Archives of Ophthalmology

About Archives of Ophthalmology

Archives of Ophthalmology — Journal Profile

Archives of Ophthalmology was the title, from 1960 to 2012, of the American Medical Association's ophthalmology journal — a monthly, peer-reviewed journal of ophthalmology and visual science whose own institutional history reaches back to 1869. Its print ISSN is 0003-9950 and its electronic ISSN is 1538-3601, the two identifiers carried by this JournalsWorld record. In 2013 the journal was renamed JAMA Ophthalmology, as part of the renaming of the American Medical Association's Archives journals under the JAMA Network brand, and it continues today under that name. This record therefore describes a ceased title with a living successor — the same pattern as a small number of other records in this directory — and the single most useful thing this profile can do is keep the two identities distinct: the Archives, the journal that published ophthalmology from the nineteenth century to 2012 under a family of related titles, and JAMA Ophthalmology, the current journal, with its own record, its own ISSNs (2168-6165 print, 2168-6173 online) and its own present-day editors, metrics and submission system.

Readers arrive at this record in three main situations, and the profile serves each of them. Historians and citing authors need the title's lineage untangled, because a reference dated 1890, 1940, 1975 or 2010 that says Archives of Ophthalmology may come from bibliographically different series of the same continuing journal. Librarians and evaluators need to know which ISSN belongs to which run, so that holdings and citation counts attach to the right title. And clinicians searching for where to submit ophthalmology research need a clear direction: not here, because this title closed at the end of 2012, but to the successor journal, whose current instructions the JAMA Network publishes. The Archives itself needs no apology for closing. Over its run it was, by the measures reported below, one of the most cited clinical ophthalmology journals in the world, and its archive remains a working part of the specialty's evidence base.

Quick facts

• Title covered by this record: Archives of Ophthalmology (1960–2012 run)
• Abbreviation: Arch. Ophthalmol.
• ISSN: 0003-9950 (print); 1538-3601 (online)
• Publisher: American Medical Association (United States)
• Origins: The continuing journal was founded in 1869 as Archives of Ophthalmology and Otology; see the naming history below
• Successor title: JAMA Ophthalmology, from 2013 — ISSNs 2168-6165 (print) and 2168-6173 (online), with its own JournalsWorld record
• Status of this title: Ceased as a title at the end of 2012; the archive remains available through the JAMA Network
• Frequency during the Archives run: Monthly — 12 issues per year
• Editor in the late Archives era: Daniel M. Albert, MD, MS, named as editor of Archives of Ophthalmology in the journal descriptions of that period
• OpenAlex source (checked for this profile): S80523760 — 29,042 works, 902,161 citations, h-index 313 for the Archives title
• New submissions to this title: None — authors should use the current JAMA Ophthalmology instructions on the JAMA Network

Naming history — one journal, several titles

The naming history matters here more than for almost any other journal in this directory, and the clearest summary of it is the historical table maintained for the successor journal, which lists the title changes with their years and ISSNs. The journal began in 1869 as Archives of Ophthalmology and Otology (ISSN 0092-5624 in that table), founded by Hermann Knapp in New York with the Heidelberg otologist Salomon Moos as his counterpart editor — Knapp practising both ophthalmology and otology with the greater emphasis on the eye. The title was later shortened, and a new series of the Archives of Ophthalmology began in 1929 (ISSN 0096-0326) when the journal affiliated with the American Medical Association. In the 1950s it appeared as A.M.A. Archives of Ophthalmology (ISSN 0096-6339, listed for 1950–1960). From 1960 it carried the plain title Archives of Ophthalmology with print ISSN 0003-9950 — the run this record covers, to which the electronic ISSN 1538-3601 was added in the online era. In 2013 it became JAMA Ophthalmology.

