Infection Genetics and Evolution

About Infection Genetics and Evolution

Infection, Genetics and Evolution — Elsevier's Journal of Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics of Infectious Diseases

Infection, Genetics and Evolution — published by Elsevier with the full title styling Infection, Genetics and Evolution: Journal of Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics of Infectious Diseases — is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, established in 2001, devoted to the genetics and evolutionary biology of infectious diseases. It is identified by print ISSN 1567-1348 and electronic ISSN 1567-7257, exactly the identifier pair stored on this Journals World record, and its official home is the journal's ScienceDirect page under Elsevier. The journal's founding and long-serving editor-in-chief is Michel Tibayrenc, and it is closely associated with the MEEGID congress (Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics of Infectious Diseases), the international meeting whose community the journal serves. The standard abbreviation is Infect. Genet. Evol.

A note on this record's place on the site: Journals World holds a second, older record for the same journal, post 14113 under the title styling "Infection, Genetics and Evolution" with the identical ISSN pair. That twin record was checked directly twice during the preparation of this profile and is a thin template record of about 249 words, so this profile proceeds on the present record and the pair is reported as a confirmed duplicate candidate for the site's merge process. The twin record also illustrates why verification matters: its publisher field is garbled, reading "28 (Netherlands)" where Elsevier belongs.

Quick Facts

Aims and Scope

Elsevier's aims-and-scope statement, published on the journal's ScienceDirect page, defines the territory precisely. The journal "welcomes articles dealing with genetics, population genetics, genomics, gene expression, population dynamics, mathematical modeling, bioinformatics, and any related area that contributes to improve our understanding of the genetics and evolutionary biology of hosts, pathogens and vectors, as well as coevolution processes among them in relation to infections and infectious diseases manifestations." All infectious models fall within scope — pathogens of humans, animals and plants, whether parasites, fungi, bacteria, viruses or prions. Together with the MEEGID congress, the journal describes itself as the main forum for cross-fertilisation between evolutionary science and biomedical research on infectious diseases.

Equally informative is the journal's published list of topics that are outside scope and "will be immediately rejected": in silico vaccine development; in vitro testing of new drugs or compounds; clinical microbiology with no relationship to genetics; and computational re-analysis of gene expression data. Few journals state their exclusions this bluntly, and authors should treat the list as a genuine desk-rejection filter. A well-executed clinical microbiology study, a drug-screening paper or a vaccine-design manuscript belongs elsewhere no matter how strong it is; a study of the same pathogen becomes in scope when its centre of gravity is genetic or evolutionary — transmission dynamics reconstructed from genomes, selection acting on resistance loci, host genetic susceptibility, vector population structure, or the phylogeography of an outbreak.

What the Journal Publishes in Practice

The journal's citation profile shows how the scope operates in practice. Bibliometric topic analyses of its output place genetics and virology at the centre, with heavy representation of genotype studies, phylogenetic analysis and molecular epidemiology — multi-locus sequence typing, strain typing, virulence-gene surveys, tuberculosis and Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetics, and immunology-adjacent host studies recur throughout its most-cited work. Landmark use cases include reconstructing the spread of epidemic clones from sequence data, dating the emergence of pathogen lineages with molecular clocks, mapping drug-resistance mutations as they arise under treatment pressure, and identifying the animal reservoirs and vector pathways through which zoonotic pathogens reach humans. During the COVID-19 period the journal, like its field, carried substantial work on the evolution and variant dynamics of SARS-CoV-2, an application squarely inside its founding remit: the pandemic was, among other things, a real-time demonstration of why pathogen evolution is a biomedical discipline in its own right.

Article types follow Elsevier norms — original research articles, reviews, and short-form contributions — handled through Elsevier's editorial system with the journal's Guide for Authors published on ScienceDirect. The journal offers open-access publication options alongside the subscription route, as indicated on its ScienceDirect page, and authors should check the current article publishing charge and their institutional agreements there rather than relying on third-party summaries, which age quickly.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in the major biomedical and scientific services. The established indexing list for the title includes BIOSIS Previews, CAB Abstracts, EMBASE, Elsevier BIOBASE, Global Health, Scopus, MEDLINE, The Zoological Record and Science Citation Index Expanded; the United States National Library of Medicine catalogue records it as indexed in MEDLINE from volume 1, issue 1 (July 2001). That breadth — spanning biomedicine, agriculture and veterinary science (CAB), and zoology — reflects the journal's deliberate position across the human, animal and plant infection worlds rather than inside clinical medicine alone.

