Diagnostics

About Diagnostics

Diagnostics — Journal Profile

Diagnostics is an international, peer-reviewed, fully open-access journal of medical diagnosis, published online by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland, under the single electronic ISSN 2075-4418. Launched in 2011, it has grown from a new open-access title in a fast-moving field into one of the larger journals of clinical diagnosis, publishing research on everything from radiology and pathology to molecular diagnostics, point-of-care devices and artificial intelligence in diagnostic medicine. The JournalsWorld record for this post (ID 2694, slug diagnostics) carries exactly that one ISSN, and every registry fetched for this profile agrees on the identity: the Directory of Open Access Journals lists Diagnostics under eISSN 2075-4418 with MDPI AG of Switzerland as publisher, and the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint carries the same ISSN, the same publisher and a 2011 starting year. The stored template on this record showed a numeric code, 266, in the publisher position; that code is not a publisher. The publisher is MDPI AG, and this profile uses that verified identity throughout.

This profile is written for clinicians, imaging scientists, laboratory researchers and health-technology authors deciding whether a diagnostic study belongs in this journal, and for readers who need the journal distinguished from the many other titles that carry the word diagnostics inside longer names. It sets out the journal's founding, its unusually broad stated scope, its article types, its editorial leadership, its verified metrics from named services, its indexing, its open-access licence and its article processing charge — the last two verified directly from the journal's DOAJ record — and the practical steps and cautions for submission, including an honest account of how to weigh a fast, high-volume open-access journal against slower, narrower alternatives.

At a Glance

• Title: Diagnostics
• Electronic ISSN: 2075-4418 (online only; no separate print ISSN)
• Publisher: MDPI AG, Basel, Switzerland
• Founded: 2011
• Frequency: Semimonthly, published online, continuously as articles are accepted
• Access: Fully open access; articles under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence; authors retain copyright
• Article processing charge: 2,600 CHF, as recorded in the journal's DOAJ listing
• Review model: Single-anonymized peer review, as recorded in DOAJ
• Field: Medical diagnosis in all its forms

Founding and Development

Diagnostics was launched by MDPI in 2011, and its founding editorial, published on 23 November 2011 by its founding editor-in-chief, Andreas Kjaer of the Department of Clinical Physiology, Nuclear Medicine and PET at Rigshospitalet, the National University Hospital of the University of Copenhagen, states the founding argument plainly. Diagnostic methods in medicine were evolving and improving rapidly — in molecular diagnostics, in biomarkers, and in medical imaging, where positron emission tomography was described as among the fastest-growing medical technologies of its time. Early and valid diagnosis was becoming crucial both for proper treatment and for the coming era of tailored therapy, in which expensive advanced treatments need to be directed to the patients able to respond to them. The journal was therefore created as an open-access, peer-reviewed venue built for speed of dissemination, with no restriction on the length of papers, so that methods could be reported in the detail peers need to adopt them. Professor Kjaer remains identified with the journal's leadership: MDPI announcements written under the guidance of the editor-in-chief, Prof. Dr. Andreas Kjaer, describe the journal's later development, including the establishment of a dedicated section for clinical diagnosis and prognosis alongside its imaging, pathology and molecular sections.

The decade and a half since launch has turned that founding design into scale. The journal received its first Journal Impact Factor in the 2018 edition of the Journal Citation Reports, an event its editor marked in a 2019 editorial as a milestone following full PubMed coverage in 2016 and coverage by the Science Citation Index Expanded. Its article output grew with the diagnostic artificial-intelligence wave of the late 2010s and 2020s. The OpenAlex source record fetched for this profile counts more than twenty thousand works in the journal — a volume that places it among the large clinical journals by output, and that shapes both its strengths, breadth and speed, and the questions a careful author should ask about fit, which the later sections of this profile address directly.

