Journal of Internal Medicine

About Journal of Internal Medicine

Overview

The Journal of Internal Medicine is a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal covering internal medicine in the broad sense: original clinical research that runs, in the description carried by the journal's bibliographic listings, from bench to bedside across general internal medicine and its subspecialties. Its saved Journals World record (post 1803, slug journal-of-internal-medicine) stores Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd as publisher, the United Kingdom as country, print ISSN 0954-6820 and online ISSN 1365-2796, and coverage beginning in 1989. That 1989 start date is the date of the current title, not the birth of the journal, and understanding that distinction is essential to understanding this publication: the Journal of Internal Medicine is the modern, English-language, fully international form of a Scandinavian medical journal founded in 1863, one of the longest continuous lineages in European medicine.

The journal is published by Wiley on behalf of the Association for the Publication of the Journal of Internal Medicine, and its editor-in-chief is Bo Angelin of the Karolinska Institute, according to the bibliographic and publisher listings consulted for this profile. It appears in print and online, publishes original articles, reviews, brief reports and research letters, and supports scientific meetings in the form of symposia within its scope. For a clinician or clinical researcher, it occupies a specific niche: more selective and more generalist than a subspecialty title, European in origin and governance, and aimed at work that a thoughtful internist outside the author's own subspecialty should still want to read.

Source-backed journal facts

Title: Journal of Internal Medicine, abbreviated J Intern Med (ISO 4: J. Intern. Med.). Former titles: Medicinskt Archiv (from 1863), Nordiskt Medicinskt Arkiv, and Acta Medica Scandinavica. Publisher as stored on this record: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd; current publisher listings shorten this to Wiley. Country as stored: United Kingdom. Print ISSN: 0954-6820. Online ISSN: 1365-2796. CODEN: JINMEO. Language: English. Frequency: monthly. Access model: subscription with an optional open-access route for authors who select it; authors who do not select that option are not charged an article publication charge under the publisher's general open-access terms. First year of the current title: 1989. First year of the lineage: 1863.

Two stored-field clarifications deserve emphasis. First, the United Kingdom country listing reflects the publisher listing used by the indexing record stored on this site; the journal's editorial home and owning association are Scandinavian in origin, centred historically on the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, so readers should not picture a British editorial office simply because a database field says United Kingdom. Second, the related Journals World record for the predecessor title, Acta Medica Scandinavica (post 2606), carries a different ISSN, 0001-6101, and its own full profile describing a journal published from 1919 through 1988. The two records are a predecessor and a successor with distinct ISSNs and distinct publication runs, not two copies of one journal, and nothing in this profile merges them.

Facts that could not be verified from sources consulted are not guessed here. A single current open-access article publication charge for this journal is not published in this profile, because the publisher's journal-level charge page available in search was a template page with placeholder amounts rather than a journal-specific figure, and a placeholder is not a price. The journal's acceptance rate is not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted, and no median decision time is stated, for the same reason.

History: from Medicinskt Archiv in 1863 to an international journal in 1989

The journal was established in 1863 as Medicinskt Archiv by Axel Key of the Karolinska Institute. In that first form it covered the broad field of medicine but accepted only contributions from Sweden, written in Swedish. It soon became more international: in 1869 it was renamed Nordiskt Medicinskt Arkiv, accepting articles from all Nordic countries in Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, with abstracts in German, which was then a leading language of medical science. In 1901 the journal was divided into two sections, one for internal medicine and one for surgery, and in 1919 the two parts were fully separated into Acta Medica Scandinavica and Acta Chirurgica Scandinavica. Acta Medica Scandinavica covered general internal medicine and later accepted articles from the Netherlands as well. In 1989 it was renamed Journal of Internal Medicine and became a fully international journal publishing articles in English from all over the world.

That history explains several present-day features. The journal's identity is generalist because its ancestor was a general medical archive before specialisation split medicine into separate titles. Its governance through an association for the publication of the journal, rather than direct ownership by a commercial publisher alone, reflects the Scandinavian society-journal tradition, with Wiley as the publishing partner. Its symposium activity continues an older function of the title as a convening institution for internal medicine, not merely a container for papers. And its stored coverage start of 1989 in modern indexing, also reflected in Scopus coverage summaries that begin in 1989, is a database artefact of the title change: citation databases commonly start a new coverage record at a rename, even though the scholarly lineage runs back to 1863. Authors citing the journal's age, and readers judging its standing, should use the lineage with the rename explained, exactly as the journal's own historical summaries do.

Scope: internal medicine from bench to bedside

The journal's stated remit, in the publisher-linked description carried by Wolters Kluwer's journal listing, is original work in clinical science from bench to bedside covering a broad field of internal medicine and its subspecialties, featuring original articles, reviews, brief reports and research letters. A scope summary drawn from indexing sources adds the working detail: original clinical articles within general and internal medicine and its subspecialties, epidemiological studies of disease prevalence, risk factors and outcomes, biomarker and genetic studies that connect variants and markers to disease susceptibility, diagnosis and progression, therapeutic trials and systematic reviews evaluating the efficacy and safety of interventions, and multidisciplinary work that draws on pharmacology, nutrition and public health where it bears on internal medical problems.

