About Archives of Dermatology

Archives of Dermatology

Archives of Dermatology was, for more than half a century, the dermatology journal of the American Medical Association, and one of the defining specialty journals of twentieth-century medicine. It is equally important to say, at the very start of this profile, what it is now: a ceased title. The journal ceased publication under the name Archives of Dermatology at the end of 2012, and from 1 January 2013 it has continued, in the same volume sequence and under the same publisher, as JAMA Dermatology. An author in 2026 cannot submit a manuscript to Archives of Dermatology, because there is no longer an editorial office receiving work under that name. What survives, and what this record documents, is a very large, heavily cited historical archive — and a direct line of descent into one of the most selective dermatology journals published today.

The JournalsWorld record for this journal stores two ISSNs, 0003-987X and 1538-3652, a United States country association, and an h-index of 251. Each of those stored facts checks out against independent sources consulted for this profile. OpenAlex records the same two ISSNs for the same title, published by the American Medical Association in the United States, and library title-history records show the same print ISSN running through the journal's long sequence of related titles. The stored record renders the publisher as a bare number in its template text, which is a display artifact of the underlying data; the publisher is the American Medical Association, as set out below.

At a glance

A title with several lives: 1882 to 2013

The lineage begins well before the Archives name. A historical account published in the journal itself records that the publication began in October 1882 as the Journal of Cutaneous and Venereal Diseases, and that in 1920 the American Medical Association became responsible for its publication and renamed it Archives of Dermatology and Syphilology. Library title-history records then trace the mid-century steps in detail: Archives of Dermatology and Syphilology ran to 1950, followed by a period under the AMA Archives styling, and the title settled as Archives of Dermatology in 1960, running from volume 82 to volume 148 in 2012. The JAMA Network states the same story from the present-day end: JAMA Dermatology has been in continuous publication since 1882, and began publication by the American Medical Association in 1920 as Archives of Dermatology and Syphilology.

The final change was a branding decision, not a closure. In 2012 the American Medical Association launched the JAMA Network, interconnecting JAMA with its nine Archives specialty journals, and announced that from 1 January 2013 all nine would be renamed on the JAMA pattern. Archives of Dermatology therefore became JAMA Dermatology with the first issue of 2013, coinciding with a major redesign of the network's journals. Volume numbering continued — the successor's first volume was 149, directly after Archives of Dermatology volume 148 — which is the clearest bibliographic evidence that this was a renaming of a continuing journal rather than the launch of a new one. For citation purposes, however, the titles remain distinct: a 2005 article was published in Archives of Dermatology and should be cited under that name and the old ISSNs, while a 2015 article belongs to JAMA Dermatology under the new ISSNs.

Scope under the Archives title

The subject territory did not change when the name did, so the successor's own description of the journal's material is the best surviving statement of what Archives of Dermatology published. In the JAMA Network's words, the journal publishes material that helps in the development and testing of the effectiveness of diagnosis and treatment in medical and surgical dermatology, pediatric and geriatric dermatology, and oncologic and aesthetic dermatologic surgery. Translated into the working life of the Archives era, that meant original clinical investigations, therapeutic trials, clinicopathological studies, surgical technique papers, case reports and series with genuine teaching value, reviews, editorials and correspondence, covering skin disease across the whole age range from infancy to old age, and spanning inflammatory, infectious, neoplastic, genetic and cosmetic dermatology.

Two features of that scope are worth underlining for anyone using the archive today. First, this was a clinician's journal owned by a national medical association, not a laboratory journal: its centre of gravity was the diagnosis and management of patients, and its most durable papers are studies that changed how a condition is recognised or treated. Second, its syphilology inheritance matters to historians. The journal carried venereal disease in its title until the 1950s, and its early and mid-century volumes are a primary source for the history of sexually transmitted infection, of dermatological surgery, and of the professionalisation of dermatology in the United States.

Metrics: a large archive, honestly described

The citation record is exceptional, and it can be stated precisely because it was fetched directly for this profile. OpenAlex (source S115046667) records 36,691 works under the Archives of Dermatology ISSNs, cited 764,347 times in total, with an h-index of 252 and 14,085 works cited at least ten times. The JournalsWorld stored h-index of 251 differs from the OpenAlex figure by one, which is ordinary measurement noise between systems and dates, not a contradiction: both say the same thing, that more than two hundred and fifty papers in this archive have each been cited at least two hundred and fifty times. That is the signature of a journal that published, for decades, much of the reference literature of its specialty.

