Archives of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology

About Archives of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology

Archives of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology — Full Profile

Archives of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology, published in Croatian as Arhiv za higijenu rada i toksikologiju and abbreviated Arh Hig Rada Toksikol, is a peer-reviewed biomedical quarterly concerned with environmental health, occupational health and toxicology. It is the journal of the Institute for Medical Research and Occupational Health in Zagreb, Croatia, and it is presented on the Sciendo platform, in partnership with Paradigm Publishing Services, as an open access title. For readers who encounter the journal through older citations, the dual title matters: the Croatian title and the English title refer to the same serial, and literature searches that use only one form will miss part of the record. This profile explains what the journal publishes, where it comes from, how its editorial process is described by its own publisher and by the Croatian HRČAK portal, how it is identified and indexed, and how authors and readers should approach it in practice.

At a Glance

The Journals World record for this post also lists the number 0375-8591 alongside the two ISSNs above. That third number is not shown as a current ISSN on the Sciendo journal page consulted for this profile, which lists 0004-1254 and 1848-6312. Readers should therefore cite the journal by the two ISSNs confirmed on the publisher page and treat the third number with caution until its status is confirmed from an ISSN record. No conclusion about a duplicate record is drawn from that difference alone in this profile; it is noted here simply so that cataloguers do not copy an unverified identifier forward.

History and Institutional Home

The journal's history reaches back to 1950, which makes it one of the long-running occupational health serials in south-eastern and central Europe. HRČAK, the Portal of Croatian Scientific and Professional Journals, records 1950 as the first year of publication and lists four issues per year. The publisher page describes the journal as a leading voice for occupational health in the Alps-Adriatic region, including the Western Balkans, for more than fifty years. That regional anchoring is important for understanding its contents. This is not a general medical journal that occasionally touches on work and health. It grew up inside an institute whose daily work concerns medical research and occupational health, and its pages have consistently connected laboratory toxicology, workplace measurement, clinical observation and public health practice.

The owning institute, the Institute for Medical Research and Occupational Health in Zagreb, is both publisher and editorial home. The journal's contact details on HRČAK give the institute address at Ksaverska cesta 2 in Zagreb and an editorial email at the institute domain. Housing a journal inside a research institute, rather than inside a purely commercial publishing programme, shapes its character in visible ways. The editors can draw reviewers from scientists who work on exposure assessment and biological monitoring themselves. The journal can publish area-specific research results and issues, to use the publisher's own framing, alongside work from authors elsewhere in the world. And the journal can sustain a service role for younger contributors in the region, including editorial help and language support, which the publisher lists among its reasons to submit.

Over more than seven decades the working environment that the journal studies has changed repeatedly. Early industrial hygiene concerned dusts, solvents, metals and acute poisonings in factories and mines. Later decades added pesticides in agriculture, indoor air and microbial exposures, mycotoxins in food and feed, forensic toxicology and the health effects of environmental pollutants that reach people outside any workplace. The journal's current scope statement, which covers all aspects of environmental and occupational health and toxicology, is broad enough to hold that whole evolution, and the topic clusters visible in the Journals World record — occupational health and safety in workplaces, heavy metal exposure and toxicity, carcinogens and genotoxicity assessment, pesticide exposure and toxicity, poisoning and overdose treatment, environmental toxicology and ecotoxicology, mycotoxins in agriculture and food, indoor air quality and microbial exposure, heavy metals in the environment, and forensic toxicology and drug analysis — are a fair map of the territory the journal has made its own.

Aims and Scope in Detail

The core promise of the journal is relevance to environmental and occupational health and toxicology. In practice that promise divides into several overlapping strands, and authors considering a submission should locate their manuscript clearly in at least one of them.

Occupational health and workplace exposure

The first strand is the health of people at work: how exposures arise in particular jobs and processes, how they can be measured reliably, what biological effects follow, and what controls reduce risk. Papers in this strand may report workplace air measurements, biomonitoring results, epidemiological follow-up of exposed groups, or evaluations of protective practice. The strength of such work usually lies in the quality of the exposure characterisation. A study that names the process, the task, the duration and the measurement method is far more useful to readers, hygienists and regulators than a study that reports only a job title and an outcome.

Toxicology, from mechanisms to clinical cases

The second strand is toxicology itself. That includes experimental work on mechanisms of toxicity, genotoxicity and carcinogenicity assessment, and studies of how metals, pesticides and other agents are absorbed, distributed, metabolised and excreted. It also includes clinical toxicology: poisoning and overdose, its diagnosis and its treatment, and case reports that teach something general from an individual presentation. The journal's article types explicitly include case reports, which is consistent with a field in which a well-documented case can alert clinicians and poison centres to a new product, a new misuse pattern or an unexpected interaction.

