Dissolution Technologies

About Dissolution Technologies

Dissolution Technologies — Journal Profile

Dissolution Technologies is a specialist quarterly journal devoted to one of pharmaceutical science's most consequential laboratory tests: the dissolution and in vitro release testing of drug products. Published since 1994 by Dissolution Technologies, Inc. of Hockessin, Delaware, in the United States, it serves the community of formulation scientists, analytical chemists, quality specialists and regulators who develop, validate and rely on dissolution methods. Its identifiers are print ISSN 1521-298X and online ISSN 2376-869X; its ISO 4 abbreviation is Dissolution Technol., and its National Library of Medicine catalogue number is 101260305. Volume numbering confirms the founding date: volume 32 appeared in 2025, counting back to a 1994 first volume, and the journal's issues appear in February, May, August and November.

Dissolution testing sits at a crossroads of pharmaceutical development and public safety. A tablet that releases its active ingredient too slowly may never work; one that releases too fast may be unsafe; and batch after batch of product must be shown, by a reproducible laboratory method, to perform the way the approved formulation performed in clinical studies. The United States Pharmacopeia (USP), the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and regulators worldwide all maintain detailed expectations for this testing, and the apparatus, media, calibration and data-interpretation questions involved are intricate enough to sustain a dedicated journal. Dissolution Technologies is that journal: for three decades it has carried the method-development papers, apparatus studies, regulatory perspectives and practical question-and-answer exchanges of the dissolution community, much of it written by practitioners at the FDA, USP, instrument manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies rather than by academics alone.

At a Glance

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's territory is the science and practice of dissolution and drug-release measurement, taken broadly. Its own site organises content into research articles, technical notes, guest editorials, a long-running Questions and Answers feature answered by USP experts, and industry news. OpenAlex's topic analysis of its published contents finds its largest clusters in Drug Solubility and Delivery Systems, Analytical Methods in Pharmaceuticals, and Advanced Drug Delivery Systems, with a further strand on pharmaceutical quality — a fair map of the journal's ground.

The February and May 2025 issues show the working range. Articles include a rapid accelerated in vitro release method for an antibiotic-eluting biologic envelope for implantable cardiac devices; a review of regulators' recommendations and the practical challenges of alcohol-induced dose dumping studies for modified-release products; the establishment of an in vitro–in vivo correlation (IVIVC) for a vitamin C and iron formulation; a discriminative dissolution method for mebendazole suspensions; characterisation of apex vessel geometries and irregularities, reprinted from a USP Pharmacopeial Forum stimuli article; a physiologically relevant simulated nasal fluid for dissolution studies of nasal products; and a cluster of comparative quality evaluations of marketed tablets — metronidazole, azithromycin, loratadine, metformin — from Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Brazil and China. Meeting reports, such as highlights of the AAPS annual meeting's in vitro release and dissolution sessions written by a team spanning Merck, Eli Lilly, universities, USP-linked experts and the publisher itself, keep the journal tied to its professional community. In short: if a question concerns how a dosage form releases its drug, how that release should be measured, or how the measurement should be specified and regulated, it is in scope here.

History and Community Role

The journal began in 1994, and its publisher also produced the field's standard reference, the Handbook of Dissolution Testing (third edition, 2004, by Royal Hanson and Vivian Gray, published by Dissolution Technologies in Hockessin) — a sign of how closely the journal is woven into the small, expert community that built modern dissolution practice. Its content model is distinctive: alongside conventional research papers it republishes and discusses regulatory and compendial material, runs the USP-expert Questions and Answers column in issue after issue, and carries industry news about the instrument and software ecosystem — automated dissolution testers, UV dissolution software, fibre-optic probes — that its readers use daily. Guest editorials by figures such as Royal Hanson of Teledyne Hanson Research, reflecting on fifty years of industry change, give the journal a community-memory function that a purely academic title would not attempt.

The authorship is correspondingly practical. Recent issues carry authors from pharmaceutical companies (Merck, Eli Lilly affiliations appear), from USP itself — the Questions and Answers column is authored by USP experts including Margareth Marques — from universities on every continent, and from regulatory-science groups. For a formulation or quality scientist, publishing here reaches the specific readership that will use, cite and build on a dissolution method: other dissolution scientists, compendial experts, and regulatory reviewers.