An independent serials listing from the University of Pennsylvania's library tells the same story from the holdings side: publication began in 1869 as Archives of Ophthalmology and Otology, the name was shortened to Archives of Ophthalmology in 1879 in that account, a new series began from volume 1 in 1929 with the AMA affiliation, the title was styled with the AMA name through the 1950s, the first actively copyright-renewed issue in that listing is the March 1960 issue, and the title changed to JAMA Ophthalmology in 2013, continuing to publish today. The small differences between such accounts — whether a shortening is dated to 1879 or folded into the early series history — are the ordinary friction of nineteenth-century serials bibliography, where title pages, series restarts and publisher changes rarely line up neatly. What every account agrees on, and what a citing author needs, is the chain itself: 1869 foundation, AMA affiliation from the late 1920s, the 1960–2012 Archives of Ophthalmology run under ISSN 0003-9950, and the 2013 renaming.

There is also a successor-side statement that captures why the renaming happened. Announcing the transition in 2013, the incoming editor of JAMA Ophthalmology wrote that the July 2013 issue began a major redesign coordinated with JAMA and the nine specialty journals of the JAMA Network, placing the ophthalmology journal under the JAMA imprimatur while continuing its scholarly leadership and its editorial lineage — noting, in the same editorial, the long service of Daniel M. Albert as one of the longest-serving editors of the journal under its Archives name. The Archives journals across medicine were renamed in the same movement, which is why this directory holds parallel ceased-title records for sister titles such as Archives of Internal Medicine alongside their JAMA successors.

Scope during the Archives run

The successor journal's description of the shared enterprise, published on the JAMA Network, states the mission in terms the Archives itself used: to be the indispensable source of ophthalmic knowledge for the generalist, the subspecialist and the trainee; to publish innovative, clinically relevant research for the vision scientist; and to achieve this through authoritative peer review. Journal descriptions of the Archives from its own era describe an international, peer-reviewed ophthalmology and visual science journal published twelve times a year, receiving more than eleven hundred unsolicited manuscripts annually in the period described, with an acceptance rate around thirty per cent in that description — figures this profile attributes to those period descriptions rather than presenting as lifetime averages, because submission volumes grew across the decades.

The subject territory was the whole of ophthalmology and visual science. Contemporary descriptions of the journal list its article territory as including epidemiology and biostatistics in eye disease, mechanisms of ophthalmic disease, ophthalmic molecular genetics, and socioeconomics and health services in eye care, alongside the clinical core of the specialty: cataract and refractive surgery, cornea and external disease, glaucoma, neuro-ophthalmology, oculoplastics, paediatric ophthalmology, retina and vitreous disease, ocular oncology, uveitis and intraocular inflammation, and the imaging and electrophysiology that support them. OpenAlex's topic summary for the Archives source, checked for this profile, gives the same picture in bibliometric form: its largest clusters are retinal diseases and treatments, with more than five thousand attributed works, and glaucoma and retinal disorders, with more than four thousand — a retina-heavy profile typical of a general clinical ophthalmology journal in the decades when anti-VEGF therapy, modern vitreoretinal surgery and ocular imaging transformed practice. The Archives published original investigations, clinical trials, reviews, and the correspondence and observation formats of a general specialty journal, and it ran an expedited route in its own era, described in period material as Archives Express, for original research of exceptional clinical or public health importance, with clinical trials given special consideration after screening by the editor.

Editorial leadership

Editorial continuity is one of the striking features of this title's history. The journal was founded and first edited by Hermann Knapp, whose son Arnold Knapp later edited it and who, as an ophthalmic historical account records, resisted pressure during the First World War era of paper shortages to merge the title into a combined publishing arrangement, believing the journal his father founded should be perpetuated — a decision whose consequence is visible in the fact that the title survived to be carried into the AMA and, eventually, into the JAMA Network. In the modern Archives era, the editor named in the journal's own descriptions is Daniel M. Albert, MD, MS, whose long tenure the successor's 2013 editorial explicitly honours, describing him as one of the longest-serving editors of the journal. The current editor-in-chief of the successor journal, named on the JAMA Network's author pages checked for context, is Neil M. Bressler, MD, of the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins — a fact recorded here only to direct readers correctly: Bressler's editorship belongs to JAMA Ophthalmology, not to the ceased Archives title, and conflating the two in a directory entry is exactly the kind of stored-field error this profile is written to avoid.

