About Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association (1996)

Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association (1996) — Journal Profile

The Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association catalogued in this record — identified in library and publisher systems by the year marker (1996) — is the 1996 to 2003 incarnation of the flagship journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, the United States pharmacists' association that renamed itself the American Pharmacists Association in 2003. Its print ISSN for this incarnation is 1086-5802, with 2543-0947 recorded as its second ISSN in the Journals World record. This post does not describe a new journal founded in 1996, and it does not describe a different journal that happens to share a similar name. It describes one chapter — the final chapter under the word Pharmaceutical — in a publication lineage that began in 1912, passed through scientific and practical-pharmacy editions, spent 1978 to 1995 under the title American Pharmacy, returned to its historic name in 1996, and then changed that name by a single word in 2003, when Pharmaceutical became Pharmacists to match the association's own new name. Readers who understand that timeline can place any citation from this journal correctly; readers who miss it routinely misdate articles, search the wrong ISSN, or treat the 1996 title as unrelated to the journal they know today as JAPhA.

Today the continuing journal is the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, universally shortened to JAPhA, published by Elsevier on behalf of the American Pharmacists Association from Washington, DC, with print ISSN 1544-3191 and online ISSN 1544-3450. The masthead of current issues states the lineage explicitly: the current journal was formerly the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, ISSN 1086-5802, and American Pharmacy. That single sentence, printed in the journal itself, is the strongest verification of the identity recorded here, and this profile is built around it, together with the association's own centenary history of the journal, Elsevier's ScienceDirect archive pages for each title incarnation, and the aims and scope that the continuing journal publishes today.

At a glance

A century-long lineage, and where 1996 fits in it

The association founded in Philadelphia on 6 October 1852 as the American Pharmaceutical Association launched its journal in 1912 under the editorship of James Hartley Beal, whose often-quoted position was that the association did not exist to produce a publication, but the publication existed to serve the association. From 1912 to 1939 the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association appeared monthly as a single title. In 1940 it split into two editions that ran in parallel until 1960: a Scientific Edition and a Practical Pharmacy Edition, reflecting the long-standing tension inside American pharmacy between its scientific, laboratory side and its practising, commercial side. In 1961 the practical line recombined into a new series under the historic title, running from 1961 to 1977, while the scientific line continued separately and became the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences — which remains the association's scientific journal and should not be confused with the practice journal profiled here.

In 1978 the practice journal was renamed American Pharmacy, a title it carried until 1995. Then, in 1996, the historic name returned: Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association once more, monthly and later bimonthly, edited in that period by Marlene Z. Bloom and L. Michael Posey according to the association's centenary booklet, JAPhA and Its Editors Through the Years, published for the journal's centenary in 2012. That restoration lasted until the March/April 2003 issue. From May/June 2003 the journal has appeared as the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, following the association's own renaming, and under that title it continues today as a bimonthly. Some reference sources round the 1996 incarnation to 1996–2002, because the final volume year began in 2002, while the association history gives the precise handover at March/April to May/June 2003. Both statements describe the same transition; this profile uses the association's issue-level dating.

Why does a seven-year incarnation deserve its own record? Because citations, library holdings, ISSN registrations and database coverage all attach to incarnations, not to lineages. An article cited as J Am Pharm Assoc (1996) with ISSN 1086-5802 belongs to this period; searching the current ISSN alone, or attributing the article to American Pharmacy, will fail. Indexing services and ScienceDirect both preserve the incarnation structure — ScienceDirect maintains separate journal pages for the 1961 title, for American Pharmacy, and for the intervening editions, each showing its former and continued titles — and faithful cataloguing on Journals World does the same.

Scope of the 1996 incarnation

The 1996 journal was the association's practice and professional journal: the place where pharmacy practice research, professional affairs, law and regulation, education and patient-care innovation met the working pharmacist. The continuing journal's current aims and scope describe the same mission in modern language, and they are the best available guide to what this incarnation published, since the mission — connecting science and practice in order to optimise medication use and improve patient and population health — runs through the whole lineage. In those terms, the journal publishes empirical studies, reviews on important healthcare topics and considered opinion, and welcomes work on the development and evaluation of innovative pharmacy services and models of care; medication-use studies and interventions to improve medication use; pharmacotherapeutic advances, especially as reviews; health outcomes research; pharmacoepidemiology; pharmacoeconomics; health services research; evaluations of drug benefit designs; healthcare policy development and evaluation; implementation science; patient-reported outcomes and patient preferences; the education of pharmacists and pharmacy technicians; professional questions including workforce, well-being and reimbursement; new technologies in healthcare; research methods applicable to pharmacy practice; and advocacy, legal and regulatory questions affecting pharmacy and healthcare.

