Journal of Aerosol Medicine

About Journal of Aerosol Medicine

Journal of Aerosol Medicine — A Full Profile

Journal of Aerosol Medicine was the original title, from 1988 to 2007, of the peer-reviewed journal now published as the Journal of Aerosol Medicine and Pulmonary Drug Delivery. The Journals World record under the original title carries print ISSN 0894-2684 and electronic ISSN 1557-9026, names Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. of the United States as publisher, and gives an h-index of 79. Those identifiers are the key to the whole record. Bibliographic title-history sources agree that the journal ran as Journal of Aerosol Medicine through volume 20 in 2007, and continued from volume 21 in 2008 under the expanded title, with new identifiers 1941-2711 (print) and 1941-2703 (electronic) and the same ISSN-L root. This is therefore not a defunct journal and not a separate rival title: it is the first twenty volumes of a continuing journal whose name was lengthened to say explicitly what it had always covered — the delivery of drugs through the lungs as well as the health effects of inhaled aerosols. Any profile that treated the old title as a closed, dead publication would mislead authors, because submissions, subscriptions and the current editorial operation all live under the longer title.

The current journal describes itself, in the publisher's own summary, as delivering coverage of the health effects of inhaled aerosols and the delivery of drugs through the pulmonary system, and as a forum for leading experts addressing topics such as aerosolised chemotherapy, aerosolised vaccines, methods for determining toxicities, and delivery of aerosolised drugs in the intubated patient. It is published in association with the International Society for Aerosols in Medicine (ISAM). The publisher's pages now present the journal through Sage, with a Journal Impact Factor of 2.2 and a five-year figure of 2.7 shown on the journal's issue listing. This profile explains the title history in full, maps the scope as the journal itself practices it, interprets the metrics attached to both titles, and sets out what an author considering the current title needs to verify.

Quick Facts

• Record title: Journal of Aerosol Medicine (1988–2007, volumes 1–20)
• Current title: Journal of Aerosol Medicine and Pulmonary Drug Delivery (from volume 21, 2008)
• Publisher named on this record: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., United States; the journal is now presented through Sage
• Society association: International Society for Aerosols in Medicine (ISAM)
• ISSN on this record: 0894-2684 (print); 1557-9026 (electronic)
• ISSN under the current title: 1941-2711 (print); 1941-2703 (electronic)
• Journals World h-index on this record: 79
• Field: Aerosol medicine, pulmonary and respiratory medicine, pharmaceutical science, inhalation toxicology

Title History: Why Two Records Exist

Serial cataloguing creates a new record when a journal changes its title in a substantive way, even when volume numbering, editors and subject matter continue without a break. That is exactly what happened here. The Electronic Journals Library title history, one of the sources consulted for this profile, states the sequence plainly in its own compressed form: the earlier title covers volumes 1 to 20, 1988 to 2007, and the later title begins at volume 21 in 2008 and continues. The archive on the publisher's site tells the same story visually: its issue list runs continuously from January 1988 to the current volume 39, with no gap at the rename. A reader who opens a 2007 issue — volume 20, number 4, for example, with its studies of particle deposition in the mouth and throat, bronchial challenge testing, intranasal spray deposition, droplets generated by coughing and the design of pressurised metered-dose inhaler actuators — is reading the same journal, in the same format, as a reader of the current issues. The lesson for anyone citing or evaluating this record is to aggregate the two titles mentally: the reputation, the archive and the editorial lineage are shared, while the identifiers and the formal citation title differ by period. Cite pre-2008 work under the old title and post-2008 work under the new one, exactly as printed.

There is a second, practical consequence. A duplicate check based only on title strings will treat these as two different journals, and a check based only on ISSN will do the same, because the ISSN pair changed with the title. The continuity evidence — unbroken volume numbering from 20 to 21, the shared ISSN-L, the single archive on the publisher site, and the society association carried across the rename — is what establishes that they are one serial. This profile therefore flags the relationship explicitly for the parent record set: the Journal of Aerosol Medicine record and any record under the expanded title describe successive periods of the same journal, and editors maintaining the catalogue should cross-link them rather than present them as unrelated venues. That is a flag about cataloguing, raised from verified title-history evidence; no merge is performed here.

Scope in Practice

Aerosol science and deposition

The foundational strand is the physics and measurement of aerosols themselves: particle size distribution, generation, transport and deposition in the respiratory tract. Work in this strand uses cascade impactors, breathing simulators and computational models to answer where particles of a given size actually land — mouth and throat, conducting airways or alveolar region — because deposition site determines both therapeutic effect and toxicological risk. The journal has published this work continuously, from early deposition modelling to recent multi-participant studies of internal losses in commercially available mixing inlets tested across pressurised metered-dose inhalers, dry powder inhalers and nebulisers following pharmacopeial methods.