Environmental health and ecotoxicology

The third strand looks beyond the factory gate. Environmental toxicology and ecotoxicology papers examine pollutants in air, water, soil and food, and their effects on human populations and on ecosystems. Heavy metals in the environment, mycotoxins in agriculture and food, and indoor air quality with microbial exposure all sit here. These topics connect the journal to food safety, housing and public health as well as to industry, and they explain why its readership includes environmental scientists and food specialists as well as occupational physicians.

Forensic toxicology and analysis

A fourth, smaller strand is forensic toxicology and drug analysis: the reliable detection and interpretation of substances in biological samples for medico-legal purposes. Analytical rigour is the entry ticket in this strand. Methods must be validated, limits and interferences stated, and interpretation kept separate from measurement. Papers that observe that discipline contribute to a literature that courts, clinicians and laboratories all rely on.

Article Types and What Editors Expect

According to the journal's instructions, the journal publishes original research articles, reviews, mini-reviews, case reports, viewpoints, editorials and letters to the editor. HRČAK's description adds scientific papers, professional papers, short communications, observations and technical papers to the picture, together with announcements, book reviews and meeting reports. That breadth is typical of an institute journal that serves both an international research audience and a regional professional community. The research articles carry the scientific weight, while professional and technical pieces translate findings into practice for hygienists, safety specialists and clinicians who may not read the primary literature in full.

Several expectations run through the instructions and are worth stating plainly for new authors. Manuscripts are accepted on the understanding that they are contributed to this journal alone, so simultaneous submission elsewhere is not acceptable. Submissions should be written in English for scientific papers. Preparation should follow the Uniform Requirements tradition associated with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, which the instructions cite. Letters commenting on a published article must arrive within the window the instructions specify, and the author of the original paper is usually given an opportunity to reply. The journal also states that it does not accept preliminary versions that were previously posted as preprints, a policy authors should check in the current instructions before submitting, because it differs from the practice of many other biomedical journals and it affects how work can be shared before submission.

Editorial Board and Peer Review

The publisher page names Nevenka Kopjar of the Institute for Medical Research and Occupational Health in Zagreb as editor-in-chief, with a full editorial board available from the journal site. A board anchored in the owning institute, supplemented by external expertise, is the normal pattern for a journal of this kind, and authors should consult the current board list on the publisher site rather than relying on any secondary summary, because board membership changes over time and the names that matter for a given submission are the subject editors active when the manuscript arrives.

HRČAK describes the review model as peer review with international reviewers, single anonymised — that is, single-blinded — and occasionally double-blinded. In single-blinded review the reviewers know the authors' identities while remaining anonymous themselves; in the double-blinded variant used occasionally, identities are withheld on both sides. The publisher highlights a streamlined reviewing process and a large pool of reviewers as reasons to submit, together with editorial help and education for young contributors and language revision and copyediting services. Those services do not lower the scientific bar. They mean that a manuscript with sound data and a clear question, but imperfect English, stands a better chance of being judged on its science, which is particularly valuable for authors writing from the region the journal has served for decades.

The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, as noted on HRČAK. Membership signals that the editors intend to handle authorship disputes, corrections, suspected duplication and other ethical problems through recognised procedures rather than ad hoc decisions. Authors, in turn, should expect to be asked about originality, about contributions, and about approvals for human or animal work where those apply, and should have those answers ready before submission rather than after acceptance.

Indexing, Metrics and Discoverability

Indexing is where this journal's long history pays off. HRČAK lists indexing in Science Citation Index Expanded, Medline and PubMed, Scopus, and a long set of subject and general services including EBSCO Academic Search Complete, BIOSIS Previews, Biological Sciences, Animal Science Database, GreenFile, INIS, Pollution Abstracts, Veterinary Science Database, Water Resources Abstracts, TEMA, TOXLINE, AGRIS, Food Science and Technology Abstracts and Ergonomic Abstracts. In plain terms, a paper published here can be found by a clinician searching PubMed, by a toxicologist searching specialist files, and by an environmental scientist searching agricultural and pollution databases. Few regional journals achieve that spread, and it is a central reason the title continues to attract submissions from outside Croatia.

The journal also appears in the Directory of Open Access Journals ecosystem as an open access title, and its full texts are available through both the publisher platform and HRČAK. HRČAK gives an Impact Factor of 1.7 with a Q3 position and a five-year Impact Factor of 2.5 in the material consulted for this profile, while SCImago places the journal in the third quartile for both Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health and for Toxicology. The Journals World record gives an h-index of 55. Metrics of this kind should be read as context, not as a verdict. A Q3 journal with deep indexing, no author charges, specialist reviewers and a seventy-year archive may be a better home for a careful occupational exposure study than a higher-ranked general title where the same paper would be handled by editors outside the field and read by almost nobody who measures workplaces for a living.

