Arthritis and Rheumatology

About Arthritis and Rheumatology

Arthritis and Rheumatology — Journal Profile

Arthritis & Rheumatology is the official journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) and one of the most influential titles in rheumatology worldwide. Published by Wiley, it is a monthly, peer-reviewed medical journal devoted to the natural history, pathophysiology, treatment and outcome of the rheumatic diseases. The profile page on Journals World is titled “Arthritis and Rheumatology”; the journal itself styles its name with an ampersand, Arthritis & Rheumatology, and is universally cited under the ISO 4 abbreviation Arthritis Rheumatol. That small naming detail matters in practice: database searches, reference lists and submission systems all use the ampersand form, and authors who search under the spelled-out “and” form will still reach the same record because the ISSNs, not the punctuation, anchor the journal’s identity.

This profile replaces a short template record with a fully researched account. It explains where the journal came from, what it publishes, how its editorial and peer-review machinery works, what its citation metrics do and do not mean, what it costs to publish in it, and — just as importantly — who should and should not consider it as a home for their work. Every verifiable fact below is drawn from the publisher, the owning college, established bibliographic records or major indexing databases, and figures that come from a single source are attributed to that source rather than presented as universal truth.

At a Glance

Two cautions belong beside that table. First, the numeric publisher codes that appeared in the older Journals World template record for this journal were database artefacts, not a publisher name: the publisher is Wiley, a fact confirmed independently by the journal’s own listing, its Ovid platform page and OpenAlex, which names Wiley as host organisation and the United States as the host country. Second, impact factors move every year. A figure of 11.4 circulated for an earlier Journal Citation Reports cycle, while the current Wiley/Ovid listing reports 9.9 as the 2025 Journal Impact Factor. Neither number is “wrong” in isolation; they belong to different citation windows, and any comparison with rival journals must use figures from the same year.

History: From Arthritis & Rheumatism to Arthritis & Rheumatology

The journal began in 1958 under the title Arthritis & Rheumatism, a name it carried for more than half a century and under which it built its reputation as the leading North American rheumatology research journal. For decades it was the official journal through which the American rheumatology community — first the American Rheumatism Association and later the American College of Rheumatology — spoke to itself and to the wider medical world. Landmark classification criteria, treatment trials and mechanistic studies in rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and related conditions reached print in its pages, and the older back file remains heavily cited today.

The journal’s family history includes a notable merger and split. In 2000 it absorbed Arthritis Care and Research, which had been the official journal of the American Arthritis Health Professions Association since 1980. A decade later, in 2010, the combined title divided again: a new Arthritis Care & Research was relaunched as a separate ACR journal focused on clinical practice, health services, epidemiology and health-professions research, while the flagship concentrated on its core research mission. In 2014 the flagship itself was renamed Arthritis & Rheumatology. The rename was more than cosmetic. “Rheumatism” had become an archaic lay term, and the new title signalled a modern specialty journal covering the full breadth of rheumatic disease science, from molecular immunology to large clinical trials. The current ISSN pair dates from that 2014 relaunch, which is why bibliographic records describe the journal’s coverage under its present title as beginning in 2014 even though the journal itself is nearly seven decades old.

That history explains a common source of confusion in citation databases. OpenAlex, for example, maintains the post-2014 title as its own source record — 5,583 works and 210,069 citations, with an h-index of 188 at the time of checking — because works published under the predecessor title sit in a linked but separate record. A researcher who adds the flagship’s older and newer records together will get a larger, historically fuller picture; a researcher who quotes only one record should say which one they mean. This profile follows that discipline throughout: database figures are always tied to the database, and where possible to the exact source record, that produced them.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The publisher describes the journal as a publication “for scientists and clinicians interested in the natural history, pathophysiology, treatment, and outcome of the rheumatic diseases,” publishing “the highest quality basic and clinical research related to the rheumatic diseases” alongside review articles, editorials and other educational material. In practice that remit is broad but sharply bounded by disease relevance: a paper must speak to rheumatic disease, and purely generic immunology or pharmacology without a rheumatic-disease connection will struggle here.

Core disease areas

Rheumatoid arthritis remains the journal’s centre of gravity, spanning synovial biology, autoantibody science, treat-to-target trials, imaging outcomes and long-term safety of targeted therapies. Systemic lupus erythematosus is the second great pillar, covering interferon biology, lupus nephritis, neuropsychiatric disease and the new generation of B-cell and interferon-pathway treatments. Beyond those two, the journal regularly publishes on systemic sclerosis, inflammatory myopathies, vasculitis including giant cell arteritis and ANCA-associated disease, axial spondyloarthritis and psoriatic arthritis, osteoarthritis — increasingly treated as a whole-joint disease with inflammatory and metabolic dimensions — crystal diseases such as gout, paediatric rheumatic diseases in translational settings, and rare autoinflammatory syndromes.