Devices and formulations

A second strand covers the engineering and formulation side: inhaler actuator design, dry powder formulations, nebuliser performance, soft mist devices, spacers and adapters, and delivery during mechanical ventilation. Papers characterise devices under realistic conditions — humidified and non-humidified circuits, varying flow profiles, simulated patient breathing — rather than under idealised laboratory conditions alone. For device researchers, this is one of the few journals where a rigorous in-vitro performance study is squarely in scope without needing a clinical trial attached.

Clinical pulmonary delivery

The expanded title added explicit weight to the clinical strand: delivering drugs through the lungs to treat asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other respiratory conditions, and using the pulmonary route for systemic delivery. Studies address dose delivery across the inhalation endpoints representative of target populations, adherence and inhaler technique, and delivery to intubated and ventilated patients, a setting where aerosol losses in circuits and airways make naive dosing assumptions fail.

Health effects and toxicology

The journal also covers the other side of inhalation: what inhaled particles do to people. That includes occupational and environmental exposure, air quality and health, smoking-related measurement, nanoparticle distribution in tissues, and methods for determining the toxicity of inhaled substances. This dual identity — therapeutic delivery and hazard assessment — is unusual and deliberate; the same aerosol science underlies both, and the journal's forum function, bringing device engineers, pharmaceutical scientists, clinicians and toxicologists into one venue, is its stated purpose.

Frontier topics

The publisher's own description singles out aerosolised chemotherapy and aerosolised vaccines as novel topics the journal addresses. Those examples signal openness to work that uses inhalation for indications well beyond classic respiratory disease, provided the aerosol, deposition and delivery science is rigorous.

Metrics, Read Honestly

Three different numbers circulate for this journal, and they measure different things. The h-index of 79 on this Journals World record belongs to the record as catalogued and reflects the citation accumulation associated with the title history feeding that record. The publisher's current pages for the expanded title show a Journal Impact Factor of 2.2 and a five-year Impact Factor of 2.7. Scopus-based listings for the current title place it across pharmaceutical science, pharmacology (medical) and pulmonary and respiratory medicine categories, with quartile positions that vary by category and year. None of these figures contradicts the others; they are different instruments pointed at a mid-sized specialist journal. The fair characterisation is a well-established, society-associated specialist title with a four-decade archive, steady citation performance in its categories, and influence concentrated in the inhalation research community — the community that also gathers around ISAM congresses, whose proceedings and special focus issues have appeared in its pages. Authors should quote the metric their institution actually requires, from its primary source, and should be alert to the title trap: a metric retrieved under the expanded title does not belong, formally, to a citation of the pre-2008 title, even though the journal is one and the same.

Publishing With the Current Title

Submissions go to the current title through the publisher's systems, and the operative requirements — article types, formatting, reference style, figure specifications, disclosure and ethics statements — are those in the current submission guidelines linked from the journal's pages. This profile deliberately does not reproduce a fee, a decision timeline or an acceptance rate, because no such figure was verified from an official source during its preparation; any site that states one for this journal without pointing to the publisher should be treated with suspicion. What the published record does support is guidance about fit. Manuscripts succeed here when the aerosol question is central rather than decorative: a clinical paper in which the inhaler is incidental, or a formulation paper with no deposition or delivery characterisation, is a weaker fit than work that measures, models or clinically tests what happens between device and lung. Methods transparency matters disproportionately in this field, because results depend on flow rates, humidity, apparatus and breathing profiles; the journal's own published studies report those parameters in detail, and reviewers in this community expect the same of submissions. Studies involving human participants, and preclinical safety evaluations of inhaled substances, appear in the archive and carry the corresponding ethics and reporting obligations; authors should follow the current guidelines for statements and approvals rather than relying on what older articles show.

The readership is international and multidisciplinary, spanning academic pharmacy and respiratory medicine, industry formulation and device teams, regulatory-facing scientists who work with pharmacopeial methods, and clinicians managing ventilated patients. Writing for that mixed audience means defining device and apparatus terms that a single-discipline journal could take for granted, and stating clinical relevance plainly in engineering papers and engineering constraints plainly in clinical ones. The journal's most-cited work tends to be exactly the work that does that translation well: reference methods, comparative device evaluations and deposition studies that later papers can build on.

