About Archives of Family Medicine

Archives of Family Medicine

Archives of Family Medicine was a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association (AMA) in the United States from late 1992 through 2000. It was one of the first journals dedicated specifically to family practice, and for its nine volumes it served as the AMA's Archives-family home for family medicine research — sitting on the shelf beside the Archives of Internal Medicine, the Archives of Surgery, and the other specialty Archives titles. The journal is no longer published and accepts no submissions; this profile is a historical and bibliographic record, written so that readers who meet its articles in reference lists, library holdings, and citation databases can identify the journal correctly, find its preserved contents, and avoid confusing it with any current title.

Identity is the first task, because the title is generic enough to invite mistakes. The record in front of you carries print ISSN 1063-3987 and online ISSN 1941-1758 and names the American Medical Association as publisher — and those identifiers match the historical AMA journal exactly: the NLM catalogue entry for Archives of family medicine (NLM ID 9300357) gives the same print and online ISSNs, the journal's ISO 4 and NLM abbreviation is Arch Fam Med, and its OCLC number is 26001153. This is therefore the defunct JAMA-network Archives title, not the Annals of Family Medicine (founded 2003, ISSN 1544-1709 / 1544-1717), not American Family Physician, and not any later journal using similar words. Everything below follows from that identification.

Quick Facts

History: A Journal Born With Its Specialty

Family practice was still a young specialty when the AMA acted. Recognised as a board specialty only in 1969, family practice spent the 1970s and 1980s building residencies, departments, and a research base, while its scholars published in general medical journals or in the specialty's own earlier titles. The AMA's House of Delegates proceedings for its 1992 interim meeting announced the plan plainly: a new journal, Archives of Family Medicine, was scheduled to begin publishing in late 1992. The launch made it one of the first journals dedicated to family practice, and it gave the discipline something symbolically important — a seat inside the AMA's Archives consortium, the family of journals whose mastheads the journal itself listed: JAMA, the Archives of Dermatology, of General Psychiatry, of Internal Medicine, of Neurology, of Ophthalmology, of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery, of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, of Surgery, and now of Family Medicine.

The founding editor, Marjorie A. Bowman, edited the journal for its entire life, 1992 to 2000 — a continuity visible in the standard history of the field, Bowman and colleagues' 2017 account of family medicine research in the United States in the journal Family Medicine, which tabulates Archives of Family Medicine as 1992–2000, editor Bowman throughout, sponsor JAMA, thrust "all types" of manuscripts with a clinical research focus, and fate: discontinued. A single editor across nine volumes gave the young journal a stable identity while the specialty argued about what its research should be.

The journal reached readers at scale for a specialty title. Its own masthead-era advertising material boasted that the Archives reached more than 81,500 readers in family and general practice each month in addition to paid subscribers, and the journal was sold by subscription through the AMA's Subscriber Services Center in Chicago, with international subscriptions handled through regional offices. Its advertisements of the period stated that it was indexed in MEDLINE — the essential discovery service for clinical literature — and indexing records also associate the title with Scopus coverage of its run.

Why It Closed

The closure in 2000 was financial, not scholarly. The standard history is specific: the journal was closed largely because of insufficient advertising revenue, and the 2017 history's table gives the same cause in shorter form — discontinued due to lack of sufficient funding, primarily advertising dollars. The distinction matters for how the journal should be remembered. Archives of Family Medicine did not fold because family physicians stopped writing or reading research; it folded because the AMA's journal economics depended on pharmaceutical advertising, and a primary-care title could not command the advertising income of the larger specialty Archives journals.

The reaction inside the specialty confirms that reading. The cessation in 2000, the same history records, resulted in an uproar: resolutions were submitted to the American Academy of Family Physicians' annual meeting, including from the National Congress of Family Medicine Residents. The field's organisations — the AAFP, the American Board of Family Medicine, the North American Primary Care Research Group, the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, and sister bodies — then came together to do deliberately what the market had not: fund a research journal jointly. The result was the Annals of Family Medicine, first published in 2003, which became highly successful. The Annals is the Archives' successor in spirit and in function, but bibliographically it is a separate journal with its own ISSNs and volume numbering, and libraries and authors should never merge the two records.

