Archives of Neurology And Psychiatry

About Archives of Neurology And Psychiatry

Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry — A Ceased Journal That Split Into Two Modern Titles

Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry was a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association (AMA) in the United States. It was first published in 1919, at a time when neurology and psychiatry were still widely treated as related branches of the same clinical territory, and it ceased under that title in 1950, when it continued as A. M. A. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry until a decisive split in 1959 divided its territory between two separate journals — one for neurology and one for psychiatry — whose present-day successors are JAMA Neurology and JAMA Psychiatry. This profile is therefore a historical profile, written honestly as such. The journal does not accept submissions, it has no current editorial board, no current article publishing charge and no current impact factor of its own, and any page that presents it as a living journal inviting manuscripts would be misleading its readers. What it does have is a forty-year run that sits at the foundation of two of the most important specialty journals in modern medicine, a complete archive that clinicians and historians still consult, and a publication history that illustrates, better than almost any other title, how medical specialities separate as they grow.

The JournalsWorld record for this post gives the publisher as the American Medical Association and lists the ISSNs 0096-6754 and 2330-9628. The first of those is verified by the title's own bibliographic history: 0096-6754 is the ISSN attached to Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry for its 1919–1950 run. The second ISSN in the record, 2330-9628, could not be verified against the 1919–1959 title history consulted for this profile, and readers should treat it with caution until it is checked against the ISSN Portal itself; the verified ISSN for the successor form of the title, A. M. A. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry (1950–1959), is 0096-6886. That distinction is set out in full in the structured-data note at the end of this profile, because accurate identifiers are the whole point of a directory record for a ceased title: a wrong ISSN sends a librarian, a citation or an interlibrary request to the wrong place.

Quick Facts

Why the Journal Was Founded: Neurology and Psychiatry Together

To understand why a single journal carried both neurology and psychiatry in its title in 1919, it helps to understand the medicine of the moment. The editorial announcement that accompanied the first volume, quoted in a centenary history published by JAMA Neurology in 2019, reflected that during the previous twenty-five years there had been great, at times startling, advances in neurology and psychiatry, and observed that the mass of the medical profession was not as well informed on nervous diseases and mental disorders as on most other branches of medical science. The new journal was created to close that gap: to bring the study of the nervous system and the study of mental disorder to a general and specialist medical readership that the founders believed was underserved.

The combination was not eccentric at the time. The clinical worlds overlapped heavily. Many conditions that defined the journal's territory — epilepsy, neurosyphilis, the psychoses associated with brain disease, the after-effects of head injury and of the First World War's psychological casualties — sat exactly on the border between the two fields, assessed by the same physicians, in the same institutions, with the same examinations. The American Neurological Association's own historical account records that when the AMA began publication of Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry in 1919, the association transferred its official publication relationship to the new journal, and separately bound copies were sent to members as well as to medical schools in the United States and Europe. A new journal that arrived with a national specialty association behind it and a national medical association as publisher began life with distribution and standing that most new titles can only envy.

The founding editor era also brought the tensions that would eventually divide the title. Accounts of the period describe disagreement within the neurology community over editorial direction, including the psychoanalytic priorities associated with the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease under S. E. Jelliffe, and support among association members for the new Archives under its editor T. H. Weisenburg, who steered its focus largely toward organic neurological topics. Even at birth, in other words, the journal embodied a live argument about what the study of mind and nervous system should be — an argument its pages conducted for four decades and that its eventual split settled organisationally, if never intellectually.

What the Journal Published

Across its run, the journal published original clinical and research contributions across the full territory its title claimed: diseases of the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nervous system; epilepsy and seizure disorders; stroke and vascular disease of the nervous system; infections and inflammatory conditions affecting the nervous system; neurosurgical and neuropathological observations; and the psychiatric disorders of its era, from the major psychoses to the psychoneuroses, together with the psychological and psychoanalytic writing that formed a large part of interwar psychiatry. It carried case reports and case series — the dominant evidence form of the period — clinicopathological correlations in which a patient's course was set against the findings after death, society transactions and proceedings, reviews, and news and comment on the profession.

