Birth Defects Research Part A Clinical and Molecular Teratology

About Birth Defects Research Part A Clinical and Molecular Teratology

Overview: Birth Defects Research Part A — Clinical and Molecular Teratology

Birth Defects Research Part A: Clinical and Molecular Teratology was a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Wiley (Wiley-Liss / John Wiley & Sons) as part of the official journal family of the Teratology Society — the society now known as the Society for Birth Defects Research and Prevention. Its ISSNs, as recorded on this Journals World record and confirmed in bibliographic listings of its content, are 1542-0752 (print) and 1542-0760 (online). Part A ran under this title from 2003 to the end of 2016. In January 2017 it was recombined with Part B and Part C into a single journal titled simply Birth Defects Research (ISSN 2472-1727), which continues today.

That status — a completed, historically bounded journal title — is the single most important fact about this record, and it shapes everything below. Part A is not a journal an author can submit to today, and it is not a current title whose present impact factor or editorial board can be listed. It is the form in which the society's flagship journal appeared for fourteen volumes (volumes 67 to 106, in the usual numbering for this title family), carrying a large and still heavily cited literature on the causes, mechanisms, epidemiology and prevention of congenital anomalies — the field historically called teratology. Researchers meet Part A daily in reference lists, in systematic reviews and in the back files of the current Birth Defects Research, so a full profile of what it was, where it came from and how its content should be read and cited remains genuinely useful.

This profile traces the lineage from the founding journal Teratology in 1968, through the 2003 reorganisation that created Parts A, B and C, to the 2017 recombination; explains Part A's particular remit within that structure — the clinical and molecular side of the field; describes its society and publisher; and answers the practical questions readers and citing authors most often have about a ceased part-title.

Lineage I: Teratology (1968–2002)

The journal family begins with Teratology, founded in 1968 as the journal of the Teratology Society, which itself had been established in 1960. The society's own historical accounts and the journal's published histories record that Teratology was published quarterly from 1968 to 1971, bimonthly from 1972 to 1987, and monthly from 1988 onward — a frequency growth that tracks the growth of developmental toxicology and birth-defects research as funded, organised sciences in the decades after the thalidomide disaster had demonstrated, catastrophically, that prenatal exposures could cause severe congenital malformations.

The field the journal served was always multidisciplinary, as the society's own description of its membership makes clear: researchers, clinicians, epidemiologists and public-health professionals from academia, government and industry, working across developmental biology and toxicology, reproduction and endocrinology, epidemiology, cell and molecular biology, nutritional biochemistry, genetics and the clinical disciplines of prenatal medicine, paediatrics, obstetrics, neonatology, medical genetics and teratogen risk counselling. The journal's content mirrored that mix: descriptive and experimental studies of developmental agents, mechanistic work, and increasingly, as the society's updated history notes, epidemiologic studies and basic pharmacologic, molecular and genetic studies of congenital defects, alongside public-health landmarks such as the scientific basis for preventing birth defects caused by rubella, alcohol exposure and folate deficiency.

In 2003 the structure changed. Teratology was combined with the related journal Teratogenesis, Carcinogenesis, and Mutagenesis (founded in 1980), and the combined publication was reorganised and renamed Birth Defects Research, issued in three parts. That reorganisation created the title on this record.

Lineage II: The Three Parts, 2003–2016 — and What Part A Was For

From 2003 the society's journal appeared as three companion titles, each with its own ISSNs, editorial focus and citation identity:

• Part A: Clinical and Molecular Teratology (ISSN 1542-0752 / 1542-0760) — the direct continuation of the main Teratology line, centred on clinical teratology, epidemiology of congenital anomalies, and the molecular and genetic mechanisms of abnormal development.
• Part B: Developmental and Reproductive Toxicology (ISSN 1542-9733 / 1542-9741 in bibliographic listings) — centred on the toxicity of chemicals and products to developing organisms and reproductive function, including multigenerational studies, endocrine-mediated toxicity and novel testing protocols.
• Part C: Embryo Today: Reviews — a reviews title covering developmental biology.

Part A was the largest and most clinically facing of the three. Its full title states its twin poles exactly. Clinical teratology means the human, patient- and population-facing side: epidemiologic studies of the prevalence, patterns and causes of specific malformations; surveillance data from birth-defects registries; studies of maternal exposures in pregnancy — medicines, infections, chronic diseases such as diabetes, substances, occupational and environmental exposures — and their associations with outcomes in children; clinical descriptions and classification of syndromes and malformation patterns; and work on prevention, counselling and public-health intervention, of which folic-acid prevention of neural tube defects is the field's defining example. Molecular teratology means the mechanism-facing side: developmental genetics, gene variants and pathways implicated in malformations, experimental embryology, animal and cellular models used to understand how an exposure or a mutation disrupts development, and signalling and metabolic mechanisms that connect a cause to a structural or functional defect.

