The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine

About The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine

Researched profile — figures are attributed to their sources and dates; verify current details on the official publisher pages before submitting.

About The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine

The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, subtitled Research on Paradigm, Practice and Policy, was a monthly peer-reviewed medical journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. of New Rochelle, New York, United States. Founded in 1995, it became the leading scholarly venue for rigorous research on complementary, alternative and traditional medical practices — acupuncture, herbal medicine, mind-body therapies, manual therapies and whole medical systems — at a time when that research had few respected homes. Its print ISSN is 1075-5535 and its online ISSN is 1557-7708, the pair carried by this directory record; its CODEN is JACPFP, its Library of Congress Control Number is 95660807, its OCLC number is 53406436, and its standard abbreviation is J. Altern. Complement. Med. The journal was the official journal of the Society for Acupuncture Research.

As with several other records in this batch, the title on this post is a historical one, and readers deserve the fact plainly: from 2022 the journal continued under a new title, Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine, with new ISSNs 2768-3605 (print) and 2768-3613 (online), reflecting the field's shift in vocabulary from alternative medicine toward integrative health. The 1995–2021 run under the original title remains fully citable and continues to be the archive on which much of the evidence base for complementary therapies rests. This profile covers the journal under the title this record bears, its founding and editorial history, its scope and standards, and its continuation, so that authors can cite the archive correctly and submit new work to the right destination.

History

The journal was established in 1995, with Volume 1, Number 1 appearing that year under Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. Its founding editorial, Introducing The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine: Research on Paradigm, Practice and Policy, set out the founding argument with unusual clarity: that healing practices used by most of the world's population, and increasingly by patients in the United States, deserved the same disciplined scientific scrutiny as conventional interventions — not exemption from it. The editors framed the journal as a bridge: alternative and complementary medicine should not stand in opposition to orthodox medicine, but be tested, integrated where evidence supported integration, and subjected to ordinary standards of validation.

The founding editor was Kim A. Jobst. He was succeeded as editor-in-chief by John Weeks, a long-standing figure in integrative health policy and publishing, who led the journal through its later years under the original title and into its continuation. Under both editors the journal kept a monthly frequency and a deliberately broad tent: clinical trialists and basic scientists sat alongside health services researchers, policy analysts and scholars of medical paradigms, which is exactly what the subtitle promised.

The 2022 retitling to Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine (abbreviated J. Integr. Complement. Med., articles carrying the DOI element jicm, as in 10.1089/jicm) was more than cosmetic. By the 2020s the clinical mainstream in the United States — academic health centres, the Veterans Health Administration's Whole Health programme, and payer policy — spoke of integrative health rather than alternative medicine, and the journal's mission statement in its current form is written for that world: it aims to help healthcare professionals, delivery organisation leaders, policymakers and scientists evaluate and integrate traditional, complementary, alternative and integrative products, practices and practitioners into patient care protocols, payment strategies and appropriate policies. The archive, the publisher, the editorial lineage and the readership carried over; the title and ISSNs changed, which is why this directory correctly keeps a separate record for the original title.

Aims and Scope

Under its original title the journal covered the full territory of complementary and alternative medicine with an evidence-first brief. Its pages carried clinical trials and observational studies of acupuncture and related needling therapies — fittingly for the official journal of the Society for Acupuncture Research — herbal and dietary supplement interventions, mind-body practices including meditation, yoga and tai chi, manual and body-based therapies, energy therapies examined with appropriately sceptical methods, and whole systems of care such as traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda and naturopathy studied as complete practices rather than as single extracted interventions. Health services and policy research — how these therapies are used, paid for, regulated and integrated into conventional settings — was in scope from the founding editorial onward, as was work on the paradigms and research methods of the field itself.

That methods strand deserves emphasis, because it shaped the journal's standards. The current publisher guidance for the continuing journal, which codifies the practice built up under the original title, gives pride of place to human clinical trials and observational studies, to whole systems research and other methods designed for the multi-modal character of traditional and integrative practice, and to implementation and cost research that documents what integration actually requires. It also keeps a door open to frontier science while stating that such work will be held to the exacting standard that frontier claims warrant — a formulation that captures the journal's editorial identity across both titles: open-minded about questions, strict about evidence.

What falls outside the scope follows from that identity. The journal was never a venue for testimonials, promotional practitioner writing, or clinical claims without a research design capable of supporting them, and single case anecdotes were channelled into the tightly limited case report format described below rather than presented as evidence of efficacy. Authors misjudge this journal when they treat a complementary-medicine title as a softer option; for intervention claims it applied the reporting and design expectations of mainstream clinical publishing, including the trial and review standards detailed in the next sections.

What the Journal Publishes

The manuscript menu codified in the publisher's author guidance for the continuing journal reflects the formats the journal developed under the original title, and gives authors precise limits. Original Articles report clinical trials and observational studies. Review Articles are limited to 4,500 words with a structured abstract of no more than 400 words, a maximum of eight figures, six tables and 200 references; systematic reviews and meta-analyses must follow the PRISMA checklist and include the PRISMA flow diagram, and a narrative review must justify in the cover letter why a systematic approach was not followed. Short Reports are limited to 1,500 words with an abstract of no more than 100 words, one figure, two tables and 15 references. Research Letters run to 600 words with no abstract, one figure or table, and up to 10 references. Case Reports are limited to 2,000 words with a structured abstract of no more than 100 words, up to four figures, two tables and 10 references. Commentaries run to 1,500 words with no abstract and at most two figures or tables combined and 15 references. Letters to the Editor are limited to 500 words, may include one figure or table, and cite no more than five references. Word limits in the guidance exclude abstracts, disclosure statements, author contribution statements, funding information, acknowledgements, tables, figure legends and references, and observational studies are expected to follow the STROBE reporting standard.