Reading the archive today requires historical literacy. Diagnoses, terminology and treatments in its pages reflect the medicine of their time: terms for psychiatric conditions that are no longer used, treatments that were later abandoned, and classifications that modern neurology and psychiatry have replaced. That is not a defect of the archive; it is its value for historians of medicine, and a reason for clinicians to read it as a historical source rather than as current guidance. A treatment described in 1932 is evidence of what was believed and practised in 1932. It is not evidence of what should be practised now, and this profile states that plainly because directory pages for historical medical titles are sometimes read by patients and students who may not make that distinction automatically.

The journal also documents, issue by issue, the professionalisation of two fields. The volume of literature grew relentlessly — a fact its own editors would eventually cite as a reason the single title could no longer continue — and the methods changed within its run: the arrival of electroencephalography, of pneumoencephalography and later imaging precursors, of the first modern psychopharmacology at the very end of its successor's run, each appears in its pages as novelty before becoming routine. For a researcher tracing when a technique, a term or a controversy entered American neurology or psychiatry, this journal's archive is one of the first places to look.

The Long Road to the Split: 1950, 1956 and 1959

The title's final decade unfolded in three steps, and getting them right matters for anyone citing the journal, because the correct journal name for a citation depends on the year of the article. First, in 1950, the journal was restyled as A. M. A. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, part of a broader AMA pattern of prefixing its Archives specialty titles, and it ran under that form, with its own ISSN of 0096-6886, until 1959. Articles from the 1950s therefore properly cite the A. M. A. title, not the original one, even though the journal was continuous in volume numbering and identity.

Second, in July 1956, the publishers tried a structural compromise. A contemporary announcement in the journal, preserved on the JAMA Network, explains the reasoning in the editors' own terms. Psychiatry, they wrote, had been emerging as a distinct specialty; the volume of literature had increased to such an extent that publications reporting psychiatry either could not absorb it or were forced to condense material to accommodate more contributions; and psychiatrists had begun to feel that the journal should allot more space to psychiatry, its emphasis over the years having been neurological. The response, from July 1956, was to divide the journal into a two-section journal, with a separate editorial board for the Section on Neurology and a separate board for the Section on Psychiatry. One title, two boards: an attempt to give each field its own editorial home without yet surrendering the combined title.

Third, in 1959, the compromise gave way to a full division. The journal split into two separate journals: Archives of Neurology and Archives of General Psychiatry. The centenary history in JAMA Neurology describes the split, forty years after the original journal's inception, as reflecting the notion that psychiatric and neurologic diseases were quite different, appealing to distinct groups of physicians with drastically different skill sets. Each successor then built its own distinguished history. Archives of Neurology flourished as the neurology title — passing briefly through an A. M. A.-prefixed form at the start of the 1960s — and in 2013, when the AMA renamed all nine of its Archives specialty journals under the JAMA brand with effect from 1 January 2013, it became JAMA Neurology. Archives of General Psychiatry likewise became JAMA Psychiatry in 2013. The original 1919 journal is thus the common ancestor of both modern titles, and a complete account of either modern journal's history begins with it.

How to Cite and Find Material From This Journal

For citation purposes, the year of the article decides the title to cite. Material from 1919 to 1950 cites Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, ISSN 0096-6754. Material from 1950 to 1959 cites A. M. A. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, ISSN 0096-6886. Material from 1959 onwards cites one of the two successors under the name it carried at that date — Archives of Neurology or Archives of General Psychiatry, and from 2013 JAMA Neurology or JAMA Psychiatry. Collapsing all of these into a single title in a reference list is a common error, and it is one reason a directory profile for a ceased title earns its space: it keeps the chain of names, dates and ISSNs in one verified place.

