The American Journal of Bioethics

About The American Journal of Bioethics

The American Journal of Bioethics — Journal Profile

The American Journal of Bioethics, universally shortened to AJOB, is one of the most recognisable journals in bioethics — and one of the most deliberately unusual in its design. Published by Routledge Journals, part of Taylor & Francis, it is identified by print ISSN 1526-5161 and online ISSN 1536-0075. Those identifiers match the Journals World record for this post (333031, slug the-american-journal-of-bioethics), which stores them without hyphens as 15265161 and 15360075 and names Taylor & Francis as publisher. Where most journals publish articles and move on, AJOB was built from its first volume to stage a conversation: a substantial target article is published together with a set of open peer commentaries written in response to it, followed in the journal's mature format by the target author's reply. If you are considering AJOB, understanding that architecture — who writes target articles, who is invited to comment, what counts as a contribution, and where empirical work belongs in the wider AJOB family — matters more than any metric. This profile explains the journal on those terms, with its history, mission, formats, indexing and reported metrics, and with clear warnings about the sister titles with which it is often confused.

At a Glance

• Journal: The American Journal of Bioethics (AJOB)
• Publisher: Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis
• Print ISSN: 1526-5161
• Online ISSN: 1536-0075
• Field: Bioethics — normative, conceptual, clinical, research, public-health and policy ethics
• Signature format: Target article with open peer commentaries and author response
• First volume: Volume 1, 2001 (Project MUSE archive)
• Editorial leadership note: David Magnus, a founding co-editor, has served as editor-in-chief in the journal's recent era — verify the current masthead on Taylor & Francis before addressing a submission
• Related titles — not the same journal: AJOB Empirical Bioethics (ISSN 2329-4515 print / 2329-4523 online) and AJOB Neuroscience, each with its own ISSNs and remit
• Official route: Taylor & Francis journal page, code UAJB

History and Founding Idea

Project MUSE, which archives the journal, lists its run from volume 1 in 2001. AJOB began, by its own editors' account, as a quarterly journal produced on a very small budget. In an interview published by the ELSIhub resource for researchers working on the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics, David Magnus — who describes himself as a founding co-editor, working at the University of Pennsylvania at the time alongside Glenn McGee as the first editor-in-chief — explains the two ideas that defined the journal from the start. The first was dialectic: debate and conversation across disciplines and perspectives, deliberately modelled, he says, on the target-article and commentary format of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in which he had published early work. Rather than waiting years for a literature to argue with itself through separate papers, AJOB would print the argument and its critics side by side. The second idea was digital: McGee pressed the importance of internet resources and what became social media, the journal built a strong web presence around bioethics.net, and AJOB became, in Magnus's phrase, one of the first journals in any field to have a blog.

An editorial marking the journal's relaunch era, “AJOB 2.0: Taking Bioethics to a New Level” (2014, volume 14, issue 8, DOI stem 10.1080/15265161.2014.936788), shows how the founding design evolved in practice. Writing nearly fifteen years after inception, the editors restated the premise: bioethics topics are often timely and even cutting-edge, traditional journals rarely generated immediate conversation, and so target articles were selected for originality and for their ability to push the boundaries of the field, with open peer commentaries facilitating multiple expert responses. The same editorial records deliberate expansion — a rebooted blog under a dedicated editor, a new section on challenging cases in research ethics from October 2013, and a clinical ethics section from January 2014, each built around a case accompanied by commentaries. The pattern is consistent: when AJOB adds a feature, it adds a structured disagreement, not just more pages.

Writing in 2020 about the direction of the field, Magnus added a point authors should weigh carefully. Most AJOB target articles, he noted, are substantial pieces of normative or conceptual scholarship, typically in the range of 5,000 to 7,000 words or more, even though the journal does occasionally publish empirical pieces. The growth of empirical bioethics — surveys, interviews, observational and other data-driven studies of moral practice — is one reason the journal's daughter title, AJOB Empirical Bioethics, matters so much to the family: it gives data-driven work a dedicated home instead of forcing it to compete, on unequal terms, with the conceptual target-article tradition of the flagship. That division of labour is the single most useful thing a prospective author can learn before choosing which AJOB title to approach.