In practice the centre of the journal is the adult internal-medicine territory that sits between laboratory mechanism and everyday hospital and clinic practice: cardiovascular disease, diabetes and metabolic disease, liver and gastrointestinal disease, kidney disease, respiratory disease, infectious disease as it presents to internists, haematological and immunological problems in adult patients, ageing and multimorbidity, and the diagnostic and prognostic questions that cut across those systems. A paper fits best when its finding changes how an internist understands, diagnoses, stratifies or treats a problem, or when a translational study connects a mechanism to a human disease phenotype convincingly enough that clinicians, and not only laboratory scientists, need to know it. A narrow subspecialty technique paper, a case description with no general lesson, or a laboratory study with no demonstrated human relevance will generally be a weaker fit here than in a subspecialty or basic-science title, however well executed it may be.

The review and symposium content deserves separate mention. The journal supports and organises scientific meetings in the form of symposia within its scope, and its reviews are part of how it serves practising internists who must keep up across a wide field. For readers rather than authors, that makes the journal useful as a curated update route: a monthly issue combines new original evidence with synthesis written for a general internal-medicine audience, in English, from an international author base, which has been its explicit model since 1989.

Article types

Original articles carry complete clinical or translational studies with the reporting completeness expected of a selective medical journal. Reviews synthesise a defined question for internists. Brief reports present focused findings that are complete but short. Research letters allow concise communication of a sharp observation. The journal's listings also confirm print and online publication, which matters for libraries and for the permanence of the record. Authors should match the format to the claim honestly: a brief format is not a refuge for an incomplete full study, and editors at a journal with this history can be expected to enforce that distinction. Case material, where it appears, must carry a generalisable lesson for internal medicine rather than rarity alone.

Editorial leadership and peer review

The editor-in-chief recorded in current bibliographic and publisher listings is Bo Angelin of the Karolinska Institute, and the journal works with an international advisory board, a structure its own aim-and-scope summaries credit with its development since the 1989 relaunch. Peer review is the standard selective medical-journal model: editorial assessment of importance and fit for a general internal-medicine readership, followed by expert external review for papers that pass that screen. The decisive editorial question is breadth of significance. A trial or cohort study can be methodologically strong and still be declined if its answer matters only inside one subspecialty clinic; conversely, a smaller study can succeed if it settles a diagnostic or prognostic question that internists everywhere face.

No acceptance rate and no decision-time figure are quoted here, because none is published in the sources verified for this profile, and third-party pages that offer such numbers for this journal do so without a verifiable basis. Authors planning around a thesis, grant or guideline deadline should ask the journal office or consult the current author guidelines rather than rely on an aggregator estimate. Ethical expectations follow the norms of a Wiley medical journal: trial registration, reporting-guideline compliance, conflict-of-interest disclosure and patient-consent discipline are the author's responsibility to evidence in the manuscript itself, and a submission that leaves those elements unclear will slow its own progress regardless of the science.

Access and charges

The Journal of Internal Medicine is a subscription journal with a hybrid open-access option. Readers normally reach the full text through a library subscription or a purchase route, with abstracts openly readable. Authors may select open access for an accepted article, in which case an article publication charge applies and the article becomes immediately free to read, download and share under the licence chosen. The publisher's general open-access page for its journals states the governing principles used here: if the open-access option is selected, submissions are subject to a charge if accepted and published; authors who do not select the option are not charged; and all or part of a charge may be covered where the corresponding author's institution, funder or society holds a Wiley open-access account, with eligibility based on the acceptance date and an active arrangement at the time the order is placed, and with taxes additional where required by law.

Because the specific charge page retrieved in research carried placeholder amounts rather than a journal figure, this profile deliberately states no number for the charge. That is the honest position, and it is also the practical one: the amount payable depends on the article, the licence, membership or account arrangements, and tax, so any single figure copied from an unrelated page could be wrong for a given author by a large margin. Check the journal's own author pages at acceptance, and check one's institutional Wiley account status before assuming either full cost or full coverage.

Metrics and standing, with sources and dates

The stored Journals World record, drawn from the SCImago 2025 dataset, places the journal in Q1 with an SJR of 3.031 and an H-index of 202, lists coverage of 1989 to 2026, assigns the category Internal Medicine (Q1), and reports 129 documents and 3,294 citations across the latest three-year reporting window described in that record. A Scopus-oriented summary of the same dataset family gives a CiteScore of 19, reinforcing that the journal's papers are cited at a rate well above the general medical average.

