Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery

About Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery

Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery — Journal Profile

Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery was a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association (AMA) in the United States, with print ISSN 1521-2491 and online ISSN 1538-3660. Launched in 1999 under founding editor Wayne F. Larrabee Jr, it was the specialist journal of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery within the AMA's Archives family of specialty titles. In January 2013, as part of the creation of the JAMA Network, it was renamed JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery. That successor title ran until the end of 2019, when the journal was acquired by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS) and, from January 2020, continued as Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine, published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. This profile therefore describes a ceased title with a living lineage: the Archives name is historical, its archive remains clinically and scientifically important, and authors seeking to publish new work in this field today should direct submissions to the successor title, not to the Archives title itself.

The Journals World record anchored here carries the Archives title, the AMA as publisher, and the ISSN pair 1521-2491 and 1538-3660. Readers should understand that pairing clearly. Those ISSNs belong to the 1999–2012 Archives run. The JAMA-era successor carried different ISSNs (2168-6076 print and 2168-6092 online), and the current AAFPRS title is a further continuation. Keeping the three stages distinct matters for citation, for library holdings, and for anyone tracing a reference: an article cited as Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery belongs to the first stage, and its volume numbering and editorial context follow from that.

Quick Facts

History: Three Names, One Journal Lineage

The journal was established in 1999 as Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery. Wayne F. Larrabee Jr launched the title and served as its founding editor, building it as the peer-reviewed home for research on reconstructive and cosmetic surgery of the face, head and neck at a time when facial plastic surgery was consolidating as a distinct subspecialty drawing on otolaryngology, plastic surgery, oculoplastic surgery, dermatology and maxillofacial surgery. As one of the AMA's Archives specialty journals — the family that also included titles in dermatology, internal medicine, neurology, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, pediatrics, psychiatry and surgery — it carried the editorial conventions of that family: structured original investigations, clinical reviews, and a readership of practising specialists.

In April and May 2012 the AMA launched the JAMA Network, interconnecting JAMA and the nine Archives journals under a single editorial and publishing system. As the JAMA Network announced at the time, effective 1 January 2013 all nine Archives journals were officially renamed, and Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery became JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery. The renaming coincided with the first major print redesign of the network journals in more than twenty years. John S. Rhee of the Medical College of Wisconsin served as editor-in-chief of the JAMA-era title. The journal's stated mission in that era was to promote the art and science of facial plastic surgery by publishing significant peer-reviewed articles on all aspects of reconstructive and cosmetic surgery of the head and neck, to promote the education and contributions of physicians worldwide, and to provide a forum for important and relevant issues in ethics and public policy. It was the official publication for the AAFPRS, and the European Academy of Facial Plastic Surgery and the International Federation of Facial Plastic Surgery Societies were formal affiliated organisations.

The third stage began when the AAFPRS acquired the journal from the AMA. As the Academy announced in December 2019, effective January 2020 the title was superseded by Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine, published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., with Dr Rhee continuing as editor at the transition. The new name was chosen deliberately to unite the traditional strengths of facial plastic surgery — rhinoplasty, facial reanimation surgery, reconstruction, surgical rejuvenation — with the growing aesthetics field, including injectables, topicals and concepts of beauty and well-being. For directory purposes the essential point is continuity of lineage with change of title, owner and publisher at each stage: Archives (AMA, 1999–2012), JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery (AMA, 2013–2019), and Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine (AAFPRS / Mary Ann Liebert, from 2020).

Scope and Content in the Archives Era

The journal's content covered all aspects of reconstructive and cosmetic surgery of the head and neck. In practical terms, its pages addressed rhinoplasty and nasal reconstruction; facial rejuvenation surgery including facelift and eyelid procedures; facial reanimation for facial nerve disorders; reconstruction after skin cancer surgery, trauma or congenital difference; scar revision; hair restoration; oculoplastic procedures; and non-surgical and adjunctive aesthetic treatments as those developed. Alongside operative research, the journal published work on anatomy relevant to facial surgery, on outcomes and patient-reported measures, on complications and their management, and on ethics and public policy questions affecting the specialty — the third strand of its stated mission, and one that distinguished it from purely technical surgical outlets.

