European Journal of Pediatric Dermatology

About European Journal of Pediatric Dermatology

European Journal of Pediatric Dermatology — Journal Profile

The European Journal of Pediatric Dermatology (EJPD) is an Italian medical journal devoted entirely to skin disease in children, owned and published in Bari by the Dermatologia Pediatrica Association. It was established in 1991 as the post-graduate journal of the European Society for Pediatric Dermatology (ESPD), according to the journal's own Information for Authors, and it describes its aim as promoting communication and cultural exchange between paediatricians and dermatologists in their common field. Its identifiers are print ISSN 1122-7672 and electronic ISSN 2281-9649, both recorded on this JournalsWorld record and both confirmed in the OpenAlex source record. This profile explains the journal's ownership and governance from its own editorial-policy pages, its scope and article types, its peer-review and ethics framework, its bibliometric record at checking time, and how clinicians, authors, readers and librarians should use and verify its record.

Identity at a Glance

Two naming points help searchers. First, the journal uses the American spelling Pediatric in its title, so catalogue searches under Paediatric will miss records unless the search system maps the spellings; the ISSNs are the reliable key. Second, the journal is sometimes shortened in citations to Eur. J. Pediat. Dermatol. and in its own pages a cited article carries the form Eur. J. Pediat. Dermatol., volume, issue and pages, as its article pages show. It should not be confused with general paediatrics journals, with general dermatology journals, or with the many newer online dermatology titles whose names share its vocabulary; ownership by the Bari association, the ESPD link and the two ISSNs fix its identity.

History and Purpose

Paediatric dermatology sits between two large specialties. The skin of a child is not a small version of adult skin: diseases present differently in infancy, inherited disorders declare themselves early, infections and infestations follow school and family patterns, and treatment choices are constrained by growth, safety and a lifetime of consequences. A journal for that borderland was the gap EJPD was founded to fill. Its author information records that it was established in 1991 as the post-graduate journal of the European Society for Pediatric Dermatology, and that it has been publishing research articles and case reports on skin diseases of the child regularly since then — for three decades, in its own summary. Post-graduate is the operative word: this is a journal written for clinicians who already practise, designed to change what they do on Monday morning as much as to advance what the field knows.

The ownership history reinforces that clinical character. The journal's editorial policy states that EJPD is owned and published by the Dermatologia Pediatrica Association, a non-profit organisation incorporated as a cultural association under the Italian Civil Code and based in Bari, established in 1993 to advance scientific knowledge and mutual learning in paediatric dermatology, and counting about 200 members as of June 2021, mostly specialists in dermatology or paediatrics, clinical researchers and academics. The association's Bari base is also the journal's editorial home — the contact address the journal gives is the association's address in Via Bitritto, Bari — and the long editorship associated with Bari paediatric dermatology is part of the journal's identity. Ernesto Bonifazi, formerly associate professor of paediatric dermatology at the University of Bari, served as editor of the journal and is described in his publisher biography as a past president of the European Society for Pediatric Dermatology (1987–90) and the first president of the Italian Society for Pediatric Dermatology (2000–2003); the journal should be understood as one instrument of that Bari-centred European network, alongside its meetings and its informal forums.

Governance and Editorial Management

The journal's own editorial-policy page is the authoritative source for its governance, and this profile follows it. EJPD is the post-graduate journal of the ESPD, which appoints three members to the journal's editorial board — a structural link that keeps the society's educational mission inside the journal's decisions, alongside the board members drawn from leading academics, researchers and clinicians across Europe and beyond, as its author information puts it. Day-to-day management, the policy page states, is in the hands of a team chaired by M. G. Favale (MSc, Managing Editor), with five named assistant editors (L. Favale, L. Garofalo, F. Mazzotta, V. Pisani and P. Chieco) at the time that page was written. Management teams change, and the page itself should be re-read for the current names before any formal correspondence relies on them; the durable structural facts are the association's ownership, the ESPD board appointments, and the Bari base.

Editorially, the journal binds itself to the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), in the December 2019 updated version named on its policy and author pages. That commitment is not decorative. It imports ICMJE positions on authorship — the four criteria the journal's author information reproduces: substantial contribution to conception, design, acquisition, analysis or interpretation; drafting or critical revision; final approval; and accountability — on originality and duplicate publication, on conflicts of interest, and on the protection of research participants. A journal that states its framework this plainly gives authors a predictable contract: meet ICMJE standards and the journal's own stated rules, and the editorial conversation will be about the work.