Mission and Scope

The journal's mission statement, preserved in its author-guidance material hosted through Project MUSE, is expansive by design. The mission of The American Journal of Bioethics and bioethics.net, it says, is to provide the clinical, legal, academic, scientific and religious communities, and the broad community at large, with a comprehensive debate of issues in bioethics; and, further, to inspire and inform research and writing across disciplines through target articles, peer commentary, book reviews, qualitative research, literary criticism, photography and graphic arts, and comments on developments in law and medical science. Two features of that statement deserve emphasis. First, the audience is explicitly plural — clinicians, lawyers, academics, scientists, religious voices and the public — which explains the journal's insistence that important arguments be readable beyond a single guild. Second, the forms are explicitly plural: alongside conventional scholarship the journal has always made room for reviews, qualitative work, and even visual and literary contributions, provided they do bioethical work.

In subject terms, descriptions of the journal across its history name the terrain a reader would expect of a leading general bioethics journal, perennial questions alongside emergent controversies: cell and molecular genetics; reproductive technology; end-of-life care; human research and its oversight; distribution of scarce resources and justice in health care; transplantation; diversity, equity and inclusion; and health services research. The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, in its guide to humanities and bioethics journals, summarises the result succinctly: featuring a unique target article and peer commentary format, the journal inspires comprehensive and rigorous debate across the diverse disciplines of bioethics. In his ELSIhub interview Magnus adds a directional note — the journal is increasingly focused on issues of justice and equity, though that concern has long been present, and he expresses particular interest in new technologies with significant impact on research. Authors with work on genomics and its social implications, on data and digital health, on artificial intelligence in care and research, or on fair allocation, are therefore writing toward an editorial interest the journal has stated publicly — provided the work is framed as an argument others will want to answer, not only as a report others will want to file.

The Target Article System — How an Issue Is Built

An AJOB issue is not a miscellaneous bundle. At its centre sits one or, in many issues, two target articles: long, original, peer-reviewed arguments chosen because they take a position worth contesting on a question that matters. Around each target article the journal publishes a larger set of open peer commentaries — shorter responses, typically by scholars and practitioners working in different disciplines, institutions and sometimes countries, who may agree, disagree, extend, qualify or reframe the target argument. The target author is then given space to respond to the commentaries. Library guides that teach the journal to students describe the same structure in plain terms: every issue contains peer-reviewed target articles that focus on difficult questions, answered by open commentary articles from scholars across disciplines and cultures.

For authors, the system creates three distinct opportunities, with three distinct expectations. A target article must sustain an issue: it needs a clear thesis, command of the relevant literature and objections, enough length to develop the argument properly — recall the typical 5,000 to 7,000-plus word scale the editor describes — and the intellectual generosity to anticipate the commentaries it will provoke. A commentary must do more in a short space than applaud or summarise: it should add an argument, an example, a distinction or a body of evidence the target article lacks, and it should engage the target text directly and by name. A response, where offered, should answer the strongest criticisms rather than restate the original paper. Many commentaries are invited once a target article is accepted, while target articles themselves are the competitive core of the journal; prospective contributors should read the current Taylor & Francis guidance for the precise submission categories open at any time, because the balance of invited and submitted material, and the handling of special sections and cases, is set by the editorial office and can change without any change to the journal's ISSN or title.

Beyond the target system, the journal's sections have historically included clinical ethics cases and research-ethics cases with commentaries, essays, book and media reviews, and correspondence engaging law and medical science. The MUSE-hosted guidance also preserves period submission mechanics — including a transfer-of-copyright form for accepted articles and an editorial-office address in Philadelphia from that era — which should be treated as history, not as current instructions: Taylor & Francis now handles submission, rights and licensing through its current online systems and policies, and the live journal page is the only reliable source for what applies today.

The AJOB Family — Do Not Confuse the Titles

AJOB is a flagship with named relatives, and confusing them is a genuine bibliographic risk. AJOB Empirical Bioethics is a separate journal for empirical scholarship in bioethics, with its own identifiers — ISSN 2329-4515 in print and 2329-4523 online — confirmed in its own pages. It began life as AJOB Primary Research; a Taylor & Francis announcement in 2014 recorded its renaming, precisely to signal its focus on empirical studies, methodological discussion and critical appraisal of bioethical concepts through data. Its founding editorial described it as a welcoming forum for studies that can evaluate theories, inform policy and enrich discourse by bringing the perspectives of patients, clinicians, research participants and publics into view. AJOB Neuroscience is a further, separate sister title for work at the intersection of neuroscience and ethics. None of these titles shares AJOB's ISSNs, 1526-5161 and 1536-0075, and citations, indexing claims and metrics for one must never be transferred to another. When a database, a CV or a university web page says “AJOB”, check the ISSN before you decide which journal is actually meant.