Article forms followed the JAMA family pattern of the period: original investigations reporting clinical studies and trials; clinical reviews and meta-analyses synthesising evidence on a procedure or question; surgical technique and innovation reports; case-based and brief reports; editorials and viewpoints; and correspondence. Peer review was the journal's stated basis — the JAMA-era instructions described it as an international peer-reviewed journal published six times a year, with new online content posted weekly on Thursdays in that period — and authorship followed the JAMA Network's strict criteria, requiring substantial contribution to conception, design, data acquisition or analysis, drafting or critical revision, and final approval, with one or more authors taking responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole.

For researchers using the archive today, this scope definition is the key to searching it well. A question about the evidence base for a facial procedure as it stood in the 2000s — the comparative outcomes literature on rhinoplasty techniques, early reports on fillers and neuromodulators in facial aesthetics, reanimation outcomes, or reconstruction series from major centres — is very likely to have part of its record in this journal's volumes. Systematic reviewers in facial plastic surgery routinely need to search across all three title stages, because database records may index the same lineage under different titles depending on year, and a search limited to the current title will miss the Archives-era evidence entirely.

Metrics and Standing

During its JAMA era the journal reported strong citation standing for its specialty. The successor publisher's announcement at the 2020 transition described the title as carrying an impact factor of 3.056 at that time, characterised as among the highest in aesthetic and reconstructive surgery and the highest among facial plastic surgery journals; a later Journal Citation Reports figure for JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, for 2021, was 4.667. Those figures belong to the JAMA-era title and to their respective years, and this profile reports them as historical, sourced values rather than as a current metric for the Archives title, for which no Journal Citation Reports factor is asserted. The more durable indicators of the Archives journal's standing are structural: publication by the AMA within its flagship specialty family, adoption as the official journal of the field's principal academy, and the fact that two successor titles have continued the lineage without interruption since 1999.

Indexing followed the JAMA Network pattern for biomedical titles, with the journal's content discoverable through the major medical literature databases of its era, including MEDLINE/PubMed and Scopus, under the title in force at the time of publication. Anyone verifying a specific article's indexing should search by article title, authors and year rather than by journal title alone, precisely because the title changed twice. Likewise, citations should be recorded under the title the journal carried when the article appeared: Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery for 1999–2012 material, JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery for 2013–2019 material, and Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine from 2020 onward. Conflating those stages is the single most common bibliographic error associated with this lineage, and this profile flags it explicitly so that readers of the Journals World record do not repeat it.

Who This Record Serves Today

Because the Archives title is ceased, this record serves three audiences differently. First, clinicians and researchers tracing evidence: the archive is a primary source for the development of modern facial plastic surgery, and its articles continue to be cited in guidelines, reviews and operative literature. Second, librarians and bibliographers: the record documents the ISSN pair, publisher and dates needed to manage holdings and link resolvers correctly across the title changes. Third, prospective authors: for them the honest guidance is redirection. New manuscripts in facial plastic and aesthetic surgery belonging to this lineage should be prepared for Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine under its current author instructions on the Mary Ann Liebert platform, where the current editorial team, submission system, article processing arrangements and peer-review policies are published. No submission route exists for the Archives title itself, and any service claiming to accept submissions to Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery in exchange for a fee should be treated with caution and verified against the AAFPRS and publisher websites.

That caution generalises. Ceased JAMA-family titles are occasionally imitated by unrelated websites trading on a respected name. The authentic lineage is verifiable in a few steps: the JAMA Network's own 2012 announcement of the renaming, the AAFPRS announcement of the acquisition and the 2020 title, and the current publisher's journal page. If a purported journal site cannot be reconciled with that chain, it is not this journal, whatever ISSN it displays.

Reading the Archive Critically

Historical surgical literature needs historically aware reading. Techniques, materials and regulatory positions described in Archives-era articles reflect the standards of their time: implant materials, filler products and energy-based devices have since changed, some products discussed were later withdrawn or restricted in some jurisdictions, and outcome measures have become more standardised and more patient-centred. A 2005 technique report is evidence of what was practised and reported then, and may remain anatomically instructive, but it is not, by itself, a statement of current best practice. Readers should pair archive material with the successor title's recent literature and with current academy guidance before drawing clinical conclusions. Similarly, the ethics and policy articles in the archive — on advertising, on cosmetic surgery for adolescents, on training and credentialing — document debates that have continued into the successor title, and are valuable partly because they show how the specialty's positions developed.