For access, the JAMA Network maintains the archive for this title, and its article pages carry the original material, including the 1959 announcement of the split discussed above. The Online Books Page, maintained at the University of Pennsylvania, lists persistent archives of complete issues, including HathiTrust holdings of volumes 1 to 24 from 1919 to 1930 free to read online, and Internet Archive scans of many individual volumes from 1919 through the 1930s and beyond. Researchers without institutional access to the JAMA Network archive will often find the early decades more openly accessible through those library collections than through the publisher, a pattern typical of journals of this age. Indexing of the journal's content in the medical literature is through the historical Index Medicus tradition carried into the modern PubMed and MEDLINE environment for its successor titles; readers searching for an article from this journal should search by author, title words and year as well as by journal name, because historical journal-name indexing is not uniform across databases.

Metrics: An Honest Statement

This journal has no current impact factor, CiteScore, quartile or h-index of its own, and this profile does not invent one. Citation metrics belong to living titles measured over recent windows; a journal that ceased in 1959 predates the Journal Impact Factor altogether. Figures that circulate online for JAMA Neurology or JAMA Psychiatry — both of them highly ranked modern journals — belong to those successors and to their recent articles, and transferring them backwards to the 1919 title, as some low-quality directory pages do, would be a fabrication. The historically meaningful measures for this title are different: a forty-year continuous run under its two forms, foundation status for two major modern journals, adoption early in its life as the official publication channel of the American Neurological Association, and an archive still consulted and cited a century after its first issue. Those are the claims this profile makes, and each of them is sourced below.

Who Should Use This Profile, and for What

Historians of medicine will use this record to place the journal in the separation of neurology and psychiatry, one of the defining professional movements of twentieth-century medicine. Clinicians and researchers will use it to trace a citation, verify a reference, or find the original description of a sign, a syndrome or a technique in the archive. Librarians and cataloguers will use the title-and-ISSN chain to keep their holdings and link resolvers accurate across four title forms and two successor journals. Students should use it as a worked example of a general principle: journal titles are not permanent, and the name on a citation is a historical fact about when the article appeared, not a brand to be updated to the modern equivalent. And anyone who arrived at this page hoping to submit a manuscript should redirect that manuscript to a living journal — for neurology and psychiatry research today, the successors named in this profile are the natural starting points, each with its own current author guidance on the JAMA Network.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry still published? No. It ceased under that title in 1950, continued as A. M. A. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry until 1959, and then split into Archives of Neurology and Archives of General Psychiatry.

What are its present-day successors? JAMA Neurology, through Archives of Neurology, and JAMA Psychiatry, through Archives of General Psychiatry. Both were renamed under the JAMA brand on 1 January 2013.

What is the ISSN of Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry? 0096-6754 for the 1919–1950 title. The A. M. A. form of 1950–1959 carries ISSN 0096-6886. The second ISSN in the JournalsWorld record, 2330-9628, could not be verified for this title from the sources consulted.

Who published the journal? The American Medical Association, in the United States.

When did the journal begin? Its first issue was January 1919, volume 1, number 1.

Why did it split? Its own 1959 announcement explains that psychiatry had emerged as a distinct specialty, that the literature had grown beyond what one title could absorb, and that psychiatrists sought more space than the neurology-emphasised journal had given them. A two-section structure was tried from July 1956 before the full split in 1959.

Can I submit a manuscript to it? No. It is a ceased title with no editorial office. Current neurology and psychiatry manuscripts belong with living journals such as its successors.

Where can I read its articles? Through the JAMA Network archive for the title, and for early volumes through the HathiTrust and Internet Archive holdings listed by the Online Books Page.

Does it have an impact factor? No current metric exists for a title that ceased in 1959. Metrics published for JAMA Neurology and JAMA Psychiatry belong to those successor journals only.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on the JAMA Network's own archive material for the title, including the journal's 1959 announcement of its history and division; the centenary history published in JAMA Neurology in 2019; the American Neurological Association's historical overview; and the University of Pennsylvania Online Books Page serial records for this title and its successors, which give first and last issues, title succession and ISSNs for each form of the title. Where a stored value in the JournalsWorld record could not be verified from those sources — the ISSN 2330-9628 — it is flagged as unverified in the text rather than repeated as fact.