Scope and Content

The scope is the whole of paediatric dermatology, read through the journal's stated aim of exchange between the two parent specialties. In practice its pages, as its own article archive shows, carry clinical case reports and case series, clinical and therapeutic studies, differential-diagnosis and image-led teaching material, and review and educational articles for the practising clinician. The archive's own examples illustrate the range: a classification and treatment report on dermotics — repeated compulsive movements causing cutaneous damage — discussed from a psychosocial point of view with a plea for cooperation between paediatrician, dermatologist and psychologist; a case report and literature review of bullous pemphigoid arising in the first year of life, working through its difficult differential diagnosis against linear IgA dermatosis and acquired epidermolysis bullosa; teaching pages on infantile urticaria and its weal lesion; and a report of perinevic atopic dermatitis around a verrucous epidermal nevus, worked up with prick and patch testing. That mixture — the rare genodermatosis, the common eruption done carefully, the psychosocial case, the diagnostic trap — is the authentic texture of the specialty.

OpenAlex's classification of the indexed corpus points the same way from outside: its largest topics for this source are genetic and rare skin diseases, dermatology and skin diseases, and vascular malformations and haemangiomas — three areas in which childhood presentation is distinctive and in which a specialist journal accumulates cases and experience that general journals scatter. Authors weighing fit should ask a simple question: does this manuscript teach a paediatrician or a dermatologist something specific about a child's skin — a presentation, a differential, a treatment response, a pitfall? If yes, it is in scope in principle. Adult dermatology without a paediatric angle, general paediatrics without skin, and laboratory work with no clinical translation sit outside the journal's stated purpose, however good they are.

Peer Review and Ethics

The journal's peer-review policy, in its own words on its policy page, is that peer review is essential to scholarly publication both as critique and as collaboration to improve the manuscript; that all manuscripts are reviewed initially by the editors; and that only papers meeting the language, scientific and editorial standards of the journal and fitting its aims and scope are circulated for further peer review. That is an editor-screened model: a real first gate at the editorial desk, then external review for the papers that pass it. Authors should therefore treat the covering submission as part of the review — a manuscript that is visibly out of scope, below standard in language, or careless in form may end at the first gate without external reports.

The ethics framework stated in the journal's author information is ICMJE-based and specific. Authors must certify that a report is original and not previously published, and disclose if it was presented at a meeting. Studies involving human subjects must have institutional ethics-committee approval and informed consent; only numbers should identify patients, and where clinical data or photographs could identify a patient, written informed consent should be obtained and shown. Animal studies must conform to institutional and national guidance for the care and use of laboratory animals. Conflicts of interest regarding material in the manuscript must be stated. In a field whose teaching value often lives in clinical photographs of children, the consent rule for identifiable images is the clause authors most need to plan for from the first draft, not the last: obtain and document consent early, and be ready to show it.

Metrics — Attributed and in Context

At checking time, the OpenAlex source resolved from ISSN 1122-7672 — and identically from 2281-9649, a consistency check that confirms the two ISSNs belong to one source — was source S4306510134, recording 540 works and 200 citations, with summary statistics of h-index 6 and i10-index 2, a two-year mean citedness of 0.0, and an indexed range from 1994 to 2021 in that database. The older JournalsWorld thin record carried an h-index of 11 and described publication coverage spanning 1994–2026 and a Q4 category position; those figures come from a different database and a different counting corpus than OpenAlex, and the disagreement is reported here rather than resolved by fiat, because no single database owns the truth about a small clinical journal. Journal summaries reproduced by Researcher.Life list the journal as indexed in Scopus and name its publisher as Dermatologia Pediatrica; that Scopus listing is reported here as that secondary summary states it, and anyone needing it for an evaluation should confirm it in Scopus itself.

Context is essential. A case-report-heavy clinical journal in a small specialty will never post the citation numbers of a large general title, and should not be judged as if it should. Its influence runs through changed differential diagnoses, avoided mistakes and treatments copied at the bedside — effects citation databases barely register. The meaningful quality signals for EJPD are the ones visible in its own record: three decades of regular publication since 1991, a named non-profit owner with a specialist membership, a society link with board appointments, an ICMJE-stated ethics framework, an editor-screened review process, and a coherent archive in which the cases and teaching pages visibly serve the specialty. Those are the grounds on which clinicians in the field decide to read and submit, and they are stronger evidence than any single metric quoted without provenance.

Indexing, Access and Charges

Beyond the Scopus listing reported by secondary summaries and the OpenAlex record described above, this profile makes no further indexing claim: a listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals could not be verified from the DOAJ search API at checking time (the API returned no record for either ISSN), and OpenAlex does not classify the source as open access. The journal maintains its own website, ejpd.com, on which its editorial policy, author information and article archive are published and can be read — the archive pages for individual articles, with abstracts, keywords and citation forms, are openly presented there. Whether every full text is free, and what any subscription or charge position is, is not stated in the sources consulted in a form this profile can quote, and is therefore recorded as not publicly disclosed here; no article processing charge is listed for the source in OpenAlex. Authors and librarians should take current access and price terms from the journal site or the association directly.

