuine historical record of antiviral drug development from the first nucleosides onward. At the same time, the antiviral field has consolidated around a small number of very large general and specialist titles, and this journal now operates as a focused, society-linked specialist outlet rather than as the field's single flagship. Authors should choose it for fit, audience and society connection, and should check its current activity level and any article charge on the SAGE page at the moment of submission, because open-access terms for converted titles are the detail most likely to have changed since any secondary listing was compiled.

Indexing, metrics and bibliographic care

Standard references record the journal as abstracted and indexed in BIOSIS Previews, CAB Abstracts, Excerpta Medica and EMBASE, Chemical Abstracts and Research Alert, and SCImago's Scopus-based record for the title gives a coverage history running from 1991 to 2015 and resuming from 2017 into the early 2020s in the snapshot consulted, with subject categorisation in drug discovery, medicine, pharmacology and virology. Journals World records an h-index of 66 for the title in its structured data; other services quote lower figures, in the high fifties and low sixties, computed over different windows. The spread is normal for a journal of this age and size and is a reminder to cite the source and year of any metric rather than treat a single number as a property of the journal itself.

Bibliographic care matters with this title for two reasons. The first is the ampersand: the title appears as Antiviral Chemistry and Chemotherapy in many databases and as Antiviral Chemistry & Chemotherapy on the journal's own masthead, and the ISO abbreviation Antivir. Chem. Chemother. is the safest form in a reference list. The second is confusion with Antiviral Therapy and with the broader antiviral review literature: the two society titles share a publisher history, a society and a readership, and hurried citation copying between them is a known source of error in review bibliographies. Matching the ISSN, 0956-3202 for print or 2040-2066 for online, resolves any doubt in seconds.

Discovery today runs through the SAGE platform, PubMed-era biomedical indexing for the older archive, Scopus-derived services for the covered years, and general scholarly search. Because coverage in any one database is partial across a thirty-six-year run, a systematic reviewer searching this journal's territory should search the journal archive directly as well as the databases, and should use both the full title and the ISO abbreviation as search terms.

Submission and editorial process

Manuscripts are submitted through the online ScholarOne submission portal for the journal, recorded in publisher listings at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/avcc, and are handled under SAGE's standard author framework, including its guidance on manuscript preparation, artwork, permissions for reproduced material, and declarations. As with all SAGE titles, authors should read the journal's own aims and scope page and its current submission guidelines on the SAGE site immediately before submitting, since article types, length expectations and open-access terms are maintained there and supersede any third-party summary.

The article types the journal has traditionally carried are original research papers, reviews, short communications and correspondence, together with commissioned pointers and special-collection articles assembled by guest editors, as in the nucleoside analogues collection edited by Jerome Deval and Katherine L. Seley-Radtke. A special collection is often the most visible route into the journal for a review author, because collections are promoted as a group and read as a set; prospective review authors with a topic that fits a live collection call should respond to the call rather than submit speculatively.

No article processing charge figure is asserted in this profile. Secondary listings disagree about the journal's charging position, with some describing it as publishing without an author charge and SCImago publishing an estimated charge figure that is a modelling estimate rather than a publisher price. Where sources conflict in that way, the only safe course, and the one this profile recommends, is to take the figure from the SAGE journal page or from the submission system at the time of submission and to record it in the submission paperwork. The same discipline applies to any statement about review speed: no official timetable was relied on here, and authors working to a grant or thesis deadline should ask the editorial office directly.

Assessment: strengths, limits and fit

The journal's strengths are focus, society anchoring and archive depth. It speaks to a defined community that actually develops antiviral compounds, it is the official publication of that community's international society, and its three decades of archive contain primary evaluations of compounds and classes that later literature cites as settled fact. For a preclinical antiviral paper whose natural readers are medicinal chemists and virologists rather than clinicians, it offers an audience that will read the chemistry and the virology with equal attention, which is rarer than it should be.