Equally, readers should notice what the OpenAlex record says about the present: the two-year mean citedness for the source is recorded as 0.0, which is exactly what one expects of a title that stopped publishing in 2012, because there are no recent papers to attract recent citations. Any website that presents a current impact factor, a current acceptance rate or a current call for papers for Archives of Dermatology itself is misdescribing a ceased journal, usually by silently borrowing the successor's data. The successor's figures belong to the successor: the JAMA Network currently describes JAMA Dermatology with its own Journal Impact Factor, its own very low acceptance rate, reported on its author pages as 8 per cent, and its own editorial team led by its editor in chief. Those numbers describe the journal you would submit to today, under the new title and the new ISSNs, and this profile does not transfer them backwards onto the Archives record.

How the archive is used today

The practical value of Archives of Dermatology in 2026 is threefold. Clinically, its back file remains part of the evidence base of dermatology: landmark trials, classification papers and long-term follow-up studies published under this title are still cited in guidelines and systematic reviews, and systematic reviewers searching the literature before 2013 must search under the Archives name and its earlier variant titles or they will miss material. Bibliographically, the title is a trap for the unwary: databases variously index the run under Archives of Dermatology and Syphilology, under the AMA Archives styling, and under JAMA Dermatology, so a complete search works through the title history rather than a single search string, and a complete citation record for the journal family assembles all of them. Academically, the run is a primary source for the history of American specialty medicine, of medical publishing under association ownership, and of the clinical construction of skin disease across a century that included two world wars, the antibiotic era and the beginnings of modern dermatologic surgery and photomedicine.

Access to the archive runs through the JAMA Network platform, where the back file sits alongside the current JAMA Dermatology content, and through the library subscriptions and indexing services that carried the journal during its life. The journal was published on a conventional subscription model for most of its run; the successor's present policy, under which research articles become free to read twelve months after publication, is a JAMA Dermatology policy and should not be assumed to describe every part of the older archive, whose access terms follow the platform and the holding library.

Relationship to the separate JAMA Dermatology record

JournalsWorld carries JAMA Dermatology as its own record, with its own depth profile, under ISSNs 2168-6068 and 2168-6084. That separation is correct and this profile does not duplicate it. The two records describe one continuing journal at two stages of its life, divided by a clean bibliographic break: title, ISSN and editorial branding all changed on 1 January 2013, while the publisher, the volume sequence and the subject scope continued. Authors should cite and submit using the successor record. Readers researching the historical journal, cataloguing the back file, or tracing a citation from before 2013 should use this record. Anyone who finds a third-party site inviting submissions to Archives of Dermatology by name, or offering to publish in it for a fee, is looking at a misleading site: the title has had no submission route since 2012, and the only legitimate destination for new dermatology manuscripts in this journal family is JAMA Dermatology through the JAMA Network's own submission system.

What a reader finds in the run

Working through the Archives run decade by decade is a compact education in modern dermatology. The syphilology years are dominated by infectious disease, serology and the arsenical and then penicillin treatment eras, and they document a specialty that was still substantially concerned with one great infection. The post-war decades show the specialty broadening into occupational and contact dermatitis, dermatopathology, mycology, and the systematic description of inherited and inflammatory skin disease, with clinicopathological correlation as a characteristic house method: a case presented clinically, examined histologically, and argued over in print. The later twentieth century brings controlled therapeutic trials, the retinoid and phototherapy eras, the recognition and classification of cutaneous lymphomas and melanocytic tumours, the dermatology of HIV infection, and the growth of dermatologic surgery from a minor technique literature into the oncologic and aesthetic surgery named in the modern scope statement. The final Archives decade, the 2000s to 2012, is recognisably contemporary: biologic therapies for psoriasis, evidence-based reviews, outcomes research and an increasingly international authorship, all of which pass without interruption into the successor title.