Methods and article character

Methodologically the journal is deliberately plural. It publishes mechanistic laboratory science where the disease link is explicit, human translational studies using synovial tissue, blood biomarkers and imaging, randomised controlled trials, large registry and claims-based epidemiology, classification and outcome-measure methodology, and health-outcomes research that bears directly on rheumatic disease care. OpenAlex’s topic mapping for the journal mirrors that spread, listing its leading topics as rheumatoid arthritis research and therapies, systemic lupus erythematosus research, systemic sclerosis and related diseases, autoimmune and inflammatory disorders research, and osteoarthritis treatment and mechanisms. The older template record on this site classified the journal under immunology and microbiology, immunology, medicine, immunology and allergy, and rheumatology — a reasonable reflection of how indexing services shelve it, since much of its content is immunology practised on rheumatic disease.

What the journal is not is equally clear. It is not a case-report journal, not a venue for small uncontrolled case series, and not a general internal-medicine outlet. Single-patient stories, however instructive, belong in its sister title or in dedicated case-report journals. Survey-style papers without a methodological advance, and confirmatory studies that merely repeat established findings in a slightly different population, face a very high bar.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

The Wiley/Ovid listing names Daniel H. Solomon, MD, PhD, as editor. Dr Solomon is a rheumatologist and pharmacoepidemiologist whose own research concerns the comparative safety and effectiveness of rheumatic-disease treatments — a background that fits the journal’s blend of clinical trials, observational comparative-effectiveness work and drug-safety science. Beneath the editor sits a team of deputy and associate editors drawn from the major rheumatology research centres, supported by an editorial board that spans basic immunology, clinical trials, imaging, paediatric rheumatology and outcomes research, plus statistical review for quantitative manuscripts.

Peer review at a journal of this standing follows the familiar pattern of selective medical journals: an initial editorial triage, external review for manuscripts that pass triage, and revision cycles that frequently involve statistical and methodological queries in addition to clinical ones. The ACR’s ownership matters here. As a society flagship, the journal carries an explicit responsibility to the specialty — publishing ACR-endorsed classification criteria, guidelines-adjacent material and meeting-linked content — alongside its open competitive submissions. Authors should expect rigorous scrutiny of trial registration, ethics approvals, data-sharing statements and conflicts of interest, in line with the expectations applied across major medical journals, and should prepare those elements before submission rather than after acceptance.

Metrics, Indexing and How to Read Them

By any measure this is a top-tier specialty journal, but the exact number attached to it depends entirely on who is counting and over what window. The Wiley/Ovid journal listing reports a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 9.9 from the Journal Citation Reports. Aggregator compilations of the previous cycle reported 11.40, with a SCImago Journal Rank around 3.71 and Q1 placement in rheumatology and immunology categories, including a rank near the very top of the rheumatology list. The Journals World template record previously quoted an h-index of 373 — a Scopus/SCImago-style figure accumulated across the journal’s combined historical identity — whereas OpenAlex’s record for the post-2014 title alone gives an h-index of 188, 5,583 works, 210,069 citations and a two-year mean citedness of about 4.24. These are not contradictions to be averaged away; they are different instruments measuring overlapping but non-identical corpora.

Three practical lessons follow. First, never compare an h-index from one database with a Journal Impact Factor from another and treat the result as a ranking. Second, when a tenure file, grant application or institutional report asks for “the” impact factor, use the current Journal Citation Reports figure and name its year — at the time of writing, the 9.9 reported for 2025 in the publisher’s listing. Third, remember that a specialty journal’s influence is better judged by its position within its field than by raw cross-field numbers: within rheumatology, this title sits consistently in the first quartile and among the small group of journals that define the field’s research agenda, alongside titles such as Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases and Rheumatology (Oxford).

Indexing is comprehensive, as expected for a Wiley society flagship: the journal is covered by the major biomedical and multidisciplinary indexes, including MEDLINE/PubMed, Scopus and the Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded, which is the coverage that produces its Journal Impact Factor. It is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals — a foreground check of the DOAJ search API by both ISSN and title returned no record — because it is a subscription journal with hybrid choices, not a fully open access title. Absence from DOAJ is not a quality judgement; it is simply a statement about access model.

Access, Open Access and Costs

The journal operates a hybrid model. The default route is subscription publication: articles appear behind the Wiley Online Library paywall for non-subscribers, with access through institutional licences, society membership arrangements and article rental or purchase for individuals. Authors who need or want immediate open access — for example because a funder mandate requires it — can choose the publisher’s online-open route on acceptance, for which an article publication charge applies. The exact charge is set by Wiley and can change; it is not published in the sources used for this profile in a form that can be quoted reliably, so it is recorded here as not publicly disclosed in the checked sources, and authors should confirm the current figure on the journal’s Wiley page before submitting rather than relying on third-party fee listings, which are frequently out of date.