Scope and Contents

The journal published, in the 2017 history's summary, all types of manuscripts with a clinical research focus — the full range of a generalist specialty. The subject profile tracked for this record fills in the topical picture: primary care and health outcomes; patient-provider communication in healthcare; healthcare policy and management; health promotion and cardiovascular prevention; mental health treatment and access; ethics and bioethics in healthcare; palliative care and end-of-life issues; and substance abuse treatment and outcomes. That breadth is the specialty itself: family medicine claims the undifferentiated patient and the whole-person, whole-family, whole-community frame, and its journal mirrored the claim.

The preserved contents show what that meant in practice. A July 1999 article reported a randomised controlled trial of shared decision making for prostate cancer screening, run from a university family medicine centre in Galveston, Texas, whose clinic served a multiethnic population of more than 30,000 visits a year — an early, rigorous entry in what became the shared decision-making literature. A September 1999 study used a primary-care practice-based research network to examine antibiotics for upper respiratory tract infections, asking whether an initial antibiotic prescription changed later utilisation and later antibiotic use — antibiotic stewardship studied where the prescribing actually happens, in family practice offices. An April 2000 article, among the journal's last, analysed prevention-related practices of women physicians from the Women Physicians' Health Study. Screening decisions, respiratory-infection prescribing, prevention, communication, and the physician workforce: the sample spans exactly the territory the scope statement promises, and it explains the citation tail below.

Citation Legacy and Metrics

The citation footprint carried by this record — an h-index of 103, with roughly 1,216 tracked works and 43,155 tracked citations — is remarkable for a journal that lived only nine years, and it is credible in context. The journal published practice-defining primary-care research at the moment the evidence-based medicine movement was reshaping generalist practice, in English, inside the AMA's distribution system, indexed in MEDLINE. Work of that kind keeps being cited for decades: screening and decision-making trials, prescribing studies, and prevention research from the 1990s remain reference points in guidelines and systematic reviews long after their journal has closed.

Readers should nonetheless handle the numbers as what they are: an index snapshot attached to this record, useful for scale rather than for ranking. A ceased journal's metrics are frozen in a way a living journal's are not — no new articles dilute or extend the record — and database coverage of a 1992–2000 title varies by provider. For formal purposes, cite the journal's bibliographic identifiers (ISSN 1063-3987, NLM ID 9300357) and the individual articles' own records in PubMed and CLOCKSS rather than any aggregate score.

How to Access the Journal Today

The journal is no longer available from the AMA's own archives. Its preservation home is CLOCKSS, the dark-archive consortium of libraries and publishers, whose triggered-content service serves the journal's articles — the surviving full texts, down to individual articles identified by ISSN, volume, issue, and page, resolve through CLOCKSS. University libraries additionally offer the digitised JAMA and Archives backfiles as licensed collections: the backfile packages list Archives of Family Medicine 1992–2000 alongside JAMA 1883–1997 and the other Archives titles, in fully searchable PDF and HTML. Print volumes survive in medical library stacks under ISSN 1063-3987 and OCLC 26001153. A researcher tracing a citation abbreviated "Arch Fam Med" should therefore search in this order: PubMed for the article record, CLOCKSS for the preserved full text, and the local medical library's backfile licence or print holdings as the fallback.

One practical warning belongs here. Because the journal is defunct, any website that today invites submissions to "Archives of Family Medicine," offers rapid publication under that title, or requests an article fee in its name is not the AMA journal — the AMA title closed in 2000 and has not been revived. Authors seeking the audience the Archives once served should look to the living family medicine journals, above all the Annals of Family Medicine and the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, checking each journal's own site for its current rules.

Relationship to Other Family Medicine Journals

Placing the title in its family tree prevents most cataloguing errors. Before it stood the Journal of Family Practice (founded 1974) and the Family Practice Research Journal, the latter also discontinued over funding problems. Beside it, the Journal of the American Board of Family Practice (1988–2006) continued into today's Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. After it, the Annals of Family Medicine (2003–present) was created by the specialty's organisations in direct response to the Archives' closure. Archives of Family Medicine is thus the middle term of the specialty's journal history: the AMA's recognition that family practice had become a research discipline, and — in its advertising-driven death — the lesson that pushed the specialty to fund its flagship research journal collectively instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Archives of Family Medicine still published?

No. The AMA published it from late 1992 through 2000 and then closed it, largely because of insufficient advertising revenue. It accepts no submissions.

What are its ISSNs and identifiers?

Print ISSN 1063-3987 and online ISSN 1941-1758, as carried by this record and matched by the NLM catalogue (NLM ID 9300357); OCLC 26001153; abbreviation Arch Fam Med.

Who edited and published it?

The American Medical Association published it, and Marjorie A. Bowman edited it for its full 1992–2000 run.