Reading the Archive: Landmarks and Special Issues

The archive rewards structured reading. A newcomer to inhalation science can use it as a history of the field's methods: early volumes establish deposition measurement and the first generation of device characterisation; the middle volumes track the transition away from chlorofluorocarbon propellants in pressurised inhalers, the rise of dry powder systems and the growing sophistication of breathing simulation; recent volumes add computational fluid dynamics of the nasal and airway passages, nanoparticle work and systematic in-vitro comparisons conducted jointly across several laboratories. Because methods papers in this journal report apparatus and conditions in unusual detail, older studies remain usable as reference points rather than merely historical curiosities, and later authors cite them when they need a comparable measurement performed under stated conditions.

Special and congress-linked content is a second feature of the archive. Issues have carried collections arising from the International Society for Aerosols in Medicine congress, including a special focus on lung cancer in the proceedings of the society's seventeenth congress, and invited reviews on topics such as mucociliary and cough clearance treated as a measurable marker for therapeutic development, macrophage clearance of inhaled micro- and nanoparticles, and acute lung injury. For a reader mapping a sub-field quickly, those invited reviews are efficient entry points: they are written by active researchers, they summarise the state of a question at a stated date, and their reference lists point back into the journal's own original research. A sensible reading strategy is therefore to start with a recent invited review on your topic, follow its citations to the two or three original studies your own work must answer, and then check the most recent two volumes for work that has already answered them. That sequence, which takes an afternoon, prevents the commonest error in submissions to specialist journals — proposing as new a measurement the community standardised years earlier.

The journal's contents also document how clinical practice changed. Work on aerosol delivery during invasive and non-invasive ventilation, on nebuliser choice in critical care, and on inhaler technique assessment by video reflects real shifts in how hospitals deliver inhaled therapy, and clinicians reading those papers should note their dates carefully, because device generations turn over and a performance ranking from one decade may not survive the next. The journal itself supports that caution by continually publishing fresh comparative evaluations rather than treating earlier rankings as settled.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Journal of Aerosol Medicine still published?

Under that exact title, no — and under its expanded title, yes, continuously. Publication ran from 1988 as Journal of Aerosol Medicine and continued from volume 21 in 2008 as Journal of Aerosol Medicine and Pulmonary Drug Delivery, reaching volume 39 in the current archive. Treat the two titles as one journal in two periods.

Which ISSN should I cite?

For material from 1988 to 2007, the identifiers on this record: 0894-2684 in print and 1557-9026 online. For material from 2008 onward, 1941-2711 and 1941-2703. When in doubt, copy the ISSN printed on the article or issue itself.

Who publishes it?

The record names Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., the journal's long-standing publisher, and the journal is published in association with the International Society for Aerosols in Medicine. Its pages are now presented through Sage, whose imprint appears on the current journal site; authors should follow the submission route given on the live journal pages.

What is its impact factor?

The publisher's issue listing for the current title shows a Journal Impact Factor of 2.2 and a five-year figure of 2.7. Impact factors are recalculated annually, so verify the current figure on the publisher's page before quoting it in an application or report.

Is it only for asthma and COPD research?

No. Those diseases are core clinical territory, but the scope also includes aerosol physics and deposition, device and formulation engineering, inhalation toxicology and environmental exposure, delivery during ventilation, and emerging uses such as aerosolised vaccines and chemotherapy, as the publisher's own scope summary states.

A Note on Discoverability Across the Rename

Researchers searching for this journal should search both titles, and librarians should expect readers to need both. Database coverage is split by period in the same way cataloguing is: Scopus coverage listings, for example, are stated for the current title from 2008, while the earlier volumes are reached through the original title and its own identifiers. A literature search that uses only the expanded title will silently lose the first twenty years of the field's record, including foundational deposition and device work that current papers still cite. The practical rule is simple: in any systematic search, include both title forms and both ISSN pairs, deduplicate by article title and year rather than by journal name, and record in your methods which title form each included study was published under. That small discipline is the difference between a review that represents inhalation science as it actually developed and one that begins, artificially, in 2008.

Bottom Line

Journal of Aerosol Medicine is the founding title of a continuing, society-associated specialist journal that now appears as the Journal of Aerosol Medicine and Pulmonary Drug Delivery. Its archive runs unbroken from 1988, its subject is the full path of an inhaled particle — generation, measurement, deposition, therapeutic use and toxic effect — and its metrics describe a durable mid-tier specialist venue rather than a general medical flagship. Read this record together with the expanded title, cite each period under its own name and ISSN, and judge the journal by the community it serves: the researchers and clinicians for whom the lung is both a target and a gateway, and who have had few other homes as consistently dedicated to that subject for as long.