Deutsche Apotheker Zeitung

About Deutsche Apotheker Zeitung

Deutsche Apotheker Zeitung — Journal Profile

Deutsche Apotheker Zeitung (the title's own styling, without the internal hyphen; abbreviated DAZ; ISSN 0011-9857) is a German-language, association-independent pharmaceutical weekly for science and practice, published in Germany by the Deutscher Apotheker Verlag in Stuttgart. It appears weekly on Thursdays and is written for pharmacists and the wider pharmacy profession: its pages combine pharmaceutical science, practical guidance for pharmacy work, professional and health-policy reporting, and business coverage of the pharmacy sector. Since 1984 it has had a Monday companion, the Apotheker Zeitung (ISSN 0178-4862), devoted to politics, economics, management and law, and since 1997 an editorially separate news website, DAZ.online. The title's lineage reaches back to the Pharmaceutisches Wochenblatt of 1861, which makes it one of the oldest continuing professional publications for pharmacists in the German-speaking world.

Classification matters here as much as history. The DAZ is a professional journal and trade newspaper, not a peer-reviewed primary research journal in the international scholarly sense, and its contents should be cited accordingly — as authoritative professional reporting and practice material from inside German pharmacy, edited by a specialist publishing house. Readers used to English-language pharmacy journals should also note what kind of prominence it has: its standing rests on more than a century and a half of continuity, a weekly presence in German pharmacies, and audited circulation figures that few professional titles can match — a sold circulation of 28,667 copies recorded by the German circulation audit (IVW) for the fourth quarter of 2018, the figure carried in its standard reference data. This profile sets out the title's history, its place inside the Mediengruppe Deutscher Apotheker Verlag, its editorial structure and content, the indexing and metric evidence that can actually be verified, and the distinctions — from its Monday companion, from its main competitor and from the pharmacists' professional association — that a reader must keep straight to use it well.

Quick Facts

History: From the Pharmaceutisches Wochenblatt of 1861 to Stuttgart

The DAZ's own reference history traces the title to the Pharmaceutisches Wochenblatt of 1861, a pharmaceutical weekly from the decades in which German pharmacy was professionalising — standardising its training, its pharmacopoeias and its place inside the health system. For a period the paper carried the title Süddeutsche Apotheker Zeitung, reflecting the regional structure of the German pharmacy press before national titles consolidated. That southern line of the family is the one that runs into the modern publishing house: the Süddeutsche Apotheker-Zeitung was published in Stuttgart by Roland Schmiedel, the founder figure of the modern group, who built a stable of scientific and professional periodicals in the city.

The twentieth century interrupted that continuity in the way it interrupted every German periodical. In 1943, during the Second World War, the Süddeutsche Apotheker-Zeitung was officially combined, on wartime grounds, with the Deutsche Apotheker-Zeitung in Berlin. Immediately after the war Schmiedel regained his publishing licence and in 1946 issued the Süddeutsche Apotheker-Zeitung again. In 1950 he acquired the rights to the Deutscher Apotheker Verlag, moved its seat to Stuttgart and combined the papers into a single title — recorded as the Deutsche Apothekerzeitschrift in the publishing house's history — from which the modern weekly descends. In 1955 the publishing house built its headquarters in the Birkenwaldstraße in Stuttgart, with a second site at Gerlingen added in 1981, and the business remained in family ownership, led in recent reference accounts by the founder's grandson. The standard reference entry for the present title accordingly lists its first edition in its current form as 1984, with the parenthetical lineage to 1861 — a dating that makes sense once the post-war recombination and the later relaunch alongside the Monday companion are understood. What no version of the history disputes is the weekly's practical identity: a Stuttgart-published, independent pharmaceutical paper that German pharmacists have received, in one form or another, across three centuries.

Two later dates complete the modern shape. In 1984 the house added the Apotheker Zeitung as a Monday edition of the DAZ, covering politics, economics, management and law for the profession — so that the Thursday paper could concentrate on science and practice while the Monday paper carried the week's professional politics. And in 1997 the house launched DAZ.online, an editorially independent news website, which by now carries the daily news flow of the brand while the printed weekly provides the fuller professional treatment. The operator of the online service is given as the Mediengruppe Deutscher Apotheker Verlag Dr. Roland Schmiedel GmbH & Co. KG, with the online editorial team named separately from the print editors — a separation the group itself stresses.