Back content has an afterlife worth knowing about. Older articles feed into the ACR’s educational ecosystem, and accepted manuscripts are typically deposited in public repositories in line with funder public-access policies, which means the subscription wall around the version of record does not make the underlying research invisible. For readers without a subscription, author manuscripts, institutional repositories and interlibrary arrangements are the legitimate routes to the text.

Submitting: Who Fits, Who Does Not, and How to Improve Your Chances

The best-fit manuscript for this journal reports something the rheumatology community needs to know: a mechanism that changes how a disease is understood, a trial or rigorous comparative study that changes how it is treated, a classification or measurement advance the field will adopt, or epidemiology large and careful enough to settle a contested question. The common thread is consequence. Editors triaging hundreds of submissions ask, in effect, whether practising rheumatologists and rheumatology scientists will behave differently after reading the paper.

Manuscripts that fit poorly include isolated case reports, small single-centre series without a control or comparison strategy, biomarker studies in tiny convenience samples with no validation, and reviews of topics already reviewed exhaustively in the journal’s recent volumes — narrative reviews here are largely commissioned or must make an unmistakably fresh contribution. Authors with valuable but more specialised work should consider the sister title Arthritis Care & Research for practice, epidemiology and health-services angles, and should read the transfer and referral options Wiley offers rather than treating a rejection as the end of the road.

Practical preparation matters. Follow the journal’s author guidelines on Wiley Online Library exactly, including word limits, structured abstracts where required, trial registration numbers for interventional studies, reporting-guideline checklists (CONSORT, STROBE and their kin as applicable), and complete funding and conflict-of-interest statements. Write a cover letter that states, in a few sentences, what is new and why it matters to this journal’s readers specifically. Anticipate the statistical review: prespecify analyses, handle multiplicity and missing data transparently, and show sensitivity analyses rather than waiting to be asked. None of this guarantees acceptance at a journal that declines the large majority of what it receives, but all of it prevents avoidable triage rejection.

The Journal Within the Rheumatology Literature

Understanding this journal also means understanding its neighbourhood. Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, the EULAR journal published by BMJ, is its closest transatlantic counterpart and competitor for major trials and criteria papers. Rheumatology (Oxford University Press, for the British Society for Rheumatology) occupies adjacent ground with a strong clinical and translational mix. Nature Reviews Rheumatology dominates commissioned synthesis but does not compete for primary data. Within the ACR’s own stable, Arthritis Care & Research takes the practice and population-science flank, and the ACR’s newer open access titles extend the family further. A manuscript strategy that ignores this map — sending practice-focused work to the flagship or flagship-grade trials to a niche title — wastes everyone’s time, including the author’s.

For readers rather than authors, the journal functions as the specialty’s monthly briefing: original research up front, reviews and editorials that frame it, and the criteria and consensus material that later hardens into everyday clinical practice. That is why its contents are watched far beyond its subscriber base, and why its citation record, however measured, remains among the strongest in the field.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Arthritis & Rheumatology the same journal as Arthritis & Rheumatism? Yes — it is the same journal under its current name. The title changed in 2014; volumes before that year appear under Arthritis & Rheumatism, and citations to the older name refer to this journal’s own back file.

Is it the official journal of the American College of Rheumatology? Yes. It is the ACR’s official journal, published on the college’s behalf by Wiley.

What are its ISSNs? Print 2326-5191 and online 2326-5205. Note that the hyphenated forms are the standard display; databases also store them without hyphens.

What is its impact factor? The publisher’s listing reports a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 9.9 (Journal Citation Reports). Earlier cycles were higher — aggregators reported 11.40 for the preceding cycle — so always cite the figure with its year.

Is the journal open access? It is a hybrid journal: subscription publication by default, with an optional paid open access route. It is not listed in DOAJ, which covers fully open access journals.

Does it publish case reports? As a rule, no — case reports and very small series sit outside its remit and are better directed to its sister title or to dedicated case-report journals.

How often does it appear? Monthly, twelve issues a year, with articles also published online ahead of issue assignment through Wiley Online Library.

Sources and Verification

This profile is based on the journal’s listing in the Wiley/Ovid journal catalogue (publisher Wiley, editor Daniel H. Solomon, monthly frequency, ISSN 2326-5191, 2025 Journal Impact Factor 9.9, official-journal description), the established bibliographic history of the title (founded 1958 as Arthritis & Rheumatism, absorption of Arthritis Care and Research in 2000, its relaunch as a separate title in 2010, and the 2014 rename), a foreground OpenAlex source record for ISSN 2326-5191 (source S4210186158: Wiley host, United States, 5,583 works, 210,069 citations, h-index 188), aggregator compilations of SCImago/Journal Citation Reports data for the preceding cycle (impact factor 11.40, SJR about 3.71, Q1), and a foreground DOAJ search-API check by ISSN and title, which returned no listing. Metrics change annually and database counts change continuously; figures here are a dated snapshot, attributed to their sources, not permanent properties of the journal.