Metrics and Indexing

OpenAlex resolves the journal as source S98185054 and reported at the time of checking 815 works with 9,282 citations, an h-index of 44, an i10-index of 237, and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.79. Scopus-based indicators are more conservative, as expected for a niche practice-oriented title: SCImago-derived listings report an SJR of 0.216 for 2024 (0.256 in the following year's update), a best quartile of Q3 in Pharmaceutical Science, and an h-index of 38 to 39 depending on the update year, while a Scopus CiteScore of 1.5 has been reported in journal-specification summaries. The earlier JournalsWorld template record for this journal showed an h-index of 39, consistent with the Scopus-based figure. One of the journal's own articles — the widely used paper on simulated biological fluids for dissolution testing — illustrates its outsized practical influence relative to its size, with citation counts in the hundreds reported in research-profile summaries. A DOAJ listing for the journal could not be verified at checking time (an ISSN search returned no record), and no article processing charge could be verified from sources fetched for this profile; authors should confirm the journal's current fee and access arrangements directly with the publisher, whose site makes current and back content readable online.

The Science Behind the Journal

Dissolution testing measures how quickly and completely a drug leaves its dosage form under standardised laboratory conditions. For immediate-release tablets the test is a quality gate: it shows that each batch matches the batches that were proven safe and effective. For modified-release products it is a performance specification: the release profile over many hours is part of the product's therapeutic design. The standard apparatus are codified by USP — the rotating basket (Apparatus 1) and the paddle (Apparatus 2) dominate, with reciprocating-cylinder, flow-through and other apparatus for special dosage forms — and general chapters such as USP <711> Dissolution and <1092> The Dissolution Procedure: Development and Validation frame how methods are developed, validated and run. The journal's literature returns repeatedly to the physical subtleties of these systems: vessel geometry (including the apex vessels characterised in a recent USP stimuli article it republished), hydrodynamics, coning, vibration, deaeration, and calibration, because small physical differences move results.

Two further themes recur across its decades. The first is biorelevance: the effort to make laboratory media and conditions imitate the gastrointestinal tract, from the simulated biological fluids literature that produced one of the journal's most-cited papers to physiologically relevant simulated nasal fluid for nasal products in a 2025 issue. The second is correlation: in vitro–in vivo correlation (IVIVC), the modelled link between a laboratory release curve and blood-level data, which regulators accept — under the FDA's extended-release IVIVC guidance and related framework documents — as a basis for some post-approval changes and biowaivers. The FDA guidance family that the journal's authors cite spans the 1997 immediate-release dissolution guidance, the extended-release IVIVC guidance, and the Biopharmaceutics Classification System waiver guidance; the journal functions, in effect, as the discussion forum where industry scientists, USP experts and regulators work out how those documents apply to real products. Alcohol-induced dose dumping — the dangerous acceleration of a modified-release product's release in the presence of alcohol, reviewed in the May 2025 issue — shows the safety stakes that keep this apparently narrow specialty consequential.

What a Typical Article Looks Like

A characteristic research article in this journal names its dosage form and apparatus in the title, develops or challenges a method in the body, and ends with a recommendation another laboratory can apply. Comparative evaluations of marketed products — a staple genre, visible in the 2025 issues' studies of metronidazole, azithromycin, loratadine and metformin products across four countries — use the dissolution profile as a window on product quality in real markets, work with direct public-health value in regions where substandard medicines circulate. Technical notes are shorter and narrower: a solubility measurement practice, a vessel irregularity, an instrument quirk. The Questions and Answers column, authored by USP experts, answers reader-submitted practical questions and is one of the journal's most distinctive services — a reminder that this title is read as a working tool, not only as an archive.

How to Publish, and Who Should

The journal publishes from its own website, dissolutiontech.com, where full issues and articles are posted and the archive runs back through its three decades. Prospective authors should prepare work in the journal's established genres: a method-development or method-validation study with full experimental detail; a comparison of apparatus, media or conditions with a clear practical recommendation; an IVIVC or biorelevance study; a regulatory or compendial perspective from direct professional experience; or a technical note solving a concrete laboratory problem. Because the readership is expert and specialised, papers should state apparatus, medium, volume, rotation or flow conditions, and acceptance criteria precisely, and should discuss variability honestly — dissolution data are notoriously sensitive to hydrodynamics and vessel geometry, as the journal's own apex-vessel and calibration literature demonstrates. Scientists seeking a general pharmaceutical-sciences audience may prefer a broad title; scientists whose contribution is specifically about release testing will find no more targeted readership than this one.

Similar and Related Journals

Neighbouring venues in this directory include the broad pharmaceutical-sciences titles that publish dissolution work among much else — the International Journal of Pharmaceutics, European Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, AAPS PharmSciTech and Pharmaceutical Research — together with analytical and drug-delivery titles. None of them is a duplicate of this journal: a twin check of this directory by ISSN and title, completed before this profile was written, found no other record carrying print ISSN 1521-298X or the journal's title, and the journal's narrow, practice-centred remit remains unique among them. Readers interested in the regulatory side should also follow USP's Pharmacopeial Forum, whose stimuli articles the journal sometimes republishes for discussion.