How to Submit

The journal's Information for Authors, published on its own site and noted there as undergoing continuous revision, is the controlling document and should be read in its current version before any submission — this profile summarises the durable requirements and invents no portal, fee or timetable. Prepare a manuscript that fits the aims stated above, in clear scientific English meeting the journal's language standard, since language is one of the stated first-gate criteria. Document authorship contributions as ICMJE requires, certify originality and disclose meeting presentation, declare conflicts of interest, and assemble ethics documentation before submission: committee approval and consent for human studies, written consent ready to show for any identifiable patient data or photograph, and compliance statements for any animal work. Expect initial editorial review, with external peer review only for papers passing that gate, and write the covering message to make scope fit obvious to a busy editor. The journal's contact, given on its policy page, is the Dermatologia Pediatrica Association in Bari (ejpd at dermatologiapediatrica.com, in the address form the site prints). Do not pay any charge or use any service the journal itself has not named.

For Readers and Librarians

Clinicians will get most from the journal by reading it as a case-based teaching file: its reports and differential-diagnosis pages are built to be raided when a child's eruption does not fit the textbook. Start from the article archive on the journal's site, where each item carries authors, pages, abstract, keywords and a how-to-cite form. Librarians should catalogue from these anchors: title European Journal of Pediatric Dermatology; print ISSN 1122-7672; electronic ISSN 2281-9649; publisher and owner Dermatologia Pediatrica Association, Bari; established 1991; society link European Society for Pediatric Dermatology; language English in its current presentation; subject paediatric dermatology. The OpenAlex and Wikidata cross-references (Wikidata Q96326403 in the OpenAlex record) help disambiguate the title in linked catalogues, and the Pediatric spelling of the title should be preserved exactly as published rather than normalised to Paediatric, so that holdings match citations.

Similar Journals

The closest neighbours are Pediatric Dermatology, the journal most directly parallel in scope internationally; the dermatology sections and case literature of general paediatric journals; and general dermatology journals such as the British Journal of Dermatology and the Journal of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, in which paediatric work appears as one strand among many. EJPD's distinction within that set is its combination: wholly paediatric in scope, European society-linked in governance, case-and-teaching centred in content, and owned by its own specialist association rather than by a large commercial publisher. A clinician choosing where to send a well-documented childhood case with a teaching point will weigh EJPD's specialist readership — the exact audience that will use the lesson — against the broader but more diffuse audience of a general title.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who owns and publishes EJPD?

The Dermatologia Pediatrica Association, a non-profit cultural association under the Italian Civil Code, based in Bari, Italy. The journal's editorial policy states its ownership and management in those terms, with about 200 association members recorded as of June 2021.

When was it founded and what is its society role?

1991, as the post-graduate journal of the European Society for Pediatric Dermatology, per the journal's Information for Authors. The society appoints three members to the editorial board.

What are its ISSNs?

Print 1122-7672 and electronic 2281-9649. Both resolve in OpenAlex to the same source, S4306510134, confirming they are the twin identifiers of one journal.

What does it publish?

Research articles, case reports and educational material on skin diseases of the child, aimed at communication between paediatricians and dermatologists — from genodermatoses and vascular anomalies to common eruptions, differential diagnosis and psychosocial dermatology.

How does peer review work?

All manuscripts are reviewed initially by the editors, and only those meeting the journal's language, scientific and editorial standards and fitting its aims and scope go forward to further peer review, according to the journal's peer-review policy.

What ethics rules apply?

ICMJE recommendations, as the journal states: ICMJE authorship criteria, originality certification, conflict-of-interest statements, ethics-committee approval and informed consent for human studies, written consent that can be shown for identifiable patient information or photographs, and recognised standards for animal studies.

What are its metrics?

At checking time OpenAlex recorded 540 works, 200 citations, h-index 6 and i10-index 2 for the source. The JournalsWorld thin record carried h-index 11 from a different database. Quote any figure with its source; for this journal, longevity, society governance and clinical usefulness are the more informative signals.

Is it open access? Does it charge authors?

No open-access classification or article charge could be verified in the sources consulted, and no DOAJ record was returned at checking time. Access and charge terms are treated here as not publicly disclosed; take them from the journal site or the association.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile was built from the live JournalsWorld record for post 36244 (title European Journal of Pediatric Dermatology, ISSNs 1122-7672 and 2281-9649 in its thin content), the journal's own site ejpd.com — its editorial-policy page (ownership, association history and membership, ESPD board appointments, management team, peer-review policy, Bari address) and its Information for Authors (1991 establishment as ESPD post-graduate journal, aim, ICMJE framework, authorship and ethics rules) and article archive pages — the OpenAlex source resolved through both ISSN endpoints and fetched directly (S4306510134), the DOAJ search API (no record returned for either ISSN at checking time), a publisher biography of Ernesto Bonifazi for his editorship and society presidencies, and secondary journal summaries for the reported Scopus listing. Metrics are attributed in the text at checking time; anything those sources did not establish is stated as could not be verified or not publicly disclosed.