A reader sampling Part A's published contents across a typical volume year — its 2009–2010 issues are well represented in secondary content listings — will see exactly that blend on a single contents page: population studies of orofacial clefts, clubfoot, gastroschisis and anotia/microtia; maternal caffeine, medication and diabetes studies in relation to neural tube and cardiac defects; linkage and candidate-gene studies for conditions such as bladder exstrophy; registry and surveillance methodology; cost-of-illness studies for children with craniofacial malformations; and experimental studies of developmental toxicants in model systems. That mixture — human epidemiology and molecular mechanism published side by side under one society's roof — was the deliberate design of the Part A remit, and it is what distinguishes Part A citations in a reference list from the more toxicology-centred Part B citations.

The current unified journal's aims and scope — which descends directly from Part A's — states the enduring mission in words that apply retrospectively to Part A's content: original research and reviews on the aetiology of adverse developmental and reproductive outcomes; the biology of embryonic development; the prenatal causative factors and mechanisms leading to structural and functional birth defects, pregnancy loss and postnatal functional defects in the human population; and the identification of prenatal factors and biological mechanisms that reduce those risks, with causes understood as genetic, environmental, nutritional or epigenetic, and their interactions. Part A's fourteen years of content are the largest single block of the archive built in pursuit of that mission.

Lineage III: Recombination in 2017 — and the Record on This Site

In January 2017 the experiment with three parts ended. Part A, Part B and Part C were merged back into a single journal under the name Birth Defects Research, the account given in the journal family's reference history and reflected in the society's current materials, which describe Birth Defects Research (formerly Teratology) as the society's official journal, published twenty times per year by Wiley, with members receiving electronic access as part of membership. The unified journal keeps the three-part intellectual structure internally: the Wiley aims and scope notes that the journal contains separate sections for clinical and molecular teratology, for developmental and reproductive toxicology, and for reviews in developmental biology, each with a dedicated editor — which is the 2003 partition preserved as sections rather than as separate titles.

On Journals World, the unified journal has its own record (post 17417, slug birth-defects-research, ISSN 2472-1727). That record and this Part A record are not duplicates of one journal under two names in the simple sense: they are a ceased part-title (2003–2016, ISSNs 1542-0752/1542-0760) and its successor whole-title (2017 onward, ISSN 2472-1727), with disjoint ISSN sets and disjoint publication periods. They are reported here as a title-lineage pair so that a future merge or linking decision can be taken with the evidence visible, but this profile treats Part A on its own historical terms, as cataloguing practice does for ceased titles that were later absorbed.

Society and Publisher

The publishing society is the Society for Birth Defects Research and Prevention, founded in 1960 as the Teratology Society. Its mission, in its own code-of-ethics preamble, is to understand the cause and pathogenesis of structural and functional birth defects, developmental delays, perinatal death and other disorders of developmental and reproductive origin, in order to prevent their occurrence and improve diagnosis and treatment — by promoting multidisciplinary research and exchange, communicating information to health professionals, decision-makers and the public, and providing education and training. The society has around 700 members by its own account, holds annual meetings whose abstracts historically appeared in the journal family, and maintains a code of ethics and guidelines for ethical publication and presentation that bind its members.

The publisher was and remains Wiley. Part A was published by Wiley-Liss, the society-journals imprint within John Wiley & Sons, from Hoboken, New Jersey — the publisher address carried in bibliographic listings for the title family. Wiley hosts the archive: back issues of Part A (cited as BDR A), Part B, Part C and Teratology are the associated titles linked from the current journal on Wiley Online Library, and society members are directed to those back files through the current journal's pages. For a reader trying to obtain a Part A article today, Wiley Online Library under the Birth Defects Research associated titles, or a medical library holding the 1542-0752 ISSN, is the correct route — not a submission or journal homepage for Part A itself, which ceased to exist as a separate destination in 2017.

Indexing, Citation and How Part A Should Be Cited

During its life Part A was a mainstream biomedical journal covered by the standard biomedical bibliographic system: it is indexed in PubMed / MEDLINE (its content listings were distributed through services such as Medscape's journal listing, which carries the title with both ISSNs), in the Science Citation Index system whose Journal Citation Reports recorded an impact factor for the title during its active years, and in Scopus, whose title history for Part A runs to its 2016 cessation. Historical impact-factor values for individual years of Part A circulate on aggregator sites; they describe a ceased title in a specific past year, they differ by source and method, and no single such figure is quoted here as a current fact about anything an author can act on. The useful, stable facts are the title's active period, its ISSNs, and its place in the lineage.

Citation form matters with part-titles, and citing authors should observe three points. First, cite what you read: an article from 2003–2016 was published in Birth Defects Research Part A: Clinical and Molecular Teratology and should be referenced under that title (commonly abbreviated Birth Defects Res A Clin Mol Teratol in NLM style), not retrospectively renamed to the current title. Second, keep the parts distinct: Part A, Part B and Part C were separate journals with separate ISSNs and paginations in the same years, so a reference that omits the part letter is ambiguous. Third, for articles from 2017 onward, cite the unified Birth Defects Research; the volume numbering continued across the recombination, which is why the current journal's volume numbers are far higher than a 2017 start would suggest.