Editorial Practice in the JAMA Family Tradition

As an AMA Archives journal, the title operated inside one of the most formalised editorial systems in medical publishing. Manuscripts were handled through the JAMA Network's editorial offices, with statistical review available for quantitative clinical studies, strict requirements for reporting clinical trials and observational research in line with the reporting guidelines of the period, and the network's long-standing rules on conflict-of-interest disclosure, funding statements and data access. For facial plastic surgery — a field where much of the literature consists of single-surgeon series, retrospective cohorts and technique descriptions rather than large randomised trials — that editorial discipline mattered. Structured abstracts, explicit statements of study design and follow-up duration, standardised photography conventions for before-and-after images, and consent requirements for identifiable patient photographs were all part of making a visually driven surgical literature scientifically usable. The archive's continuing citation life owes much to that consistency: later reviewers can usually extract design, sample size, follow-up and outcome data from Archives-era articles because the journal required those elements to be reported in predictable places.

The journal also served an educational function for a specialty whose training pathways cross several parent disciplines. Residents and fellows in otolaryngology–head and neck surgery, plastic surgery and related fields read it alongside their parent-specialty literature, and its review articles and technique papers were written to be usable by a trained surgeon outside the author's own subspecialty niche. That breadth explains the presence, unusual in a narrow operative journal, of sustained discussion of ethics, advertising, credentialing and public policy: a field that operates at the boundary of reconstruction and elective cosmetic practice has to argue publicly about where that boundary lies, and the journal provided the forum its mission statement promised.

Landmark Territory in the Archive

Without attributing specific findings that belong in the primary literature itself, it is fair to describe the territory in which Archives-era papers are most often encountered today. Rhinoplasty outcome assessment, including the shift toward validated patient-reported outcome instruments, is one such area. Facial reanimation — static and dynamic approaches to facial paralysis, including cross-face nerve grafting and free muscle transfer in their evolving forms — is another, where long follow-up series in the archive remain reference points. Reconstruction after Mohs surgery and other skin cancer treatment generated a large practical literature on local and regional flaps for nasal, lip, eyelid and cheek defects. The early evidence base for injectable fillers, neuromodulators and resurfacing in facial aesthetics also runs through these volumes, read today with the regulatory caution described earlier. Finally, the journal documented the professional formation of the specialty itself: training standards, the relationship between facial plastic surgery and its parent disciplines, and the economics and ethics of aesthetic practice. Historians of surgery, as well as clinicians, have reason to keep this archive accessible and correctly catalogued.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery?
Print ISSN 1521-2491 and online ISSN 1538-3660, for the 1999–2012 Archives run recorded here.

Who published the journal?
The American Medical Association, as part of its Archives specialty journal family.

Is the journal still published under this name?
No. It was renamed JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery effective 1 January 2013, and from January 2020 the lineage continued as Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine, published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. for the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.

Who founded and edited the journal?
Wayne F. Larrabee Jr launched Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery in 1999 and was its founding editor. John S. Rhee was editor-in-chief in the JAMA era and at the transition to the current title.

What did the journal publish?
Peer-reviewed articles on all aspects of reconstructive and cosmetic surgery of the head and neck — including rhinoplasty, rejuvenation, reanimation, reconstruction and aesthetic practice — plus ethics and public policy discussion relevant to the specialty.

Can I submit a manuscript to Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery?
No submission route exists for this ceased title. Authors should submit to the current continuation, Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine, following its current author instructions, and should disregard any unrelated site claiming to accept submissions under the Archives name.

How should I cite articles from this journal?
Under the title in force when the article appeared: Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery (1999–2012), JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery (2013–2019), or Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine (from 2020).

Sources and Verification

This profile is based on the JAMA Network's 2012 announcement of the Archives renaming (effective 1 January 2013, Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery becoming JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery), the AAFPRS announcement of its acquisition of JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery and the launch of Facial Plastic Surgery & Aesthetic Medicine from January 2020 (including the mission statement, society affiliations and the 3.056 impact factor reported at that time), JAMA-era author instructions summarising the journal's scope, frequency and authorship criteria, and the Journals World record itself for title, publisher and ISSN pair. The 2021 impact factor of 4.667 for the JAMA-era title is reported as a Journal Citation Reports figure carried in reference summaries of that title. Current submission details for the successor title should be verified on the publisher's live journal page, as they are outside the scope of this historical record.