Read against the late 1990s, that scope had a distinctive flavour. This was the decade in which pharmaceutical care — the movement, associated with American pharmacy's academic leadership, to redefine the pharmacist's role around responsibility for patient outcomes — moved from manifesto to mainstream, and the association's journal was one of its principal vehicles. Issues of the period mixed research articles with the practical apparatus of a membership journal: drug updates, legislation and regulation reporting, continuing-education material, counselling features and association news. The ScienceDirect archive of the predecessor American Pharmacy shows that mixture clearly in its final 1995 issues, and the restored 1996 title continued it under the historic name. Scholars of pharmacy history find this incarnation valuable precisely because it documents the profession renegotiating its identity — from dispensing towards clinical and public-health roles — in its own official journal, in real time.

Two scope boundaries matter for authors and readers today. First, this journal was and remains distinct from the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, the association's bench-science title: submissions describing pharmacokinetic or pharmacodynamic work without a direct application to practice, animal models, or in-vitro and in-silico drug studies sit outside the practice journal's remit, as the current guide for authors states plainly. Second, educational scholarship is considered only where it carries a clear link to pharmacy practice. Both boundaries were already implicit in the scientific-edition / practical-edition split of 1940–1960, and both still shape what JAPhA means by pharmacy research.

Editorial and institutional setting

The journal is owned by the association and is its official journal, published today by Elsevier on the association's behalf; the association is headquartered at 2215 Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC, and the journal's website is japha.org. For the current title, the editor-in-chief named on ScienceDirect is Pamela Heaton of the University of Toledo. For the 1996 incarnation specifically, the association's centenary history names Marlene Z. Bloom and L. Michael Posey as editors — Posey then continuing into the renamed Pharmacists title from 2003, providing editorial continuity across the exact transition this profile documents. Naming the editors of a closed incarnation matters for provenance: correspondence, editorials and policy positions from 1996 to 2003 belong to their tenure, and historians citing them should attribute them to this period rather than to the journal in general.

Metrics and standing

The Journals World record for this incarnation records an h-index of 59, a figure that reflects the citation weight of the JAPhA tradition taken through this period. For the continuing journal, Elsevier currently reports a CiteScore of 3.3 and an Impact Factor of 2.5 on its ScienceDirect journal page; those figures belong to the current title and current measurement years, and are included here only so that readers can gauge the standing of the lineage today — they must not be quoted as metrics of the 1996 incarnation itself, which predates both measures in their present form. In its own period, the journal's standing rested on something simpler and, for a practice profession, arguably more important: it was the official, indexed, widely held journal of the largest pharmacists' association in the United States, indexed across the biomedical and pharmacy abstracting services listed in its mastheads, including Biological Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, Current Contents and Excerpta Medica. A 1996–2003 JAPhA citation in a clinical or health-services bibliography is therefore a citation to the mainstream of American pharmacy practice literature, not to a marginal outlet.

How to cite and find material from this incarnation

Give the title as published, the year, and ISSN 1086-5802 when precision matters; do not silently modernise Pharmaceutical to Pharmacists for pre-2003 articles, because the modernised form is a different registered title with a different ISSN. In databases, search both the title variant and the ISSN, and use the ScienceDirect backfile, where the archive is organised by incarnation, to reach full text. In library catalogues, holdings for 1996 to 2003 sit under this title, holdings for 1978 to 1995 under American Pharmacy (ISSN 0160-3450), and holdings from May/June 2003 under the Pharmacists title. Confusingly for newcomers, the abbreviation JAPhA spans all of these periods; only the year and ISSN pin a reference down.

The 1996–2003 issues in their professional moment

To understand what a reader actually found inside the 1996 incarnation, it helps to reconstruct the professional questions pressing on American pharmacy in those exact years. Managed care was restructuring how medicines were paid for, and pharmacy benefit designs — formularies, tiers and utilisation controls — were moving from insurer paperwork into daily practice, which is why evaluations of drug benefit designs and pharmacoeconomic analysis, both named in the journal's scope, carried such weight in the period. Pharmacists were expanding into immunisation, disease-state management and collaborative practice with physicians, and each expansion generated the same journal-shaped questions: what service was delivered, to which patients, with what outcomes, at what cost, and under what legal authority. The journal's mixture of research, reviews and opinion was the mechanism by which a local service innovation in one state became a discussable, replicable model for the profession nationally. Its legislation and regulation coverage performed the same function for scope-of-practice law, tracking the state-by-state changes that determined what the research articles were even allowed to test.