The Publisher: Deutscher Apotheker Verlag and Its Group

The Deutscher Apotheker Verlag (DAV) in Stuttgart is a specialist pharmaceutical publishing house serving pharmacists and pharmaceutical technical assistants, and it sits at the centre of a wider media group whose subsidiaries have included the Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft in Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, and other specialist and scientific publishers, as listed in reference accounts of the group. Inside the pharmacy portfolio, the Thursday DAZ and the Monday Apotheker Zeitung are the flagship newspapers; the group also publishes the fortnightly magazine for pharmaceutical technical assistants founded in 2007, the hospital pharmacy journal of the German hospital pharmacists' federal association, and the Medizinische Monatsschrift für Pharmazeuten, together with scientific books, pharmacopoeias, loose-leaf works, databases and electronic media for the profession, and it runs the pharmacy jobs portal jobpharm.de and the spring professional training congress Interpharm.

One distinction must be made carefully, because German pharmacy uses near-identical names for different bodies. The publisher of this newspaper is the Deutscher Apotheker Verlag — a commercial publishing house in Stuttgart. It is not the Deutscher Apothekerverband, the professional association of pharmacists whose history runs through the regional pharmacists' associations and the federal umbrella bodies. The DAZ describes itself, precisely, as association-independent — verbandsunabhängig — meaning it is not the organ of that association or of any other professional body, and its reporting on professional politics is editorially its own. Readers citing the paper on a policy question should therefore treat it as independent professional journalism with a pharmacist readership, not as an association's official position.

Content, Readership and Editorial Structure

The reference description of the Thursday paper is an independent pharmaceutical journal for science and practice, in the fields of pharmacy and the health economy, in German. In practice its weekly contents follow the working life of a German pharmacy: new medicines and what pharmacists need to know to dispense and counsel on them; pharmaceutical science and technology; clinical and practice questions arising at the counter and in hospital and community settings; the economics of running a pharmacy, including remuneration, regulation and the health-policy decisions that set both; professional news, appointments and association activity reported independently; and legal and management material that its Monday companion treats at greater length. The Monday Apotheker Zeitung is explicitly positioned for politics, economics, management and law, and readers who need the DAZ brand's position on a policy fight will often find the fuller treatment there or on DAZ.online.

Editorial responsibility, as carried in the title's standard reference entry, lies with editors-in-chief Benjamin Wessinger and Julia Borsch for the DAZ, with Klaus G. Brauer and Peter Ditzel as publishers (Herausgeber); the Monday paper's editorial leadership is listed separately in the same reference data, and the online service's editorial team is likewise named separately — reflecting the group's structure of related but editorially distinct desks. The weekly is a subscription title, and its audited sold circulation of 28,667 copies in the fourth quarter of 2018 — the dated figure on record, not a current claim — indicates a paper that reached a substantial share of Germany's roughly twenty thousand community pharmacies and their pharmacists in print, before the ongoing shift of daily reading to DAZ.online.

Indexing, Records and Metrics — What Can Be Verified

The bibliographic anchor is ISSN 0011-9857 for the print weekly, stored in this record; the Monday companion's separate ISSN 0178-4862 should never be merged into this record, and cataloguers should keep the two titles apart exactly as this profile's twin checking did — no separate Journals World record for the Monday title was found in that checking, and none is created by this profile. The journal-analysis service MIAR, in the profile for this ISSN checked for this profile, records the title in the health sciences, in pharmacology and pharmacy, and lists its presence in one citation database, Scopus, and one specialised database, EMBASE — a plausible indexing footprint for a German professional weekly whose scientific content is abstracted even though the paper as a whole is professional rather than academic. That MIAR listing is reported here as MIAR's record, attributed as such.

Resolved in the foreground through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint for 0011-9857, the title's OpenAlex record at checking time was source S4306507830, with the publisher group Mediengruppe Deutscher Apotheker Verlag as host, the official site as homepage, 94 works and 31 citations, an h-index of 3 and an i10-index of 1, a two-year mean citedness of 0.0, and captured coverage from 1967 to 2021, with topics in pharmacy and medical practice and pharmaceutical analysis. As with every trade and professional title in this batch, those numbers capture only the small academically harvested residue of a weekly newspaper's output across those years and say nothing meaningful about its professional reach; they are reproduced exactly as returned, with their attribution, because a profile should show the evidence rather than hide it. The earlier short template text for this record quoted an h-index of 10, which does not match the freshly resolved OpenAlex figure of 3, and the template's figure is not relied on here. A DOAJ search by ISSN at checking time returned no record — expected in kind for a subscription professional weekly, and recorded only as that search result. No impact factor or citation quartile is claimed, because none could be verified from a primary source.