Metrics — a very large historical citation record

OpenAlex, resolved from the ISSN endpoint for 0003-9950 to source S80523760 and fetched directly for this profile, records 29,042 works and 902,161 citations under the Archives title, with a summary h-index of 313 and an i10-index of 13,366 at checking time. That citation total — over nine hundred thousand — places the Archives among the most heavily cited titles in this entire batch of profiles, and it is worth explaining rather than merely admiring. It reflects three things acting together: a very long run, so that decades of papers had time to accumulate citations; a clinical specialty with large research communities in retina, glaucoma and cataract, whose guidelines and trials cite the journal continuously; and the digitisation and platform continuity of the AMA archive, which kept the backfile as easy to cite as current material. OpenAlex dates the works it holds for this source from 1919 to 2012 — its coverage of the earliest decades is partial compared with the journal's 1869 foundation, a normal feature of database backfiles — and its two-year mean citedness reads 0.0 because the title has published nothing new since 2012, making recent-window measures meaningless for it.

Period sources give the journal's standing in its own time. Journal descriptions of the Archives cited a Journal Impact Factor of 3.203 in their era and described it at that time as the highest of any clinical ophthalmology journal — a period claim, quoted here as the journal then presented itself, not as a current ranking. The successor's own record provides the continuity check: the journals' shared Journal Citation Reports line, reported for the successor, gave a 2021 Impact Factor of 8.253, ranking third of sixty-one titles in Ophthalmology, and the JAMA Network author pages more recently report an impact factor of 10.5 for the successor, again third-highest among ophthalmology journals, with an acceptance rate of ten per cent and a median time to first decision of thirty-seven days with review on that page. Those successor figures are quoted here, clearly labelled as the successor's, for one reason only: they show that the journal this record describes did not fade and close, but was renamed at the height of its standing. The older JournalsWorld record for this post carried an h-index of 313, which matches the OpenAlex figure fetched now exactly — a reassuring case where the stored value and the fresh check agree.

Indexing and the archive today

The journal's abstracting and indexing record, as listed for the continuing title, includes BIOSIS Previews, Current Contents in its Clinical Medicine and Life Sciences editions, Index Medicus, MEDLINE and PubMed, the Science Citation Index, and Scopus. For a ceased title, the practical indexing question is different from the one authors ask about live journals: not whether new papers will be indexed, but whether the old papers remain findable and citable in the systems researchers actually use. On the evidence of the OpenAlex totals above and the archive's presence on the JAMA Network platform — where the successor's pages present the journal as published continuously since 1869 — the answer is yes. PubMed records for Archives papers persist with their original citations, and a reader following a 1985 or 2005 reference lands on the same platform as the current journal. A DOAJ search-API query by both ISSNs, run for this profile, returned no record; the Archives was a subscription-era society journal for most of its run, the successor makes research articles free to access twelve months after publication under its stated policy, and no DOAJ claim is made here on the basis of that API check.

Fees — why this record publishes none

No article processing charge, submission fee or page charge for the Archives title is quoted in this profile, for a straightforward reason: the title has taken no manuscripts since 2012, so any fee figure would be either historical or invented. Period page charges and reprint arrangements from the print era have no application to a modern author. Authors considering the successor journal should read the JAMA Network's current instructions for JAMA Ophthalmology, which state, on the author pages checked for this profile, that there are no author fees for that journal and that all research articles are made free access online twelve months after publication — again, a successor fact, labelled as such, and one to re-confirm on the live page at the time of any actual submission, since publisher policies change. Any third-party service offering, for a fee, to place a new article in Archives of Ophthalmology is offering something the publisher's own title history makes impossible: the title closed in 2012.

How to submit — to the successor, not to this title

There is no submission route into Archives of Ophthalmology. Authors with ophthalmology or visual science research should submit to JAMA Ophthalmology through the JAMA Network, following its current Instructions for Authors. The successor describes its own position on those pages as an international, peer-reviewed ophthalmology and visual science journal, a member of the JAMA Network consortium of general medical and specialty publications, published online weekly with twelve print and online issues a year, receiving millions of annual article views and downloads, with the editorial figures quoted above. Its mission statement — to be the indispensable source of ophthalmic knowledge for generalist, subspecialist and trainee, and the first choice for authors' important manuscripts — is the Archives mission carried forward, and a manuscript written for that mission should be framed clinically: a clear question, a design that answers it, reporting to the standard the JAMA Network requires, and a discussion that tells the general ophthalmologist, not only the subspecialist, what changes. Authors whose work is sound but unlikely to meet the successor's ten per cent acceptance threshold should plan a realistic second destination among the specialty's other general and subspecialty journals from the outset, rather than treating a decision letter as the moment to start thinking about fit.

