Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine

About Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine

About Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine

Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine — widely shortened to Archives or APLM, and abbreviated Arch Pathol Lab Med — is the monthly, peer-reviewed medical journal of the College of American Pathologists (CAP), published since 1926 and described by the College itself as offering global reach and the highest measured readership among pathology journals. It is a general pathology journal in the fullest sense: anatomic and surgical pathology, cytopathology, clinical pathology and laboratory medicine, molecular diagnostics, informatics, and laboratory management all sit inside its remit, and its pages carry everything from original research and review articles to College guidelines, consensus statements, proficiency-testing studies, and the abstracts of the CAP annual meeting.

The journal's identifiers are print ISSN 0003-9985 and electronic ISSN 1543-2165, exactly the two ISSNs recorded on the Journals World record for post 332951. The article identifier prefix 10.5858 and the journal code arpa appear throughout its modern citations. Publication is monthly, the language is English, and the country of publication is the United States. Online access to the full text and PDF files of Archives articles is free through the journal's website — a long-standing open reading model that the College highlights as central to the journal's educational mission, allowing dissemination of its content to readers everywhere at no charge to them.

One correction matters immediately, because the Journals World thin record got it wrong for the present day. That record named the publisher as the American Medical Association. That attribution is historical, not current: the journal was first published in 1926 as a specialty journal of the American Medical Association, but it became the official journal of the College of American Pathologists in 1995, and the College is its publisher and owner today. Section 9 of this profile records that stored-versus-verified conflict formally. Everything else in this profile uses the verified, current position.

Quick Facts

History: From an AMA Specialty Journal to the College's Flagship

The journal began in 1926 as a specialty journal of the American Medical Association, at a time when pathology was consolidating as a distinct medical discipline built around the autopsy, the surgical specimen, and the clinical laboratory. For most of the twentieth century it served as one of the AMA's archive-format specialty titles. The defining institutional change came in 1995, when it became the official journal of the College of American Pathologists — the professional society whose members practise the specialty the journal covers, and whose laboratory accreditation, proficiency testing, and guideline programmes generate a substantial share of the journal's most-used content. That alignment between a journal and the practising profession's own college explains much of its character: it is written substantially by practising pathologists and laboratory scientists, for practising pathologists and laboratory scientists, with the College's quality programmes woven through its pages.

In 2009 the journal received a notable honour: it was voted the only pathology journal among the top 100 most influential journals of the past 100 years by the BioMedical and Life Sciences Division of the Special Libraries Association — a distinction the College still cites in its own description of the title. The modern editorial era most thoroughly documented is that of editor-in-chief Philip T. Cagle, MD, who led the journal from 2005 to 2019. A published retrospective on his tenure records that the Archives nearly doubled its impact factor under his leadership, became the most widely read general pathology journal, expanded its editorial board with leading pathologists across new masthead sections, and pushed early into digital pathology — including articles on smartphone use in pathology and on incorporating whole-slide images and video into journal articles. Special sections introduced in that period became fixtures of the journal's identity.

The journal marked its 90th anniversary in 2016 still describing itself, in its own anniversary editorial, as an open-access-reading journal committed to insightful and relevant medical knowledge, and it reaches its centenary in 2026 — one hundred years after the 1926 founding — with its scope now extending from classical morphology to molecular pathology and artificial intelligence. Few general pathology titles anywhere can show that combination of age, society ownership, and continued monthly publication.

Scope and Content

The journal's instructions for authors state its audience and purpose plainly: it publishes original, peer-reviewed articles for pathologists and clinical laboratory scientists, intended to help laboratorians keep abreast of the ever-increasing knowledge base necessary to successful practice. In practice its content spans the whole working life of a pathology department. Anatomic and surgical pathology — tumour classification, diagnostic criteria, immunohistochemistry, and prognostic factors — forms the largest share; research-topic analyses of the journal's output attribute roughly half of its coverage to pathology in this core sense, with internal medicine, immunohistochemistry, surgery, and carcinoma among the intersecting themes. Clinical pathology and laboratory medicine cover haematology, microbiology, chemistry, transfusion medicine, and laboratory quality. Molecular pathology contributes biomarker and genomic testing studies, including the guideline work that directs routine testing. Digital pathology and informatics reflect the journal's early and continuing engagement with whole-slide imaging and computational methods. And laboratory management, accreditation, and education content serves the College's quality mission directly.

