In Practice

About In Practice

In Practice — A Full Profile

In Practice is a peer-reviewed veterinary continuing-education journal published on behalf of the British Veterinary Association (BVA), the United Kingdom's professional body for vets. Since January 2021 it has been published by Wiley, which took over the BVA journal portfolio from the BMJ Group at the start of that year, as both the BVA and Wiley announced at the time. It carries print ISSN 0263-841X and electronic ISSN 2042-7689, the pairing recorded on this JournalsWorld record, on Wiley's journal page (the journal's online home is onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/20427689) and in the OpenAlex source record. First published in 1979, it is produced in conjunction with Vet Record, the BVA's flagship journal, and it has a different job from its sibling: where Vet Record carries news, comment and original research papers, In Practice provides continuing educational material — peer-reviewed clinical review articles, written by experts in their field, that give practising vets a regular update on clinical developments across all species, principally farm and companion animals, together with articles on veterinary practice management. It appears ten times a year. For the working vet in practice — its named audience, together with practice managers and students — it is designed as professional development reading rather than as a primary research outlet, and every part of its format follows from that purpose.

At a Glance

History and Character

In Practice was first published in 1979, and its longevity is the first fact to understand about it: a continuing-education title that has survived for more than four and a half decades has done so because a professional membership keeps reading it. The BVA describes its journals as its number one membership benefit for veterinary surgeons, and In Practice sits inside that membership economics — it reaches practising vets as part of belonging to their professional association, not mainly through institutional library subscriptions sold on citation performance. Its publishing history reflects the changing structure of UK medical publishing. For many years it was produced by BVA Publications in collaboration with the BMJ Group; in December 2020 the BVA announced that Wiley would become its publishing partner from January 2021 for Vet Record, In Practice and the two online-only titles, Vet Record Open and Vet Record Case Reports, with the stated aims of improving the digital offering and the author and reader experience. Wiley's own portfolio materials describe In Practice's audience as practising veterinary professionals, practice managers and students, its frequency as ten issues a year, its first issue as 1979, and its editor-in-chief as Suzanne Jarvis, and they record reader-survey findings that rated it the strongest monthly title among veterinary surgeons and the most popular veterinary title for continuing professional development — publisher survey claims, quoted here as the publisher presents them, not as independent measurement.

The character of the content is set by those survey strengths. Wiley's materials summarise its editorial sections as dedicated to companion animal, farm, equine and business and practice management, with comprehensive coverage of companion, farm and equine animals in every issue. Articles are review-based and practical: they synthesise current evidence on everyday clinical challenges — diagnosis, treatment choices, anaesthesia, imaging, common presentations by species — into guidance a general practitioner can apply on Monday morning, alongside management material on running a practice as a business and a workplace. That is why its citation profile, discussed below, looks unlike a research journal's: the value of a good clinical review to its readers is high even when its formal citation count is modest, because practitioners apply articles far more often than they cite them.

Scope and Subjects

The journal's own summary, carried by the BVA and by bibliographic services alike, is consistent: peer-reviewed review articles by experts cover all species, but principally farm and companion animals, providing a regular update on clinical developments, plus articles on veterinary practice management. Unpacking that sentence gives the real scope. Companion-animal practice — dogs, cats and the other species seen in small-animal clinics — is the largest everyday audience in UK general practice. Farm-animal content serves the production-animal side of the profession: cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry, where clinical decisions carry flock, herd and food-chain consequences. Equine material is called out as its own editorial section in the publisher's description. Practice management is the second pillar: finance, employment, client communication, professional wellbeing and the regulation of practice — the non-clinical half of a vet's working life, which purely clinical journals leave uncovered. The journal has also carried a calendar of educational meetings, in keeping with its continuing-education function. Manuscripts that fit are therefore invited or submitted expert reviews and practical guidance pieces; original experimental research with a methods-and-results structure belongs in Vet Record or a research title, not here.