Citing authors have the mirror-image duty. Cite the paper as it appeared: journal title as printed on the article — Archives of Ophthalmology for the 1960–2012 run, the AMA-styled title for 1950s material, the earlier series title for pre-1929 material — with its year, volume and pages, and the DOI where one has been assigned to the archive version. Do not modernise an Archives citation into a JAMA Ophthalmology citation; citation databases match on the title as published, and a renamed citation can fail to resolve to the record evaluators are checking.

Related titles

The successor record in this directory is JAMA Ophthalmology (post 6960), which carries the current title's ISSNs and standing. The JAMA Network family supplies the other closest relatives — JAMA itself and the renamed sister specialty titles that began, as this one did, as Archives journals, including the directory's record for Archives of Internal Medicine. Within ophthalmology, the titles against which the Archives was read during its run, and against which its successor is still read, are the specialty's other general journals — Ophthalmology, the American Journal of Ophthalmology, the British Journal of Ophthalmology and Acta Ophthalmologica, all of which have their own records here. A reader who understands where the Archives sat among those titles — the American association journal, clinically led, trial- and retina-heavy, with an archive reaching back to the specialty's beginnings — understands the shape of twentieth-century ophthalmic publishing itself.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Archives of Ophthalmology? Print ISSN 0003-9950 and online ISSN 1538-3601, for the 1960–2012 run covered by this record.

Who published it? The American Medical Association of the United States. OpenAlex names the same association as host organisation of the source.

Is Archives of Ophthalmology still published? Not under that title. It was renamed JAMA Ophthalmology in 2013 and continues under that name in the JAMA Network; the Archives archive remains accessible through the same platform.

When was it founded? The continuing journal was founded in 1869 as Archives of Ophthalmology and Otology, founded by Hermann Knapp with Salomon Moos; it affiliated with the American Medical Association in the late 1920s and took the plain Archives title, with the ISSN on this record, from 1960.

Can I submit a manuscript to it? No. Submit to JAMA Ophthalmology through the JAMA Network's current instructions for authors.

What are its metrics? OpenAlex, checked for this profile, records 29,042 works, 902,161 citations, an h-index of 313 and an i10-index of 13,366 for the Archives source — historical totals for a ceased title, quoted with their database.

Is the successor the same journal? Bibliographically it is the same continuing journal under a new title from 2013, with new ISSNs. Cite each era under the title it was published in, and use the successor's own record for its current editors, metrics and policies.

Why does this directory keep a separate record for a renamed journal? Because citations, holdings and ISSNs attach to the title as published. Keeping the Archives record distinct from the JAMA Ophthalmology record prevents the two runs — and their different ISSNs — from being merged into a single inaccurate entry.

Sources and checking note

This profile is anchored to the live JournalsWorld record for post 2367 (title Archives of Ophthalmology, slug archives-of-ophthalmology, stored ISSNs 0003-9950 and 1538-3601). The naming history and ISSN chain come from the historical title table maintained for the successor journal and from an independent university library serials listing. Successor facts — continuous publication since 1869, JAMA Network membership, current editor-in-chief, acceptance and timing figures, free access twelve months after publication and the absence of author fees — come from the JAMA Network's author pages for JAMA Ophthalmology and its 2013 transition editorial, and are labelled as successor facts wherever they appear. Bibliometric figures come from OpenAlex: the ISSN endpoint resolved to source S80523760, fetched directly and quoted as at checking time. A DOAJ API query by both ISSNs returned no record at checking time and is reported only in those terms. The thin successor record found in twin checking (post 6960, JAMA Ophthalmology, 256 words, ISSNs 2168-6165 and 2168-6173) shares no ISSN with this record and is a distinct title era, not a duplicate of it.