That continuity is also why the archive must be read with historical care. Diagnostic labels, drug doses, surgical indications and ethical norms in a 1955 or even a 1985 paper reflect the knowledge and the standards of their moment. A treatment reported favourably in these pages may since have been withdrawn, superseded or shown harmful in larger studies, and a classification used confidently in 1970 may have been split, merged or abandoned. Clinicians use the back file as evidence within systematic, up-to-date reviews, not as a stand-alone instruction to treat; historians use it as a record of what the specialty believed and did. Both uses are legitimate, and confusing them is the one real danger the archive poses.

Cataloguing and citation guidance

Cataloguers should record this title exactly as Archives of Dermatology, with print ISSN 0003-987X and electronic ISSN 1538-3652, publisher American Medical Association, country United States, and a continuation note pointing forward to JAMA Dermatology from 2013 and backwards through Archives of Dermatology and Syphilology and the earlier Journal of Cutaneous and Venereal Diseases. The stored JournalsWorld record's rendering of the publisher as a bare numeric term is a display fault in the template text, not a fact about the journal, and it should not be copied into other catalogues. Authors citing the journal should abbreviate it in the usual medical style, give the year, volume and pages or article number as published, and resist the common error of retrospectively renaming old citations to JAMA Dermatology: a citation is a record of where a paper actually appeared, and changing the journal name in a reference list makes the reference harder, not easier, to verify. Reviewers assembling a publication history for the journal family should state explicitly which titles and which ISSN pairs they included, because totals for the family and totals for the Archives title alone differ by tens of thousands of papers.

Frequently asked questions

Can I submit a paper to Archives of Dermatology? No. The title ceased at the end of 2012. New manuscripts for this journal belong to its continuation, JAMA Dermatology, submitted through the JAMA Network.

Is JAMA Dermatology the same journal? It is the same continuing publication under a new title and new ISSNs from 2013, with continuous volume numbering. Bibliographically the two titles are separate records, and citations should use the title in force when the article appeared.

What are the correct ISSNs? For Archives of Dermatology, 0003-987X in print and 1538-3652 online. For JAMA Dermatology, 2168-6068 and 2168-6084. Do not use one pair for the other title.

Why is the h-index so high while recent citation measures are zero? Because the archive is enormous and historically influential — OpenAlex records 36,691 works and 764,347 citations — but the title has published nothing new since 2012, so measures that depend on recent papers have nothing to count.

Who published it? The American Medical Association, in the United States, from 1920 until the 2013 renaming, and the association continues to publish the successor in the JAMA Network.

How should a systematic reviewer search it? Search the whole title family, not one name: Archives of Dermatology, Archives of Dermatology and Syphilology, the AMA Archives styling of the 1950s, and JAMA Dermatology for material from 2013 onward, using both ISSN pairs and the title abbreviations databases use. Stating the titles and ISSNs searched, in the review's methods, is what makes the search reproducible.

One further distinction is worth keeping in view. The influence figures in this profile describe the archive as a whole, accumulated over ninety years of the Archives title and its predecessors under association ownership. They are not a league table position for any single year, and they should not be set beside the annual metrics of a journal that is still publishing as though the two were the same kind of object. Used properly, they tell a simpler and more useful story: dermatologists and historians will be reading, citing and arguing with papers published under this title for a long time after its name left the masthead, which is precisely why the record deserves the same care as the record of a living journal.

Standing of this record

This is a historical record of a ceased title, kept at full depth because the journal behind it remains one of the most cited in its specialty and because researchers, reviewers and librarians still work with its archive every day. Nothing in this profile should be read as a call for papers, a statement of current editorial policy, or a promise about access terms for any individual article. Those belong, respectively, to JAMA Dermatology as the continuing journal, to the JAMA Network as its publisher, and to the platform or library through which a reader reaches the back file. Where this profile gives a number for the continuing journal, it does so only to keep the two records from being confused with each other, and it attributes that number to the JAMA Network's own current pages rather than to the Archives title.

Sources and verification note

This profile rests on the JAMA Network's own announcement of the 2013 renaming of the Archives journals and on its current author pages for JAMA Dermatology, which give the 1882 and 1920 history and the present scope statement; on library title-history records tracing the title sequence and ISSNs; on a historical account of the journal published in its own pages; and on the OpenAlex source record for ISSN 0003-987X (source S115046667), fetched directly for this profile, for works, citations and h-index. A Directory of Open Access Journals search by ISSN returned no record. Figures belonging to the successor title are attributed to the successor throughout and were not transferred to this record.