Why a Whole Journal About One Test?

Outsiders sometimes ask why a single laboratory test needs its own journal. The answer lies in the test's regulatory and economic weight. A failed dissolution result can hold a batch worth millions of dollars, trigger an investigation, or contribute to a product recall; a well-justified dissolution specification can, through IVIVC or a Biopharmaceutics Classification System argument, spare a company a clinical bioequivalence study. The test is also scientifically richer than its routine quality-control use suggests: it touches solubility, diffusion, hydrodynamics, formulation design, gastrointestinal physiology and statistics, and its apparatus questions — how a tablet behaves at the bottom of a vessel, how a paddle's wobble or a vessel's apex changes the flow — are genuine fluid-mechanics problems. The journal's three decades of calibration studies, collaborative trials and method post-mortems are the record of a community taking those questions seriously, and its pages are where a dissolution scientist checks first when a method misbehaves.

The journal also documents the field's instrumentation history. Automated testers, fibre-optic UV probes, imaging and software for dissolution data have each been introduced, debated and refined in its industry-news and technical coverage; the May 2025 issue alone carried news of online UV dissolution software updates, adjustable-pathlength in-situ probes, and a fiftieth-anniversary note for the first automated dissolution system, built in 1975. For historians of pharmaceutical technology, as for practitioners, that running record is part of the journal's value.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 1521-298X and online ISSN 2376-869X. The online ISSN is missing from the older JournalsWorld template record, which showed the print ISSN alone; both identifiers are recorded by the National Library of Medicine and by OpenAlex.

Who publishes Dissolution Technologies? Dissolution Technologies, Inc., based in Hockessin, Delaware, United States. The older template record showed a numeric publisher code; the publisher is the company of the same name as the journal.

How often does it appear, and since when? Quarterly — February, May, August and November issues — since 1994; volume 32 corresponds to 2025.

What does it publish? Research articles, technical notes, guest editorials, USP-expert question-and-answer columns, meeting reports and industry news, all centred on dissolution and in vitro release testing, IVIVC, apparatus and calibration, biorelevant media, and regulatory expectations for drug-release testing.

What are its metrics? As checked in October 2026: OpenAlex reports 815 works, 9,282 citations and an h-index of 44; SCImago-derived listings report SJR about 0.216–0.256, Q3 in Pharmaceutical Science, and a Scopus-based h-index of 38–39.

Who reads it? Dissolution and formulation scientists in industry, analytical and quality-control laboratories, regulatory scientists, USP and compendial experts, and the instrument and software vendors who serve them — the same mix that writes for it. Its question-and-answer column and meeting reports are pitched at practising scientists rather than at a general academic audience.

Is it connected to USP or the FDA? It is an independent publisher's journal, not an official organ of either body — but USP experts author its long-running Questions and Answers column, its articles frequently discuss FDA guidance and USP chapters, and it has republished USP Pharmacopeial Forum stimuli material for community discussion. Readers should treat its regulatory content as expert discussion, not as the regulators' own text.

Does it charge to publish? A processing-charge position could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile, and no DOAJ listing was found by ISSN search; confirm current arrangements with the publisher before submitting.

Is it peer reviewed? The journal presents itself as a peer-reviewed professional title, and its research articles follow the conventions of the genre — full methods, data and referenced discussion. Its question-and-answer and industry-news material is editorial and expert content rather than refereed research, and readers should weigh each genre for what it is; the journal labels its sections clearly enough for that distinction to be made on sight.

How large is it? Deliberately small. OpenAlex counted 815 works across its first three decades — roughly a few dozen items a year, consistent with a quarterly carrying a handful of research papers plus notes, columns and news per issue. In a field this specialised, that scale is a feature: the readership and the authorship are substantially the same working community.

Can I read it online?

Does it publish work from outside the United States? Extensively — the 2025 issues alone carried authors from Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Brazil, China, Mexico, India and several European countries, reflecting how completely dissolution practice has globalised along with pharmaceutical manufacturing itself.

What is the single most useful thing to know before citing it?

Profile compiled from the journal's own website (dissolutiontech.com, including its February, May and November issue listings), National Library of Medicine identifier records, OpenAlex source S98185054, and SCImago-derived listings, checked in October 2026. Figures are attributed at checking time and change as sources update.