The period also sits immediately before the Medicare prescription-drug benefit transformed American medication policy in 2003–2006, and the journal's late-1990s and early-2000s pages record the profession arguing its way towards the medication-therapy-management role that the new benefit would eventually recognise. That is a specific, citable reason why health-services researchers still mine this incarnation: it is a primary source for how a profession documented its own case for a clinical role, in empirical rather than merely rhetorical terms. A profile that treated the 1996 title as a bibliographic shell would miss that entirely; a researcher who knows the context can use the archive deliberately, searching the 1086-5802 years for benefit-design evaluations and service models from the managed-care era, and the successor title from 2003 for the implementation literature that followed.

The lineage today, and what it inherited from 1996

The continuing journal has recently extended the same lineage into companion titles: JAPhA Pharmacotherapy, an open-access journal for research improving medication use in humans, including drug-interaction identification and management, clinical trials and epidemiology of therapeutic agents, pharmacokinetics with a practice link, and clinical pharmacology; and JAPhA Practice Innovations, an open-access journal for innovative practice research, programme evaluation and commentary, including practice reports, management case studies and pharmacy-around-the-world features. Both companions restate the parent journal's mission in their own scope statements. Their existence confirms the reading of the 1996 incarnation offered here: the practice journal's territory grew wide enough to need specialist offshoots, but the territory itself — services, medication use, outcomes, policy, education and professional questions — is the one the 1996 title was already mapping. Authors who find the companions while searching should not back-project their titles, ISSNs or open-access charges onto the 1996 journal, which was a subscription membership-era publication; each generation of the lineage must be cited and costed on its own terms.

What a complete citation to this incarnation looks like

A complete reference to material from this period carries four elements: the author and article title; the journal title as printed at the time, with Pharmaceutical not Pharmacists; the year, which will fall between 1996 and early 2003; and, where a catalogue or bibliography permits it, ISSN 1086-5802. Omitting the year marker is the single most common error in student bibliographies for this journal, because the near-identical successor title invites the assumption of one continuous journal under one ISSN. The assumption is understandable — same association, same abbreviation, same editor continuing across the change — but libraries, indexers and the publisher's own archive all maintain the break, and a reference that respects it will resolve in every system, while a reference that ignores it will fail in at least some of them.

That habit of giving the year and the ISSN together is also the safest way to search this journal in any aggregated database, because aggregator records for the lineage are only as clean as the incarnation data publishers supplied to them, and the year-plus-ISSN pair cuts through every title-variant error at once.

Frequently asked questions

Was a new journal founded in 1996? No. The historic title was restored in 1996 after the American Pharmacy period (1978–1995), within a lineage that began in 1912.

Why did the title change again in 2003? Because the association itself changed its name from the American Pharmaceutical Association to the American Pharmacists Association; the journal followed, changing one word, from the May/June 2003 issue.

Is this the same as the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences? No. That is the association's scientific journal, descended from the Scientific Edition of 1940–1960. This record covers the practice and professional journal line.

Can I still submit to this title? No; this incarnation closed in 2003. Submissions go to the continuing Journal of the American Pharmacists Association through its current Elsevier submission system, whose guide for authors sets out today's article types and limits.

Sources and verification

Main sources: the American Pharmacists Association centenary booklet JAPhA and Its Editors Through the Years (title and editor timeline, including the 1996–2003 (Mar/Apr) period); current JAPhA mastheads stating that the journal was formerly the Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association (ISSN 1086-5802) and American Pharmacy; Elsevier ScienceDirect journal pages for the continuing journal (aims and scope; CiteScore 3.3; Impact Factor 2.5) and for American Pharmacy and the 1961 title (former/continued title chains); the journal's published history summary (1912 origin; American Pharmacist 1978–1996 in that summary's rounding; restored title 1996–2002 by volume year; current title from 2003); and the Journals World record for post 368414 (ISSNs 1086-5802 and 2543-0947; h-index 59; publisher recorded as Elsevier BV).