Two content streams deserve special emphasis because they give the journal influence beyond its citation counts. The first is guidelines and consensus statements. Manuscripts produced by CAP committees and councils appear in the Archives, including CAP Laboratory Improvement Program articles and evidence-based guidelines from the CAP Pathology and Laboratory Quality Center, often published jointly with other societies' journals. The ASCO/CAP guideline recommendations for HER2 testing in breast cancer and the CAP/IASLC/AMP molecular testing guideline for selecting lung cancer patients for EGFR and ALK inhibitors are among the journal's most cited papers ever, because they changed everyday laboratory practice worldwide. A pathologist does not merely read this journal; on guideline topics, the profession works to it. The second stream is the CAP annual meeting abstract programme: the journal's editorial operation manages the review and scoring of abstract and case-study submissions for the College's annual meeting, a programme that grew dramatically under its management, and selected meeting content reaches the journal's readership.

Regular genres include original articles, review articles, special sections on defined themes, case studies and case reports with teaching value, editorials, and correspondence. The journal's citation record shows its centre of gravity clearly: classic papers on prognostic factors in colorectal cancer arising from a College consensus statement, and on histologic fixatives for light and electron microscopy, sit alongside the modern guideline literature at the top of its most-cited list — morphology, method, and consensus, which is the journal in miniature.

Metrics and Standing

Aggregator listings report an impact factor of 3.2 for 2024–25 for the journal, with 3.7 reported for 2023 in the same listing series, and research-profile compilations based on Scopus data report a SCImago h-index of 143 and an SJR of 1.202. Those figures place the Archives in the solid middle-to-upper range of general pathology journals: below the field's most selective molecular and surgical titles, and comfortably among the established general journals that practising pathologists actually read — a position consistent with the College's claim of the highest measured readership among pathology journals. Readership and citation rank are different things, and this journal is the standard example of why both matter: a guideline or a proficiency-testing study in its pages can alter the daily practice of thousands of laboratories while accruing citations at a working journal's pace.

Because metric values move every year and differ between the Journal Citation Reports and Scopus-derived products, this profile attributes each figure to its reporting source and year rather than presenting a single timeless number. Researchers who need the current official values should read them from the latest Journal Citation Reports for the impact factor and from Scopus/SCImago for CiteScore and SJR, using ISSN 0003-9985 as the key. What does not change is the qualitative standing: a century-old, society-owned, monthly general pathology journal with free online reading, a three-point-range impact factor in recent listings, and an outsized role in laboratory guidelines and quality programmes.

Publishing With the Journal

Submissions are handled through the journal's online peer-review system, identified in its instructions for authors as AllenTrack, where authors register, submit text and figures over the internet, and can check the status of a submission at any point during review. The instructions for authors are the governing document for manuscript categories, preparation, and ethical requirements, and prospective authors should work from the current version on the journal's website rather than from any secondary summary — including this one — because categories and requirements are revised over time.

Several practical points follow from the journal's identity. First, fit is judged against a practising readership: papers that help pathologists and laboratory scientists practise better — diagnostic accuracy, testing algorithms, quality and safety, guideline implementation, education — sit naturally here, and authors should make the practice implication of their work explicit. Second, College-linked content follows College processes: guideline and committee manuscripts are produced through CAP's own development and review machinery before they reach the journal. Third, the journal's free online reading model means authors should expect their work to be genuinely read, including by the international audience that the College emphasises, at no cost to the reader. A standard per-article open-access charge is not the basis of this journal's model — its full text is presented by the College as free online — and authors should confirm any page or submission charges, if applicable to their article type, in the current instructions for authors; no standard article publishing charge figure is published in the sources used for this profile, so none is asserted here.

Ethical and reporting expectations follow mainstream biomedical journal practice: authorship contributions, conflict-of-interest disclosure, patient-privacy protection in case material, and adherence to the uniform requirements tradition for biomedical manuscripts that the journal's own author instructions invoke. Case-based submissions in particular should be prepared with consent and de-identification handled before submission, since the journal's wide free readership makes its case content highly visible.

Who Should Consider This Journal

The Archives is a natural home for diagnostic and laboratory research with direct practice relevance: validation and comparison studies of tests and platforms, immunohistochemistry and molecular biomarker work tied to diagnostic decisions, cytopathology and surgical pathology series that refine criteria, laboratory quality, safety and management studies, proficiency-testing analyses, and education research for pathology training. It is also the obvious venue for College programme output and for guideline-adjacent work. Authors seeking the field's highest citation metrics for a narrow molecular discovery may aim at more specialised titles instead, and authors outside pathology and laboratory medicine will find the fit poor — the journal's readership, board, and College mission are all inside the specialty. For work that belongs here, the combination of a century of continuity, the College's imprimatur, the highest measured readership in its field per its publisher, and free online access makes it one of the most professionally consequential places a practising pathologist can publish.