For systematic reviewers, the lineage has a search consequence: a comprehensive search on a birth-defects topic across the whole period must include all four title forms in its journal-title strategy — Teratology (to 2002), Birth Defects Research Part A (2003–2016), its companion parts where the topic touches toxicology or reviews, and Birth Defects Research (2017 onward) — or, more robustly, search by topic in PubMed and Scopus without a journal restriction and use the titles only for screening. Many missed older studies in this field are missed at exactly this title boundary.

Editorial Character and Article Types

Part A published original research articles, reviews, and the society-facing material characteristic of a society flagship: the published histories of the Teratology Society themselves appeared in Part A (the updated history by Shepard and colleagues was published in Birth Defects Research Part A in 2010), alongside lectures, meeting-related material and commentaries in its active years. Peer review was editor-managed external review in line with Wiley society-journal practice and the society's published ethics guidelines for publication and presentation; those guidelines — on authorship, disclosure and responsible communication of findings with health implications — are the same society documents that govern the successor journal today.

The society's code of ethics gives a fair picture of the editorial culture Part A operated in. Members commit to objectivity and integrity; to communicating information with potential or real health implications expeditiously and responsibly, with due regard for the significance and credibility of the data; to presenting judgments with full disclosure of the extent of factual support; to keeping conflicts of interest out of their judgment; and to observing the laws and ethical standards protecting human and animal subjects. In a field where a single study can change what pregnant patients are advised to do, that emphasis on calibrated, responsibly communicated claims was not boilerplate — it was the field's lived experience since thalidomide and rubella, written into its society's rules.

Audience and Continuing Use of the Archive

Part A's contemporary audience was the society's multidisciplinary community: developmental biologists and toxicologists, geneticists, epidemiologists, dysmorphologists and clinical geneticists, obstetricians, paediatricians, neonatologists, teratogen-information and risk-counselling specialists, regulators and industry safety scientists, and public-health staff running surveillance and prevention programmes. Its present-day audience is the same community in its capacity as readers of the literature: anyone synthesising evidence on a congenital anomaly, a prenatal exposure or a developmental mechanism will work through Part A's fourteen volumes, because for 2003–2016 this title, with its companions, was the society's journal of record.

If you have arrived at this profile hoping to submit a manuscript, the practical answer is direct: submissions go to the current unified journal, Birth Defects Research, on Wiley Online Library, whose current aims and scope explicitly include clinical and molecular teratology as a section with its own dedicated editor. If you have arrived hoping to find or cite an article, search by the article title or DOI in Wiley Online Library or PubMed; the ISSNs 1542-0752 and 1542-0760 identify the Part A back file unambiguously in any library catalogue.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Birth Defects Research Part A still published?

No. It ran from 2003 to the end of 2016. In January 2017 it was merged with Parts B and C into the unified journal Birth Defects Research (ISSN 2472-1727), which continues with Wiley for the Society for Birth Defects Research and Prevention.

What was Part A's ISSN?

Print ISSN 1542-0752 and online ISSN 1542-0760, as recorded on this profile and in bibliographic listings of its contents.

What did "Clinical and Molecular Teratology" mean in practice?

The human and mechanism sides of birth-defects research: clinical and epidemiological studies of congenital anomalies and prenatal exposures, plus molecular, genetic and experimental work on how abnormal development occurs. Toxicology-centred work sat mainly in Part B and reviews mainly in Part C during the same years.

What journal came before Part A?

Teratology (1968–2002), which in 2003 combined with Teratogenesis, Carcinogenesis, and Mutagenesis and was reorganised into the three Birth Defects Research parts.

Who owned and published the journal?

It was the official journal of the Teratology Society, now the Society for Birth Defects Research and Prevention, and was published by Wiley (Wiley-Liss).

How should I cite a 2010 Part A article?

Under the title in force when it appeared — Birth Defects Research Part A: Clinical and Molecular Teratology, abbreviated Birth Defects Res A Clin Mol Teratol — with its original volume and pages. Do not rename it to the current journal title.

Where can I read Part A articles now?

In the back file on Wiley Online Library (the associated titles of the current Birth Defects Research), through PubMed for abstracts, and through medical libraries holding ISSN 1542-0752.

Is the Journals World record for Birth Defects Research (post 17417) the same journal?

It is the successor whole-title from 2017 onward, with its own ISSN (2472-1727) and a disjoint publication period — a lineage relative of Part A, not the same title. The pair is reported with this profile for a linking or merge decision under the site's procedures.

Profile prepared from the Society for Birth Defects Research and Prevention's own journal and history pages, Wiley's aims and scope for the successor journal, and the journal family's documented title history. Part A ceased in 2016; for current submission information use the unified Birth Defects Research on Wiley Online Library.