Access, Charges and Language

The journal is described in its own instructions as a diamond open access journal. Diamond open access means readers pay nothing and authors pay nothing; the costs are carried by the publisher and its supporting arrangements rather than by either side of the scholarly exchange. The current Sciendo page states that there are no article processing charges, which corrects an older line on the same platform that referred readers to the instructions for a charge. Authors should still read the current instructions before submitting, because policies can change, but on the evidence of the publisher page consulted here the position is clear: open to read, and no processing charge to publish.

That model has consequences for who can use the journal. A hygienist in a small enterprise, a clinician in a regional hospital, a student in the Western Balkans and a regulator drafting guidance can all read the full text without a subscription. An author without grant funding for publication fees is not priced out. For a field whose findings often need to reach practitioners rather than only other researchers, that openness is not a cosmetic feature; it is part of how the journal does its work.

On language, the instructions require English for scientific papers, while manuscripts in some other categories may be in Croatian or English, and announcements, book reviews and meeting reports may also be in Slovene, reflecting the journal's regional community. In practice, authors who want international indexing and citation should write in English, use the language and copyediting help the publisher offers, and provide careful abstracts, because the abstract is what most readers of PubMed and Scopus will judge the paper by.

Reading the Journal Well

Readers approaching the archive should keep three habits. First, search by both titles and by the abbreviation, and include the Croatian title in library catalogues, because older volumes and some records are filed under that form. Second, distinguish evidence types. An experimental toxicology paper, an epidemiological study, a workplace survey and a single case report answer different questions and should not be weighted equally when a practical decision is at stake. Third, check dates and methods against current standards. A journal founded in 1950 inevitably contains papers written when exposure limits, analytical sensitivity and statistical practice were very different. The archive is valuable precisely because it shows change over time, but a measurement from an early volume should not be quoted as if it were produced by a modern laboratory.

For researchers planning a literature review in occupational or environmental toxicology, the journal rewards a deliberate search of its back volumes alongside the large international databases. Regional exposures — particular industries, agricultural practices, products and environmental problems in south-eastern Europe — are documented here in a depth that global journals rarely match. Ignoring the title because its metric sits in the third quartile would be a methodological mistake in any review that claims to cover the European evidence.

Who Should Submit, and Who Should Look Elsewhere

The best fit is a manuscript that reports solid, well-executed work squarely inside environmental or occupational health or toxicology: a measured exposure with a health outcome, a toxicological mechanism with clear methods, a poisoning case that teaches, a food or environmental contamination study with validated analysis, or a review that organises a genuinely scattered literature. The journal's own guidance to authors, echoed in the Journals World summary, is to confirm scope fit before submitting, because off-scope manuscripts are typically returned quickly. A purely clinical paper with no exposure or toxicological element, a general environmental paper with no health connection, or a workplace paper that reports opinion without measurement will struggle, not because the editors are narrow, but because the journal's reviewers and readers come for a specific kind of evidence.

Authors should also be realistic about presentation. Follow the instructions for authors published by the journal, structure the paper so that exposure, method, result and interpretation can each be found quickly, report negative and inconclusive findings honestly, and state limitations without prompting. In a field where results feed into limits, guidance and clinical practice, overstated conclusions do real harm, and experienced reviewers in this journal's pool are well placed to notice them.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the same journal as Arhiv za higijenu rada i toksikologiju? Yes. That is the Croatian title of the same serial; the English title is Archives of Industrial Hygiene and Toxicology, and the standard abbreviation covers both.

How often does it appear? Quarterly, four times a year.

Does it charge authors? The current publisher page states that there are no article processing charges, and the journal describes itself as diamond open access. Check the current instructions before submitting in case policy changes.

Where is it indexed? Among other services, in Science Citation Index Expanded, Medline and PubMed, and Scopus, with a wide set of subject databases listed by HRČAK.

Can I post a preprint first? The instructions consulted for this profile state that the journal does not accept preliminary versions previously posted on public servers. Verify the current wording before you share a manuscript publicly.

What language should I write in? English for scientific papers; some other categories have historically allowed Croatian, and announcements have also appeared in Slovene.

Sources and Verification

This profile is based on the journal's publisher page on Sciendo, which names the publisher, the editor-in-chief, the ISSNs, the quarterly pattern, the open access model and the absence of processing charges; on HRČAK, the Portal of Croatian Scientific and Professional Journals, which records the first year of publication as 1950, the frequency, the review model, the article types, the indexing list and the Committee on Publication Ethics membership; and on the journal's instructions to authors as hosted by HRČAK. Metric values are reported as given by those sources and by SCImago and should be checked against the current journal page for the year in question, because such values are updated annually. Where a source consulted did not confirm a detail, that detail has been left out rather than filled in by guesswork.