Where can its articles be read now?

Through CLOCKSS, which preserves the journal after its removal from the AMA archives, and through licensed JAMA and Archives backfile collections in medical libraries; article records remain in PubMed.

Is it the same as the Annals of Family Medicine?

No. The Annals, founded in 2003 by the family medicine organisations after the Archives closed, is a separate journal with its own ISSNs (1544-1709 print, 1544-1717 online) and its own volume sequence.

Why does a journal closed in 2000 still matter?

Because its nine volumes contain primary-care research — on screening decisions, antibiotic prescribing, prevention, and communication — that continues to be cited; this record tracks an h-index of 103 and more than 43,000 citations for its contents.

The Journal in the AMA Archives Family

The word "Archives" in the title was a brand with a meaning. Through the twentieth century the AMA gathered its specialty journals under the Archives banner, each title the association's archival record for its discipline — dermatology from 1920, internal medicine from 1908 in its lineage, neurology, ophthalmology, surgery, and the rest. When family medicine joined the family in 1992, the youngest specialty in American medicine received the same bibliographic dignity as the oldest: its research would be archived, indexed, and shelved in the same series as the established disciplines. The journal's masthead said so literally, listing the consortium of AMA journals to which it belonged and routing subscribers through the same Chicago services centre as JAMA itself.

That membership shaped the journal's material life. It was distributed through the AMA's subscription machinery at home and through regional offices abroad; its advertising pages addressed the pharmaceutical market that sustained the whole family; and when the economics of that model failed for a primary-care title, it failed inside the family — the association closed its family medicine Archives while its larger siblings continued. The backfile market later reassembled the family in digital form: libraries buying the JAMA and Archives backfiles receive the 1992–2000 Archives of Family Medicine as one component of the set, which is why the journal remains present in medical-school collections worldwide despite having no living publisher's platform.

What Its Nine Volumes Are Still Used For

Three continuing uses justify the care taken with this record. First, evidence synthesis: systematic reviewers assembling the history of an intervention — shared decision making for screening, antibiotic strategies for respiratory infections, preventive-service delivery — still retrieve the journal's trials and cohort studies through PubMed, and still need its full texts from CLOCKSS or a backfile licence. Second, disciplinary history: the journal is a primary source for how family medicine defined its research agenda in the 1990s, and the 2017 history of the field treats its founding, editorship, and closure as landmarks. Third, citation hygiene: thousands of reference lists carry the abbreviation "Arch Fam Med", and every reader who resolves that abbreviation to the correct journal — rather than to the Annals, or to a similarly named current title — depends on records like this one keeping the ISSN pair, the dates, and the publisher attached to the title. A ceased journal's profile is therefore not an obituary exercise; it is working infrastructure for the literature that journal left behind.

Editorial Identity and Article Types

Because the journal served a generalist specialty, its article mix was deliberately wide. Alongside original clinical research — trials, cohort and cross-sectional studies, and practice-based network research of the kind illustrated above — a family medicine journal of the 1990s carried the genres through which a young discipline taught itself: clinical reviews for practising physicians, commentaries on the organisation and financing of primary care, and work on medical education for the residency programmes that were the specialty's engine. Marjorie Bowman's nine-year editorship gave that mix a consistent hand. Bowman herself later became a central historian and editor of the discipline — editing the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine after 2003 — and her retrospective writing on the Archives' closure remains the standard first-person-adjacent source for why the journal ended and what the specialty built in its place.

Frequency deserves a precise note for cataloguers, because sources differ in emphasis. The journal's own masthead described it as published monthly by the AMA, while summary references commonly list it as bimonthly; what is not in doubt is the run itself — continuous publication from late 1992 through 2000, nine volumes, ending with volume 9 in 2000. Catalogue records that show either frequency should be reconciled against the volume run and the ISSN pair rather than treated as evidence of two different journals: there was one Archives of Family Medicine, and this record is it.

Bottom Line

Archives of Family Medicine was the American Medical Association's family practice journal from late 1992 to 2000: Bowman-edited, MEDLINE-indexed, widely distributed, clinically focused across the full breadth of primary care, and closed for advertising economics rather than scholarly failure. Its afterlife is well organised — preserved in CLOCKSS, sold in library backfiles, and answered institutionally by the Annals of Family Medicine — and its correct identifiers (ISSN 1063-3987 and 1941-1758, NLM 9300357) keep its record cleanly separate from every similarly named living title.