Its limits follow from the same focus. It is not a clinical journal, not a general pharmacology journal, and not a high-volume open-access megajournal; papers needing a clinical, epidemiological or general medical readership belong elsewhere, most obviously in its sister title for clinical antiviral work. Its citation metrics sit in the specialist middle range rather than at the top of pharmacology or virology rankings, and authors whose evaluation systems reward only top-quartile placement should factor that in honestly before submitting, using current-year figures from the ranking service their institution uses.

Taken as a whole, Antiviral Chemistry and Chemotherapy is best understood as the preclinical half of a two-journal society publishing programme that has served antiviral research since the first years of the antiretroviral era. For authors inside that programme's territory it remains a credible, well-identified home with stable identifiers, a clear scope and a readership of peers. For readers and librarians it is a title to keep distinct, carefully cited, and searched directly, because a significant part of the primary record of how antiviral drugs were first made and tested sits in its pages.

Reading the journal as a researcher

The archive rewards systematic reading by compound class and by virus, and the journal's own special collections provide ready-made entry points. A researcher entering the nucleoside field, for example, can begin with the collection on nucleoside analogues and their prodrugs and move from its scene-setting reviews to the primary evaluations they discuss, acquiring in one place both the medicinal-chemistry logic of prodrug design and the comparative virology that shows where a class works and where it fails. A researcher working on a single virus can use the journal in the opposite direction, gathering the preclinical evaluations scattered across decades of issues into a development history of that virus's drug pipeline, including the negative and spectrum-limiting results that are often the hardest to find and the most useful to know before designing a new screen.

Negative and comparative results deserve emphasis because they are a distinctive part of this journal's value. The retrovirus panel study discussed earlier in this profile is remembered precisely because it reported where licensed drugs did not work, virus by virus, at concentrations that mattered. Literature searches confined to high-profile general journals systematically under-recover such results, and drug-development decisions made without them repeat work that was done and published here years earlier. Any thorough preclinical review in this field should therefore include this journal in its search set by title and abbreviation, alongside the large databases.

Author guidance in practice

A manuscript for this journal should be written so that two different expert readers can each audit their half. The chemist should be able to follow the synthesis, characterisation and purity evidence for every compound without recourse to unpublished detail, and the virologist should be able to follow the virus strains, cell systems, assay conditions, cytotoxicity controls and selectivity calculations with the same completeness. Papers most often weaken at the join between the halves: a beautiful series of analogues evaluated in a single under-described assay, or a thorough virological study of a compound whose structure and provenance are loosely specified. Reviewers drawn from this community can be expected to press on exactly that join. Authors should also decide early whether their contribution is a full research paper, a short communication reporting a completed but compact study, or a review, and should shape length and display items to the chosen form under the current SAGE guidelines rather than retrofit the manuscript after review.

Because the journal is a society title, authors should consider its community routes as well as its submission portal. Work presented to the International Society for Antiviral Research's meetings and networks reaches the same readership the journal serves, and special collections and commissioned review programmes periodically create openings that a speculative submission would miss. None of that replaces the formal route: submission is through the journal's ScholarOne portal, compliance is with the current SAGE author guidelines, and the open-access and charging position to apply is the one shown on the live SAGE journal page on the day of submission.

Frequently asked questions

Is this journal the same as Antiviral Therapy? No. They are companion titles linked to the same society. This journal covers preclinical development, chemistry and virology; Antiviral Therapy covers clinical development and practice. Their ISSNs differ, and citations should be checked against them.

When was it founded, and by whom was it published? It was established in January 1990, published by Blackwell Publishing until 1997, then by International Medical Press, and it is now published by SAGE.

What are its identifiers? Print ISSN 0956-3202, online ISSN 2040-2066, CODEN ACCHEH, ISO abbreviation Antivir. Chem. Chemother.

Where is it indexed? Standard references list BIOSIS Previews, CAB Abstracts, EMBASE and Excerpta Medica, Chemical Abstracts and Research Alert, with Scopus-derived coverage recorded across most of its run. Database coverage changes, so a current check of the relevant source list is advised for formal reporting.

What does it cost to publish? That figure could not be verified from a single authoritative source for this profile, because secondary listings conflict. Confirm the position on the SAGE journal page or in the submission system before submitting.