The family logic, however, is helpful rather than merely confusing. Normative and conceptual argument with debate potential belongs, in the first instance, to the flagship. A study whose contribution is primarily its dataset, its method or its empirical findings belongs, in the first instance, to AJOB Empirical Bioethics. Work centred on the brain, mind, neurotechnology or psychiatric practice may belong to AJOB Neuroscience. Editors across a family of journals are used to redirecting misdirected manuscripts, but a redirected manuscript costs months; choosing correctly at the outset — by remit and ISSN, not by the shared acronym — is an author's job.

Indexing, Readership and Scholarly Standing

AJOB's standing rests less on any single list than on its visibility across the communities it convenes. Its literature is traced through the major biomedical and humanities routes its readers use — PubMed and Philosopher's Index are both named in editorial discussion of how its papers enter academic databases — and PhilPapers maintains a substantial, current record of its articles and commentaries, volume by volume into the present. The journal is recommended to members by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities in its journals guide, and it is taught in health-science library guides as a first example of a bioethics journal — both signals that its readership extends from research specialists to clinicians, ethics committees, lawyers and students. Taylor & Francis has also publicly linked the flagship to newer open-research initiatives in the field, describing an affiliation between Bioethics Open Research and The American Journal of Bioethics intended to expand authors' publication options while reinforcing AJOB's leadership position in bioethics publishing — evidence that the publisher treats the title as a field flagship rather than a backlist journal.

As with every profile in this series, verify formal indexing claims at the point of formal use. If an appointment, promotion or funding case depends on the journal appearing in a specific index — a Web of Science category, Scopus, or a humanities index — confirm the title by its ISSNs in that service's current source list, and record the date of your check. Aggregator pages are useful for discovery and comparison; they are not the source list itself.

Metrics — Reported Figures and Their Limits

Aggregator profiles built on Scopus data report strong citation performance for AJOB relative to its field. Researcher.Life reports a CiteScore of 9.7 for the journal, an h-index of 69 in its dataset, and a source-normalised impact figure (SNIP) of 1.65, and classifies its SCImago standing as Q1; research-profile summaries drawing on SCImago report an h-index of 76 and an SJR of 1.284, with the journal's most cited contributions including a national survey of ethics consultation in United States hospitals, a study of the ethics of pharmaceutical industry gift-giving, and an article on justice, health and health care. Those three examples are instructive: AJOB's influence has been exercised as much through agenda-setting normative and policy argument, and through empirical work published when the flagship chose to carry it, as through any single genre.

Two cautions are essential. First, figures differ between aggregators and years because the underlying datasets and windows differ; an h-index of 69 in one profile and 76 in another is not a contradiction to resolve by averaging, but a reminder to cite a figure only with its source and year attached. Second, headline impact-factor numbers circulating on unofficial websites for this journal vary wildly and at least some are plainly implausible for the field or conflate different titles and years; this profile therefore does not state a Journal Impact Factor figure, because no such figure could be verified from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports or from the publisher at the time of writing. If you need the current impact factor for a formal purpose, take it from Journal Citation Reports for ISSN 1526-5161 / 1536-0075 — and from nowhere else. What can be said without a contested decimal is substantive: by citation profile, by its Q1 classification in aggregator reporting, by its role in professional-society guidance and by the debate format itself, AJOB sits among the leading general journals of bioethics, and publication of a target article there is a significant scholarly event in the field.

Submitting to AJOB — Practical Advice

Route all submissions through Taylor & Francis, from the journal's official page under code UAJB — the address the Journals World record itself gives for journal information. Read the current aims, article types and author guidelines there before writing a word of a cover letter, and confirm the current editor-in-chief and editorial office from the live masthead. Then be honest with yourself about genre. If your manuscript is a normative or conceptual argument, test it against the target-article standard: Is the thesis contestable and important? Have you answered the best objections, not the weakest? Could twenty experts find twenty different, worthwhile things to say about it — and would the field be better for printing them together? If the honest answer is that your paper is a solid argument of ordinary scope, AJOB may still have commentary, case or essay routes worth exploring under current guidance, but a conventional research article of modest ambition is not what the flagship's centre is built for.