Metrics must be quoted with their source and year, because the journal's figures move. Elsevier's ScienceDirect page for the journal displayed a CiteScore of 5.5 and an Impact Factor of 2.8 when consulted for this profile. Journal Citation Reports figures quoted in reference sources give a 2022 impact factor of 3.2 and a 2023 figure of 2.6; the differences are a reminder that these are annual, provider-specific numbers, not constants of nature. The OpenAlex bibliographic record for the ISSN pair (secondary source, consulted for this profile) lists Elsevier BV as publisher, the Netherlands as country, and a citation total consistent with a large, mature specialty journal — on the order of 168,000 citations across roughly 6,000 indexed works at the time of consultation — with leading topics in virus infection studies, virology and genetic diversity. The SCImago-derived h-index values quoted for the title by secondary services (in the 118–139 range depending on the database and date) likewise indicate a journal with a deep back catalogue of well-cited papers rather than a narrow or regional outlet. Authors comparing venues should read those numbers as evidence of a solid mid-to-upper specialty standing in microbiology and evolutionary biology, and should always re-check the current figure on the provider's own page before making a submission decision.

The MEEGID Community

The journal cannot be fully understood apart from MEEGID, the congress series on Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics of Infectious Diseases with which it is institutionally intertwined — Elsevier's own scope text names the journal and "its companion congress MEEGID" together as the field's main forum. The pairing of a journal with a recurring international congress gave the discipline something it lacked before 2001: a single intellectual home where evolutionary biologists, population geneticists, bioinformaticians and infectious-disease clinicians publish and meet within one conversation. Michel Tibayrenc's founding editorship embodied that programme — his research career centred on the population genetics and clonal evolution of parasitic protozoa, and the journal's pages have carried the field's defining debates, including the clonal-versus-sexual population structure arguments that shaped how researchers think about pathogen reproduction and its consequences for vaccines, drugs and diagnostics.

Research Themes in Depth

Four research programmes illustrate the journal's range particularly well. The first is genomic epidemiology: the use of pathogen genome sequences, sampled densely through an outbreak or across a region, to reconstruct who infected whom, where a lineage entered a population, and how fast it is spreading. Papers of this kind turned the journal into a standard reference during successive Ebola, Zika and coronavirus emergencies, because its reviewers and editors were already fluent in the phylogenetic methods involved when those crises arrived. The second programme is the evolution of drug resistance: studies tracing resistance mutations in tuberculosis, malaria parasites, HIV and bacterial pathogens, measuring their fitness costs, and predicting which compensatory changes will follow. Work of this kind speaks directly to treatment policy, yet its logic is purely evolutionary — selection, epistasis and population structure — which is precisely the journal's founding argument that evolutionary thinking is clinical infrastructure.

The third programme is host genetics: genome-wide and candidate-gene studies of why exposure produces disease in one person and silent infection in another, from malaria and tuberculosis susceptibility to viral control. The fourth is vector and reservoir biology: the population genetics of mosquitoes, ticks, snails and animal reservoirs, which determines whether a pathogen can persist in a landscape at all. A journal that holds these four programmes in one table of contents — pathogen, host, vector and environment, each treated genetically and evolutionarily — is doing something no clinical journal and no pure evolution journal does, and that integration, more than any metric, is the title's contribution to the literature. Special issues and themed collections, often linked to the MEEGID meeting cycle, periodically concentrate these programmes on a single pathogen or question, and the journal's review articles serve as entry points through which clinicians and modellers alike approach unfamiliar parts of the field.

Editorial Standards and Peer Review

As an Elsevier subscription-and-open-access hybrid title, the journal operates the publisher's standard editorial infrastructure: online submission and tracking, single-anonymised peer review by subject specialists as the default model described in Elsevier's journal policies, plagiarism and image screening, and formal policies on research ethics, informed consent for human studies, animal welfare, and the availability of underlying data. Sequence-based studies — the journal's staple — are expected to deposit their data in the public nucleotide archives and to cite accession numbers, a requirement reviewers can and do enforce because the analyses are otherwise irreproducible. Authors should consult the live Guide for Authors on ScienceDirect for the current versions of all such requirements, since Elsevier revises them centrally; the enduring point for this profile is that the journal's refereeing is conventional international peer review, conducted within the same policy framework as Elsevier's other biomedical titles, and that its acceptance decisions turn on the scope judgements described above at least as much as on technical quality.

Guidance for Authors

Fit is the first decision. A submission belongs here when its contribution is to the genetics or evolution of infection: a genomic epidemiology study, a population-genetic analysis, a phylogenetic or phylogeographic reconstruction, a host-susceptibility study, a vector genetics paper, or a modelling or bioinformatics advance applied to infectious disease. It does not belong here when the genetic element is decorative — when the paper is really clinical microbiology, drug testing, in silico vaccine design or a re-analysis of expression data, all of which the journal names as immediate-rejection territory. The second decision is presentation: the readership is international and interdisciplinary, so methods from one tradition (say, coalescent modelling) must be explained for readers from another (say, field epidemiology). The third is compliance: follow the ScienceDirect Guide for Authors for the current formatting, ethics, data-availability and open-access requirements, since Elsevier updates those centrally and any summary here would date.