Special Sections, Digital Pathology and the College's Quality Programmes

Three features distinguish the Archives from a generic general-pathology journal and deserve a closer look, because they shape what an author can publish there and what a reader can expect to find. The first is its special sections. Under the Cagle-era editorial board the journal built named masthead sections that commission and organise content around defined practice areas, and those sections proved immensely popular with readers. A special section gives the journal a way to treat a fast-moving topic — a new tumour classification, a testing technology, a laboratory safety problem — as a coordinated set of articles rather than as scattered single papers, and it gives authors a visible thematic home for work that belongs together.

The second feature is its early and practical engagement with digital pathology. The journal featured innovative content on the use of smartphones in pathology and on incorporating whole-slide images and video into articles at a time when many titles still treated digital material as an afterthought. That editorial openness matters today, when image-rich, computationally assisted diagnostics are a routine submission category: authors with whole-slide, imaging, or artificial-intelligence content are writing for a journal whose editors have handled such material for years and whose readership expects to see the images, not just read about them.

The third feature is the journal's integration with the College's quality and proficiency-testing programmes. Studies arising from CAP Q-Probes and proficiency-testing surveys — multi-institution analyses of how laboratories actually perform tests, choose codes, and report results — appear in its pages, alongside Laboratory Improvement Program articles and accreditation-related guidance. This content has no real equivalent in commercially published pathology journals, because no commercial publisher runs the underlying programmes. For laboratory directors and quality managers it is often the most directly usable material in any issue, and for researchers it provides large, real-world datasets about laboratory practice that cannot be assembled any other way. A submission that draws on such programme data, or that benchmarks a laboratory process across institutions, fits the journal's identity precisely.

Taken together, these features explain the journal's durability. It is simultaneously a research journal, the College's professional record, a guideline publisher, and a quality-improvement channel. Authors evaluating it should decide which of those identities their manuscript speaks to, and frame the submission accordingly — a diagnostic study framed for practising pathologists, a quality study framed for laboratory leadership, and a guideline framed for the whole profession are all legitimate Archives papers, but they are written and reviewed differently.

How to Read This Journal's Numbers Without Misleading Yourself

A short note on interpretation is warranted, because this journal is routinely misjudged in both directions. Skeptics point to a three-point-range impact factor and rank it below flashier specialty titles; enthusiasts point to its readership claim and its guideline citations and rank it above them. Both readings capture part of the truth. The impact factor measures the average citation rate of recent citable items, a game in which a monthly general journal carrying quality studies, meeting content, and practice material will always trail a selective molecular title. Readership, guideline authority, and programme integration measure something else: how much a journal changes what laboratories do on Monday morning. By that second measure the Archives has few peers in pathology, because its publisher owns the accreditation and proficiency-testing system its readers work inside, and publishes the guidelines they are inspected against. Researchers deciding where to submit should choose which currency their paper needs — citation velocity or practice reach — and this journal competes honestly, and strongly, on the second.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine? The College of American Pathologists, whose official journal it has been since 1995. It was founded in 1926 as an American Medical Association specialty journal, which is why older sources — and the previous thin Journals World record — name the AMA.

What are its ISSNs? Print 0003-9985 and electronic 1543-2165.

Is it peer reviewed and how often does it appear? Yes, it is a peer-reviewed journal, published monthly.

Can I read it free of charge? The College states that online access to the full text and PDF files of its articles is free through the journal's website.

What is its impact factor? Aggregator listings report 3.2 for 2024–25 (3.7 for 2023), with a SCImago h-index of 143 and SJR of 1.202 in Scopus-based compilations. Check the current Journal Citation Reports for the live official figure.

How do I submit? Through the journal's AllenTrack online peer-review system, following the current instructions for authors on the journal's website.

Verification and Conflict Note

Conflict flag: the Journals World record for post 332951 stored the publisher as “American Medical Association”. Verified position: the journal was an AMA specialty journal from 1926, but it became the official journal of the College of American Pathologists in 1995 and is published by the College today, per the College's own publication page and the journal's published history. The stored publisher value is therefore outdated by roughly three decades and should be corrected to College of American Pathologists when the record's structured data is next edited. The record's ISSNs (0003-9985, 1543-2165) and title were correct.