If your manuscript is empirical — a survey of ethics consultation, interviews with research participants, an observational study of consent practice — read AJOB Empirical Bioethics' remit before defaulting to the flagship, and choose by contribution, not by prestige. If your work concerns neuroethics specifically, compare AJOB Neuroscience. Whichever title you choose, prepare the unglamorous parts well: ethics approvals and consent for any human-participants work, reporting appropriate to your method, data and materials statements as current Taylor & Francis policy requires, competing-interest and funding declarations, and a reference list that credits the commentaries and debates you are entering — in a journal built on conversation, failing to cite the conversation is both a scholarly and a strategic error. Finally, guard against impersonation: established journals are mimicked by fraudulent sites and email solicitations. Submit only through the publisher's own system, reached from the Taylor & Francis domain, and treat any approach that asks for fees by unusual payment routes, or that cannot be traced to ISSN 1526-5161 / 1536-0075, as suspect until proved otherwise.

Who Should Read AJOB, and How to Use It in Teaching and Practice

Read AJOB if you work on, teach, or make decisions governed by the ethics of medicine, life science, health care or health policy — as a clinician facing a contested case, an ethics-committee member preparing advice, a researcher designing a study others will scrutinise, a lawyer or policymaker testing an argument, or a scholar tracking where the field's arguments are moving. Its format is a teaching gift: a target article with its commentaries and response lets a seminar read a live disagreement in a single assignment, assign students to defend different commentaries, and show how a position changes under criticism — a truer picture of bioethics as a practice than any single article read alone. In clinical and committee settings, the case sections and commentaries offer a disciplined way to rehearse reasoning before a real case demands it. The journal's blog and web presence around bioethics.net extend that function between issues with news, job and event information and faster commentary, continuing the founders' bet that a journal could also be a community's noticeboard and debating chamber.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are AJOB's ISSNs?
Print ISSN 1526-5161 and online ISSN 1536-0075. The Journals World record stores the same numbers without hyphens.

Who publishes AJOB?
Routledge Journals, Taylor & Francis. The Journals World record names Taylor & Francis, which is consistent with the publisher's own presentation.

What is a target article?
A substantial, peer-reviewed argument — typically 5,000 to 7,000 words or more for normative and conceptual pieces, per the editor's own description — published together with open peer commentaries from other scholars and an author response.

When did AJOB start?
Its archived run begins with volume 1 in 2001. It began as a quarterly, founded by co-editors including David Magnus, with Glenn McGee as first editor-in-chief.

Is AJOB Empirical Bioethics the same journal?
No. It is a separate sister journal, formerly AJOB Primary Research, with ISSNs 2329-4515 (print) and 2329-4523 (online), dedicated to empirical bioethics scholarship.

Does AJOB publish empirical research?
Occasionally, but the flagship's target articles are predominantly normative or conceptual, and the family provides AJOB Empirical Bioethics as the dedicated home for empirical work. Choose by the nature of your contribution.

What metrics can be stated safely?
Aggregator reporting based on Scopus data gives a CiteScore of 9.7 and Q1 SCImago classification (Researcher.Life). No Journal Impact Factor is stated here because none could be verified from Journal Citation Reports or the publisher at the time of writing; verify any such figure there, by ISSN.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on Taylor & Francis journal information for code UAJB as referenced in the Journals World record; on the journal's mission and guidance material hosted by Project MUSE, including its archive from volume 1 (2001); on the editors' own “AJOB 2.0” editorial (2014); on David Magnus's ELSIhub interview and his 2020 “Frontiers in Bioethics” essay on the journal's genres and its empirical sister title; on the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities journals guide; on the 2014 Taylor & Francis announcement renaming AJOB Primary Research as AJOB Empirical Bioethics, with that journal's own ISSNs and founding editorial; and on Scopus-based aggregator reporting (Researcher.Life and SCImago-based summaries), attributed as such. Masthead, submission categories and any impact-factor figure should be re-verified on the live publisher page and in Journal Citation Reports at the time of use.