Scope: Diagnosis, in Full

The journal's aims and scope statement on the publisher's site defines it as an international scholarly open-access journal on medical diagnosis, publishing original research articles, reviews, short communications, case reports and interesting images, with no restriction on the maximum length of papers and an explicit aim to encourage scientists to publish experimental and theoretical research in as much detail as possible, with full experimental and methodological details provided for research articles. Its scope list is the clearest map of what belongs here, and it is worth giving in full because authors most often misjudge this journal by assuming it is an imaging journal only. The listed scope covers radiology; nuclear medicine; medical imaging; theranostics; optical imaging; endoscopy; pathology; biopsy; molecular diagnostics; forensic diagnostics; medical screening; prognosis; biomarkers; diagnostic microbiology and infectious disease; point-of-care testing and devices; microfluidic and lab-on-a-chip technologies; biosensors and biochips in diagnostics; mobile health; clinical decision support systems; and machine learning and artificial intelligence in diagnostics.

Read as a whole, that list has a logic. It covers the three great routes by which diagnosis actually happens — looking inside the body through imaging and endoscopy, examining tissue and fluids through pathology and laboratory methods, and computing over data through decision support and machine learning — and it covers the settings in which diagnosis is moving, from central laboratories toward the point of care, the wearable sensor and the phone. A paper belongs in this journal when its main claim is diagnostic: a test, an image, a marker, a device or an algorithm that detects, classifies, stages, screens for or predicts disease or response. A treatment trial whose diagnostic element is incidental, or a basic-science paper with no route to a diagnostic use, will be read as outside the scope even when its medicine is sound. Conversely, diagnostic accuracy studies, validation and comparison studies of tests and imaging protocols, biomarker evaluations, and well-documented case reports and images that teach a diagnostic lesson are squarely inside it.

Article Types and Sections

The journal publishes original research articles, reviews, short communications, case reports and interesting images. The absence of a length limit is a real feature for diagnostic methods work, where reproducibility lives in the protocol detail — scanner parameters, assay conditions, cohort construction, annotation procedure, model training detail — that word limits elsewhere force into supplements or out of the paper entirely. The journal is organised into sections reflecting its scope, among them medical imaging and theranostics, pathology and molecular diagnostics, and the clinical diagnosis and prognosis section established under the editor-in-chief to take manuscripts with a focus on clinical diagnosis, stratification, therapy guidance through companion diagnostics, and prognostication using established methods. Authors should name the section they intend when they submit and write the abstract so the diagnostic claim and the evidence for it — the cohort, the reference standard, the performance figures — are visible immediately, because editors and referees in this journal assess diagnostic papers against reporting expectations for accuracy studies, including a clearly described reference standard and an honestly described study population.

Publisher, Licence and Fees: Verified from DOAJ

MDPI AG is the publisher, based in Basel, Switzerland, and the journal is published semimonthly online. Articles are open-access articles distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, CC BY, and copyright is retained by the authors — terms stated on the publisher's about page and confirmed in the journal's DOAJ record, which lists the licence as CC BY and records that the author retains copyright. The DOAJ record fetched for this profile also gives the financial terms directly: the journal has an article processing charge, with a maximum recorded price of 2,600 CHF, and no other charges; it records a waiver policy, plagiarism screening, a publication-time figure of six weeks in its directory data, English as the language, and open-access publishing from 2011. MDPI's own journal pages publish the same charge figure for the journal, and state that members of its affiliated societies receive a discount on the article processing charges. The affiliated societies named by the publisher are the British Neuro-Oncology Society, the International Society for Infectious Diseases in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and the Swiss laboratory medicine society. Authors should confirm the current charge on the publisher's page at submission, since charges are revised periodically, and should check discount and waiver routes before assuming the headline figure is the figure they will pay.

The journal's ethics framework is also a matter of publisher record. MDPI is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, and the journal's about page states that the publisher enforces rigorous peer review with strict ethical policies, uses iThenticate to check submissions against previous publications, and trains its editors to handle cases of plagiarism, data falsification and inappropriate authorship with a zero-tolerance approach. For diagnostic research, where human data, images and clinical cohorts are the material, authors should expect the standard requirements that follow from that framework: ethics approval and consent statements for human studies, data availability statements, and clear reporting of funding and conflicts of interest.