Editorial Leadership and the BVA Portfolio

In Practice does not stand alone; it is one quarter of the BVA's journal family, and its editorial identity is best understood inside that family. Vet Record, published fortnightly in the BVA's description of it, carries news, comments, letters and clinical research papers. In Practice, monthly in the BVA's wording and ten issues a year in Wiley's, carries the continuing-education reviews. Vet Record Open is the family's online-only open-access research journal, and Vet Record Case Reports is an online educational collection of case reports and series across all disciplines. An author with a manuscript should place it in the right quarter first: a case series is a Case Reports piece, an original study is a Vet Record or Vet Record Open piece, and a state-of-the-art clinical review for general practitioners is an In Practice piece. Editorially, Wiley's BVA media materials name Suzanne Jarvis as Editor-in-Chief of In Practice. Older reference sources name Alexander Trees, Baron Trees — a former editor whose name still circulates in encyclopaedia entries — so readers reconciling sources should treat the publisher's current materials as governing and older listings as historical. The BVA's publishing move to Wiley in 2021 was presented by both parties as a digital-development step, and the BVA's own journals page now routes members to a digital platform for reading Vet Record and In Practice, with member login details provided through the association.

Peer Review and How Content Is Produced

All articles in In Practice are peer-reviewed — that is stated consistently by the bibliographic descriptions of the journal, including the Ovid journal description from Wolters Kluwer, which adds that its clinical articles are written by experts in their field. The production model of a continuing-education review journal differs from a research journal's in one important way: much of its content is expert-authored review material planned around the profession's educational needs, rather than unsolicited research reports, and prospective contributors are therefore best advised to approach the editorial office with a topic proposal before writing a full manuscript, and to follow Wiley's current author guidelines for the journal on its online platform. Those are practical recommendations, not a claim about a formal commissioning rule: the detailed submission mechanics for this title could not be verified from the publisher pages fetched for this profile, because Wiley's journal site sits behind access controls that returned a browser challenge rather than the guidelines text. What can be said firmly is the shape of a successful piece: a clinically focused, well-referenced review, pitched at general practitioners rather than specialists, covering a whole problem area — presentation, work-up, treatment options, pitfalls — rather than a single narrow research question, and written to be usable in practice. Authors should also note the access model before submitting: this is a membership and subscription journal, not an open-access title, and no article processing charge is advertised for it in the sources checked; any current fee or open-access option should be confirmed in Wiley's live author guidelines at submission time rather than assumed from this profile.

Metrics and Standing

Reported with attribution, because the sources measure different universes. SCImago's summary of Scopus data gives In Practice an SJR of 0.157 with a Q4 placement in Veterinary (miscellaneous), a Scopus-based h-index of 32, and Scopus coverage running 1981–1989 and 1991–2025 — the small coverage gap in the late 1980s is visible in the SCImago coverage history and in the JournalsWorld template record, which quoted the same spans. OpenAlex, indexing more broadly, records the journal as source S4210216585 with 4,433 works and 18,527 citations at checking time, an h-index of 44, an i10-index of 558 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.38, with output from 1979 to 2026 and Wiley as host organisation. The much larger OpenAlex h-index is expected: it counts citations from a wider set of sources than Scopus, and it counts the journal's whole archive. An older Journal Citation Reports impact factor of 0.176 for 2017 circulates in reference sources; it is a dated figure from a secondary summary, not a current verified JCR value, and it should not be quoted as the journal's present impact factor. The honest interpretation of all of this is that In Practice is a low-citation, high-readership professional title. Its SJR and quartile describe how research databases see it; its membership circulation and reader-survey standing describe how the profession sees it. Judging it only by the first set of numbers mistakes what the journal is for.

Indexing and Access

The journal is indexed in Scopus, as its SCImago entry attests, and in the National Library of Medicine's catalogue, which records it under NLM catalogue number 8106445 with the standard abbreviation In Pract. Its bibliographic identifiers beyond the ISSNs include CODEN IPRCDH and OCLC number 04752211, both carried in standard reference listings. Access for readers runs through BVA membership and through institutional and personal subscriptions on Wiley's platform; the BVA states plainly on its journals page that readers need to be BVA members to read its journals through the member route, with login details in the member portal. The DOAJ position is negative and worth stating clearly so that no reader infers an open-access status the journal does not have: the DOAJ search API returned no record for ISSN 2042-7689 or 0263-841X at checking time, and OpenAlex likewise marks the source as not in DOAJ. Individual articles may still be reachable through library holdings and the publisher's platform arrangements, but the journal as a whole is a subscription and membership publication.