Journal Citation Reports figures differ by edition and must be kept year-labelled. Publisher-linked listings give a 2024 Journal Impact Factor of 9.2. Reference sources citing the 2025 reports give a 2025 impact factor of 7.6. Those two numbers are successive editions of the same measure, not rival claims, and the change between them should be read as the ordinary year-to-year movement of a citation ratio in a field whose citation patterns were still normalising after an exceptional period for medical publishing, not as a sudden change in editorial quality. What is stable across both editions, and across the SCImago record, is the positional picture: a Q1 general and internal medicine journal with a three-figure H-index built over a long lineage, selective monthly volume, and citation performance that places it among the leading general internal-medicine titles available to European and international authors. Any page that quotes a single impact figure for this journal without a year should be treated with caution, and any page quoting a dramatically higher figure without naming its source and edition could not be verified against the sources consulted here and should not be relied on.

Indexing and discoverability

Indexing summaries list the journal in Scopus, the Science Citation Index Expanded within Web of Science, and Embase, with NLM indexing reflecting its presence in the biomedical system that clinicians search. For a medical author, that combination covers the realistic discovery routes: PubMed-style searching by clinicians, Scopus and Web of Science citation tracking for evaluation, and Embase coverage valued in pharmacology-aware and European searching. The journal's long back run also matters: because the lineage reaches back through Acta Medica Scandinavica, the title sits inside citation chains that span more than a century of internal medicine, and its current papers are read against that tradition by a loyal Scandinavian and wider European readership as well as an international one.

Who should submit, and who should look elsewhere

The best fit is a clinical or translational internal-medicine study whose conclusion matters across subspecialty boundaries: a diagnostic or prognostic finding internists will use, a treatment result that changes a common decision, an epidemiological result that reframes risk in a population, or a mechanism-to-phenotype study that explains human disease. Authors in cardiology, diabetology, hepatology, nephrology, respiratory medicine, infectious diseases and neighbouring fields should ask the generalist question explicitly in the cover letter and discussion: why should an internist who is not in this subspecialty read and cite this paper? If that question has a strong answer, this journal is a rational target. If it does not, a subspecialty journal will usually review the work faster and more sympathetically. Purely laboratory authors should note the bench-to-bedside framing: the bench end is welcome when the bedside end is real and evidenced, not speculative. Authors of single case reports and small uncontrolled series should expect a high bar and consider whether the observation truly carries a general lesson.

Relation to Acta Medica Scandinavica on this site

Journals World holds a separate, already detailed profile for Acta Medica Scandinavica (post 2606, ISSN 0001-6101), the predecessor title published from 1919 through 1988. That separation is bibliographically correct. Libraries, citation databases and the ISSN system treat a renamed journal as a new title with a new ISSN, linked to its predecessor by a continues-and-continued-by relationship rather than by identity. A citation to Acta Medica Scandinavica is a citation to a paper published before 1989 under that title; a citation to the Journal of Internal Medicine is to the successor from 1989 onward. Researchers tracing a topic across the rename should search both titles, and should not be surprised that database coverage for the current record begins in 1989. No merge of the two records is proposed in this profile, and none would be correct under the site's own rule that distinct-ISSN predecessor and successor titles are identity questions, not duplicates.

Frequently asked questions

When was the Journal of Internal Medicine founded? The current title dates from 1989; the journal lineage dates from 1863, through Medicinskt Archiv, Nordiskt Medicinskt Arkiv and Acta Medica Scandinavica.

Who publishes it and who edits it? Wiley, shown on this record as Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd, on behalf of the Association for the Publication of the Journal of Internal Medicine; the editor-in-chief in current listings is Bo Angelin of the Karolinska Institute.

What is its impact factor? 9.2 in the 2024 Journal Citation Reports as carried in publisher-linked listings, and 7.6 for 2025 in reference sources citing that edition; the SCImago 2025 record on this site gives SJR 3.031 and Q1 in Internal Medicine. Always attach the year.

Is it open access? It is a subscription journal with an optional paid open-access route; authors who do not select that route are not charged a publication charge under the publisher's stated principles, and institutional accounts may cover the charge for those who do.

Is it the same journal as Acta Medica Scandinavica? It is its successor, not the same title: different name, different ISSN, different publication run, profiled separately on this site as post 2606.

Sources and verification note

This profile is anchored to the post's own stored record for title, slug, ISSNs, publisher, country, coverage and SCImago 2025 metrics, and to the live page structured data carrying the same ISSN pair. History, former titles, association publishing and the editorship are taken from the journal's bibliographic record as summarised in reference sources and from the publisher-linked Wolters Kluwer listing, which also carries the bench-to-bedside scope description, monthly frequency and the 2024 impact factor of 9.2. The 2025 impact factor of 7.6 is taken from reference sources citing the 2025 Journal Citation Reports. Open-access principles are taken from the publisher's open-access page for its journals; because the journal-specific charge page retrieved carried placeholder amounts, no charge figure is stated. The predecessor relationship and the distinct ISSN of Acta Medica Scandinavica were verified by direct fetch of that record on this site. DOAJ was checked through its search API for ISSN 0954-6820 on the date of research and returned no listing, consistent with a subscription and hybrid model rather than a fully open-access title.