Metrics: Verified Figures, Attributed

The publisher's journal page reports an Impact Factor of 3.8 for 2025 and a five-year Impact Factor of 3.6 for 2025, and ranks the journal JCR Q1 in Medicine, General and Internal and CiteScore Q1 in Internal Medicine. The older template on this JournalsWorld record quoted an impact factor of 3.8 with a Q2 label; the 3.8 figure matches the publisher's 2025 figure, and the Q2 label belongs to other ranking systems and categories — SCImago, for example, places the journal in Q2 in clinical biochemistry and internal medicine categories on its Scopus-based measure. Quartiles are category- and system-specific, and a profile that gives a quartile without its system and category misleads; this profile therefore attributes each ranking to its source rather than blending them.

The OpenAlex source record for this journal (source S4210172076, resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint from the ISSN on this record and fetched in full for this profile — and not the similarly numbered phantom source that this directory's workers are instructed never to cite) reported, at the time of checking, 20,463 works and 242,927 citations, a summary h-index of 128, an i10-index of 6,946 and a two-year mean citedness of about 4.00. Its leading topic clusters were radiomics and machine learning in medical imaging, artificial intelligence in cancer detection, artificial intelligence in healthcare, and medical imaging techniques and applications — a topic profile that shows how strongly the journal's recent literature is shaped by imaging and AI. Read together, the metrics describe a large, fast, mid-to-high-visibility open-access journal: not a small specialist title, and not one of the most demanding clinical flagships, but a venue whose papers are widely indexed, quickly published and regularly cited, particularly where diagnostic imaging and machine learning meet.

Indexing and Visibility

The publisher states that the journal is indexed within Scopus, the Science Citation Index Expanded in Web of Science, PubMed, PubMed Central, Embase, Inspec and CAPlus/SciFinder, among other databases. For a diagnostic journal, the PubMed and PubMed Central presence is operationally the most important entry on that list: it places the journal's articles in the search path of clinicians, and the full text in PubMed Central satisfies the open-access deposit expectations of many funders. The journal is also listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, verified directly from the DOAJ search API for this profile, which independently confirms its open-access licence, its charge and its publisher. The publisher also publishes performance figures for the journal, reporting that manuscripts are peer-reviewed with a first decision provided approximately 20.4 days after submission and acceptance to publication undertaken in 2.9 days, as median values for papers published in the journal in the first half of 2026. Those are the publisher's own figures for its own process, quoted here as such; individual manuscripts, particularly those needing major revision or specialist statistical review, will take longer.

How to Submit

Manuscripts are submitted online through the MDPI submission system, reached from the journal's pages on the publisher's site, after registering and logging in. The publisher requires that submitted manuscripts have not been published previously and are not under consideration elsewhere, conference proceedings papers excepted, and that all submissions passing pre-check are peer-reviewed through a single-anonymized process — the model also recorded in the journal's DOAJ listing. The publisher's instructions for authors for this journal should be followed for structure, reporting and format before submission. In practice, a strong submission to this journal does six things. It states the diagnostic question and intended use of the test, image, marker or model in the first paragraph. It describes the study population and reference standard with the completeness that diagnostic accuracy reporting demands. It gives full methodological detail, which the journal's no-length-limit policy exists to accommodate. It reports performance honestly, including the cases the method gets wrong. It carries the required ethics, consent, data availability, funding and conflict statements. And it confirms, before submission, the article processing charge position — the 2,600 CHF figure recorded in DOAJ, any affiliated-society discount, and any waiver application — so that cost is a known quantity rather than a surprise at acceptance. Reviewers receive recognition from the publisher in the form of vouchers toward future charges when they provide timely, thorough reports, a detail that tells authors the journal actively maintains its reviewer pool to sustain its decision times.

Is This Journal Right for Your Paper?