Contributing and Using the Paper

The DAZ does not operate a scholarly manuscript system: there is no author portal, no article processing charge and no peer-review pipeline of the kind research journals run, and no public author guidelines for research submissions could be verified from the sources checked for this profile, so none are invented here. Material reaches a professional weekly through its editorial office — news from companies, institutions and the profession, contributions from practising and academic pharmacists whom the editors know or who approach the desk with practice material of clear use to readers, and the paper's own reporting. A pharmacist or researcher with material they believe belongs in the DAZ should approach the editorial office in Stuttgart through the contact routes on the official website, in German, with a concise account of the topic and its practical relevance, and should not mistake the paper for a venue for unrefereed research claims: its editors will treat contributions as professional journalism, with the checking and shortening that implies.

For readers and researchers, the paper's best uses match its nature. It is a first-rate primary source for the history of German pharmacy since the post-war period — what concerned the profession in a given year, how a medicines-policy reform was received at the counter, when a product or practice entered German pharmacy discussion. Its science and practice content is a reliable professional summary source for German-speaking pharmacists. Its policy reporting is independent professional journalism and should be read as such, balanced where a question is contested against the official texts and the association statements it reports on. And it should be distinguished, in any bibliography, from the Pharmazeutische Zeitung, the other great German pharmacy weekly, published by a different house — confusing the two titles, which German sources abbreviate DAZ and PZ respectively, is the most common cataloguing error in this corner of the pharmacy press, and the ISSNs keep them apart: 0011-9857 for this title.

DAZ.online and the Weekly in the Digital Working Day

The digital arm deserves its own paragraph in any modern profile, because for many younger pharmacists DAZ.online, launched in 1997 and run as an editorially independent news service by the publishing group, is now the form of the title they meet first and most often. Where the printed weekly arrives once, on Thursdays, with considered science and practice material, the website carries the running news of German pharmacy — policy announcements, product and recall information, professional disputes and market moves — updated as the working day unfolds, and organised for a reader checking between tasks rather than sitting down with a paper. The group presents the online desk as editorially separate from the print desks, and researchers using the site should note the practical consequence: an item may appear online as news days before the weekly treats it in depth, the two treatments may differ in emphasis, and a citation should identify which form was used, with its date, exactly as a citation of the Monday companion should be distinguished from the Thursday paper.

The print weekly's role has shifted accordingly rather than disappeared. A subscription paper that an audited figure once showed selling more than twenty-eight thousand copies in a quarter now serves, in large part, as the profession's considered record: the place where a topic is explained once, fully, with the background a daily news item cannot carry, and where a pharmacist who has followed the headlines online on Monday can find the science, the figures and the practical consequences gathered on Thursday. That division of labour — fast and free online news for the day, a paid weekly for depth, a Monday paper for politics and management — is the DAZ brand's answer to the economics that have closed many professional newspapers, and it is the structure a new reader should have in mind when deciding which part of the brand to consult, cite or subscribe to.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Deutsche Apotheker Zeitung? 0011-9857 for the Thursday weekly. The Monday companion, Apotheker Zeitung, has its own ISSN, 0178-4862, and is a separate title.

Who publishes it? The Deutscher Apotheker Verlag in Stuttgart, within the Mediengruppe Deutscher Apotheker Verlag Dr. Roland Schmiedel GmbH & Co. KG. It is a publishing house, not the pharmacists' professional association, and the paper describes itself as association-independent.

How old is it? Its lineage is traced to the Pharmaceutisches Wochenblatt of 1861, through a period as Süddeutsche Apotheker Zeitung and a post-war recombination in Stuttgart from 1946–1950; reference data list the present title's first edition in its current form as 1984.

How often does it appear? Weekly, on Thursdays, with the Monday Apotheker Zeitung since 1984 and the DAZ.online news website since 1997.

What does it cover? Pharmaceutical science and practice for pharmacists — medicines, dispensing and counselling, pharmacy economics, health policy, professional news, management and law — in German, for the German pharmacy profession.

Is it indexed? The MIAR journal-analysis profile for ISSN 0011-9857 records a presence in Scopus among citation databases and in EMBASE among specialised databases. OpenAlex, at checking time (source S4306507830), listed 94 works and 31 citations, which reflect only a small harvested residue of a weekly professional paper's output.

Is Deutsche Apotheker Zeitung peer-reviewed? It is an edited professional weekly, not a peer-reviewed primary research journal; cite it as professional reporting and practice material, not as refereed research evidence.

What was its circulation? The dated audited figure carried in its standard reference data is 28,667 copies sold (IVW, fourth quarter of 2018). A current audited figure could not be verified for this profile and none is claimed.