The Archive as a Clinical Resource

A continuing-education journal accumulates a kind of value a research journal does not: a back archive of self-contained reviews that remains useful for years, because the everyday caseload of general practice changes slowly. OpenAlex records more than four thousand works for this title across its run from 1979 onward, and the publisher itself describes the journal as providing an extensive archive of useful articles for veterinary professionals wherever they practise. A vet facing an unfamiliar presentation — an uncommon endocrine case in a cat, a herd fertility problem, an anaesthetic question in an older dog — can work from a review written precisely for that situation, by a specialist, in language aimed at the generalist. That archive function explains several otherwise puzzling features of the title: why a professional association protects it as a membership benefit, why readership surveys rank it so far above its citation position, and why its publisher markets it on readership strength rather than on bibliometrics. It also means the journal's historical record matters. Scopus coverage, as SCImago summarises it, begins in 1981 rather than at the 1979 launch and shows a break before resuming in 1991, so database searches do not reach the whole archive; readers hunting older reviews should use the publisher's own archive on the Wiley platform rather than assuming a citation database holds everything the journal has printed.

Its Place in Veterinary Continuing Education

Veterinary surgeons in the United Kingdom work under professional expectations of continuing professional development, and journals like this one are part of the infrastructure that makes that development possible between formal courses. The BVA frames its journals as a way of keeping members informed in a profession that is constantly changing, and the publisher's survey material — again, the publisher's own presentation — calls In Practice the most popular veterinary title for CPD and describes its practical focus on everyday clinical challenges and its encouragement of reflective learning. Reflective is the operative word: a review article read against a vet's own recent cases prompts the comparison of habits with current evidence in a way a lecture cannot schedule. The management content plays the same role for the business side of practice, where many vets hold responsibilities — employing staff, setting fees, handling complaints — for which their clinical training gave them no preparation. A journal that deliberately serves both halves of that working life, clinical and managerial, inside one membership package is doing something no research title attempts, and evaluators of this journal, whether librarians or authors, should assess it against that educational brief rather than against the standards of a primary-research publication.

Who Should Publish and Read Here — and Alternatives

The ideal contributor is an experienced clinician — in practice, referral work, academia or industry — able to write an authoritative, practical review of a clinical area or a practice-management topic for generalist colleagues, and willing to write for usability rather than for citation accumulation. The ideal reader is the practising vet the journal is named for, plus the practice managers and students the publisher names in its audience description. Researchers choosing where to send original studies should look instead to Vet Record for BVA-published clinical research, to Vet Record Open for open-access veterinary research, or to the Journal of Small Animal Practice for small-animal research — all different instruments from the continuing-education review format profiled here. Within the JournalsWorld catalogue, readers comparing veterinary titles will find In Practice occupies a rare niche: a national professional association's CPD journal with a four-decade archive, where most veterinary journals listed are either research titles or society journals from a single country. That niche, more than any single metric, is its significance.

A Note on Names and Records

Researchers tracing this journal in catalogues should know its identifier set as a group, because its short, generic title makes it easy to confuse with unrelated publications that share the words “in practice”. The veterinary journal is the one tied to print ISSN 0263-841X, electronic ISSN 2042-7689, CODEN IPRCDH, OCLC number 04752211 and National Library of Medicine catalogue number 8106445, published for the British Veterinary Association and archived on Wiley's platform under its electronic ISSN. Any “In Practice” record lacking those identifiers is a different publication. The same caution applies to its editors: current publisher materials name Suzanne Jarvis as Editor-in-Chief, while older reference works name a predecessor, Alexander Trees — catalogue entries copied from old sources will keep repeating the earlier name, and the publisher's current materials should govern.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of In Practice?
Print ISSN 0263-841X and electronic ISSN 2042-7689.

Who publishes In Practice?
Wiley publishes it on behalf of its owner, the British Veterinary Association, a partnership that began in January 2021; it was previously published in collaboration with the BMJ Group.

Is In Practice peer-reviewed?
Yes. Its articles are peer-reviewed expert reviews, as stated in the journal's bibliographic descriptions.

How often is In Practice published, and since when?
Ten issues a year, first published in 1979.

What subjects does In Practice cover?
Clinical developments across all species, principally farm and companion animals, with dedicated companion, farm and equine content, plus veterinary practice management.

What are its metrics?
Per SCImago's Scopus summary: SJR 0.157, Q4 in Veterinary (miscellaneous), h-index 32. Per OpenAlex at checking time: 4,433 works, 18,527 citations, h-index 44. Quote figures with their source.

Is In Practice open access?
No — it is a BVA membership and subscription journal. No DOAJ record was returned for either ISSN at checking time.