Choose Diagnostics when your paper's main contribution is a diagnostic method, evaluation or application — in imaging, pathology, molecular diagnostics, point-of-care testing, screening, prognosis or diagnostic artificial intelligence — and when you value speed, open access with a CC BY licence, PubMed Central visibility and room to report methods in full. Choose it when your funder mandates immediate open access, since its licence and deposit profile meet the standard requirements. Think carefully, and consider narrower alternatives, when your paper needs the audience of a single clinical specialty, where a society journal may be read more closely by exactly your peers; when your institution's assessment rewards only a small set of flagship titles; or when your study is a preliminary, single-centre evaluation whose claims would be strengthened by a more demanding revision cycle before they enter the literature. The journal's own scale cuts both ways: publication here puts a paper into a very large, fast-moving stream, which rewards a clear title, a structured abstract and a diagnostic claim stated in numbers, and buries vague ones. Authors who write for that reality generally find the journal's model works as advertised.

Similar Journals

Authors considering this journal commonly also consider other MDPI titles in adjacent territory named by the publisher as companions or neighbours, including Journal of Clinical Medicine for broader clinical research and Journal of Imaging for imaging science as such; the BMC title Diagnostic and Prognostic Research for studies of tests, markers and prediction models as a methodological field; BMJ Open and other large open-access general medical journals for diagnostic studies aimed at a general clinical readership; and the specialty imaging, pathology and laboratory-medicine society journals for work whose audience is one profession. Within that set, Diagnostics is the broad diagnostic title: the widest stated scope in diagnosis, a diagnostics-specific identity rather than a general medical one, and a publication model built on speed and full methodological reporting. A manuscript whose diagnostic claim spans more than one of the routes in its scope list — an imaging biomarker, say, validated against pathology and read by a machine-learning model — is the clearest case for choosing it over a narrower title.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Diagnostics? Its electronic ISSN is 2075-4418. It is an online journal with no separate print ISSN.

Who publishes Diagnostics? MDPI AG of Basel, Switzerland. The journal was launched in 2011. The numeric code in older directory records is not a publisher name.

Who founded Diagnostics, and who leads it? It was founded in 2011 under its founding editor-in-chief Andreas Kjaer of Rigshospitalet and the University of Copenhagen, whose founding editorial set out the journal's mission and who remains identified as its editor-in-chief in the publisher's announcements.

Is Diagnostics open access, and what does it charge? Yes, fully open access under a CC BY licence, with copyright retained by authors. Its DOAJ listing records an article processing charge of 2,600 CHF and no other charges, with a waiver policy in place. Confirm the current figure on the publisher's page at submission.

Is Diagnostics listed in DOAJ? Yes. The listing was verified directly from the DOAJ search API for this profile, under eISSN 2075-4418, publisher MDPI AG, country Switzerland.

What are the journal's metrics? The publisher reports an Impact Factor of 3.8 (2025) and a five-year figure of 3.6 (2025), with JCR Q1 in Medicine, General and Internal. OpenAlex, at the time of checking, counted 20,463 works, 242,927 citations and an h-index of 128. Other systems place it in other quartiles in other categories, so cite rankings with their source.

How fast is publication? The publisher reports median first decision at approximately 20.4 days and acceptance to publication at 2.9 days for papers published in the first half of 2026; its DOAJ record gives a publication time of six weeks. Individual papers vary.

What kinds of papers does it publish? Original research, reviews, short communications, case reports and interesting images, across its full diagnostic scope from radiology and pathology to molecular diagnostics, point-of-care devices and artificial intelligence in diagnostics, with no maximum length limit.

Conclusion

Diagnostics is what its founding editorial promised: a fast, open, broad home for the science of finding out what is wrong with a patient. Its scope is one of the widest in clinical publishing, its licence and charges are on public record through DOAJ, its indexing covers the routes clinicians and funders actually use, and its metrics, attributed above to the publisher, to Journal Citation Reports categories and to OpenAlex, place it as a large and visible mid-field journal rather than a flagship title. For a diagnostic study that is complete, honestly reported and written so its claim can be found, those are strong reasons to submit here — and this profile has set out the checks that let an author confirm, before paying any charge, that the fit is real.