Researchers choosing between this journal and neighbouring titles should note its distinctive centre of gravity. General microbiology journals weigh novelty of mechanism; clinical infectious-disease journals weigh patient relevance; evolutionary journals weigh theoretical contribution. Infection, Genetics and Evolution weighs the evolutionary-genetic understanding of infection itself — which is why a technically modest study that resolves a real transmission or emergence question can thrive here while a technically dazzling study with no evolutionary content will be returned. Reading a recent issue's table of contents is the most reliable calibration an author can perform.

How the Journal Compares with Neighbouring Titles

Authors and readers place the journal most accurately by contrast with its neighbours. Against generalist microbiology titles, it is narrower and deeper: every paper must connect to infection, but within that boundary it ranges from molecules to populations. Against clinical infectious-disease journals, it is more basic and more theoretical: a paper can be important here for what it reveals about a pathogen's past or future evolution while having no immediate bedside application. Against evolutionary biology journals, it is more applied: the evolution studied is the evolution of named pathogens, hosts and vectors, and its results feed surveillance, vaccine strain selection and resistance management. Against molecular epidemiology outlets that grew up later, it is the elder title — publishing since 2001, it helped define the field those outlets joined. This positioning also explains its durable citation record: its classic papers on pathogen population structure, typing methods and resistance evolution are cited simultaneously by clinicians, epidemiologists and evolutionary biologists, three audiences that rarely share a journal. A library building a collection in infectious disease, microbiology or evolutionary medicine will find it a core title; a purely clinical collection will find it valuable but secondary; and a researcher deciding where a manuscript belongs should ask the single question the editors ask — does this paper change what we understand about the genetics or evolution of an infection? If it does, this is its natural home.

Why This Journal Matters

The strongest claim that can be made for Infection, Genetics and Evolution is also the simplest: it was founded, in 2001, on a thesis that the following two decades proved correct. The thesis was that infectious disease cannot be understood, predicted or controlled without evolutionary genetics — that a pathogen is a population evolving in real time, inside hosts, across vectors and through landscapes, and that its future behaviour is written in its genetic variation. Anthrax and plague archives, tuberculosis lineages, malaria drug resistance, avian influenza reassortment, and finally a coronavirus pandemic tracked variant by variant in public dashboards: each episode moved the journal's founding programme closer to the centre of biomedical practice. Its archive therefore reads as a record of a discipline becoming indispensable, written by the community — editors, congress participants, authors and reviewers — that built that discipline. For researchers entering the field, it remains both a primary venue and a map of what the field values; for this directory, it is catalogued as what it is, a mature Elsevier specialty journal of established standing, with the identifiers, editorship, indexing and scope recorded above.

One final practical note for librarians and research managers: because the journal's title is a plain-language phrase, catalogue searches for it collide with course names, conference themes and book titles. The ISSN pair and the Elsevier ScienceDirect journal page are the stable anchors; any record that cannot produce them should be treated as unidentified rather than assumed to describe this journal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Infection, Genetics and Evolution? Print ISSN 1567-1348 and online ISSN 1567-7257 — the pair stored on this record and confirmed by Elsevier and bibliographic listings.

Who publishes the journal, and since when? Elsevier has published it since its establishment in 2001. Its founding editor-in-chief is Michel Tibayrenc.

What does MEEGID mean? Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics of Infectious Diseases — the field named in the journal's subtitle and in its companion congress series.

What topics are out of scope? Elsevier's published scope excludes in silico vaccine development, in vitro testing of new drugs or compounds, clinical microbiology with no relationship to genetics, and computational re-analysis of gene expression data; such submissions are rejected immediately.

Is the journal indexed in MEDLINE and Scopus? Yes. Its indexing includes MEDLINE (from volume 1 in 2001, per the National Library of Medicine catalogue), Scopus, Science Citation Index Expanded, EMBASE, BIOSIS Previews, CAB Abstracts and The Zoological Record.

What is its impact factor? It changes annually and differs by provider: Elsevier's journal page displayed CiteScore 5.5 and Impact Factor 2.8 when consulted for this profile, while reference sources quote Journal Citation Reports values of 3.2 (2022) and 2.6 (2023). Always cite the figure with its source and year.

Profile basis: Elsevier's ScienceDirect journal page and aims-and-scope statement (primary), the journal's established bibliographic record (indexing list, frequency, editorship), the National Library of Medicine catalogue note on MEDLINE coverage, and the OpenAlex record for ISSN 1567-1348/1567-7257 (secondary, attributed). The duplicate-record note reflects direct checks of the twin Journals World record described in the text.