Read as a whole, that menu explains the journal's texture: substantial original research at the core, a disciplined review literature around it, and sharply limited short formats that keep preliminary findings, single cases and debate in proportion. Special focus issues have also been part of the programme — the publisher's guidance itself points authors to a special focus issue on multimodal approaches in integrative health — gathering whole-systems and methods papers that would otherwise scatter across general issues.

Editorial Standards and Peer Review

The journal is peer-reviewed, and its indexing in MEDLINE — which requires a quality and editorial review by the National Library of Medicine — is itself evidence of the standard maintained. Editorial handling follows the mainstream medical pattern operated by its publisher: submissions are screened for scope and reporting completeness, sent to expert reviewers, and decided by the editor-in-chief and editorial team, with disclosure of funding and conflicts expected as a condition of publication, as the author guidance's attention to disclosure and contribution statements shows. Reporting checklists are enforced in practice, not merely recommended: the PRISMA requirement for systematic reviews and the STROBE expectation for observational studies are stated in the publisher's own manuscript-type descriptions.

Two field-specific standards are worth an author's attention. First, intervention description: trials of acupuncture, herbal products or complex whole-system care are expected to describe the intervention in reproducible detail — the actual treatment protocol, practitioner qualifications, product identity and dosing — because a trial of an unspecified herbal mixture or a generic needling routine cannot be replicated or sensibly pooled in a meta-analysis. Second, claim calibration: the journal's stated position on frontier work applies across the board, and conclusions must match design, so an uncontrolled observational study will not be permitted to conclude efficacy. Authors who observe both standards will find the journal's review process demanding but predictable; authors who arrive with promotional framing will find it brief.

Indexing and Metrics

The journal was abstracted and indexed in CAB Abstracts, CINAHL, Current Contents/Clinical Medicine, Index Medicus/MEDLINE/PubMed, Embase/Excerpta Medica, the Mantis database, PsycINFO, the Science Citation Index and Scopus — a coverage list that placed every article in front of clinical, nursing, psychology and agriculture-adjacent readerships as well as the core medical audience, and that continues to make the back run discoverable through PubMed today.

On citation metrics, the attributed figure for the original title is an impact factor of 2.3 for 2023, as reported from the Journal Citation Reports — a strong showing for a specialist field journal and a reflection of how often its trials and reviews are cited in guidelines and systematic reviews. The continuing journal under its new title has been listed in recent journal summaries with an impact factor of 1.9 in the latest listings consulted and a Scopus-based CiteScore of 3.5, with coverage under the new title running from 2022; figures for the new title should be verified in the current JCR and Scopus releases before being quoted, since the title change means the two runs accumulate metrics separately. The directory record for this post lists Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. as publisher and the original ISSN pair 1075-5535 and 1557-7708, both correct for the title and period this record names.

Submitting Today, and Citing the Archive Correctly

New manuscripts in this field should be submitted to the continuing journal, Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine, through the publisher's site for that title, using the manuscript types and limits set out above and the reporting checklists named there. Before submitting, an author should confirm three things: that the study design matches the claim (efficacy claims need a controlled design), that the intervention is specified reproducibly, and that the relevant reporting checklist — PRISMA for a systematic review, STROBE for an observational study, and the trial reporting standard for a randomised study — has been completed and followed in the text, not merely filled in as a form.

Citation hygiene for the archive is equally simple and equally often mishandled. A paper published in 2010 appeared in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine and must be cited under that title and abbreviation, J. Altern. Complement. Med., with ISSN 1075-5535 where an ISSN is required; a paper published in 2024 appeared in the Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine under its own ISSNs. Databases, tenure dossiers and systematic reviews that merge the two runs silently will undercount both. Libraries and readers will find the original-title archive through the publisher's platform and PubMed, and any researcher conducting a systematic search in this field should search both titles explicitly.

How This Journal Differs From Neighbouring Titles

Authors in this field choose among several venues whose names sound alike, and the distinctions matter for both fit and citation. This journal — first as The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine and now in its continuation — is a clinical and health-services research journal: its centre of gravity is the human study, the trial, the observational cohort, the systematic review and the integration question, published by a New York medical publisher and indexed in MEDLINE. It is not the same publication as the Journal of Integrative Medicine, a separate bimonthly title from China, published by Science Press with Elsevier distribution, which began as the Journal of Chinese Integrative Medicine; database searches that treat the two as one will corrupt a bibliography, and the ISSNs — 1075-5535 here, 2095-4964 there — are the reliable way to separate them. It also differs in kind from practitioner and trade titles in the same field, and from broad open-access complementary medicine journals that organise their model around article charges: the Liebert journal's subscription model, society connection through the Society for Acupuncture Research, and MEDLINE indexing define a more selective, clinically anchored venue.

Its influence pattern follows from that position. Papers here are picked up by systematic reviewers building the evidence tables on which clinical guidelines depend, by health services researchers studying how integrative care is actually delivered and paid for, and by clinicians deciding what can responsibly be offered alongside conventional treatment. The journal's own history supports that reading: it was founded, in its editors' words, to subject a widely used but lightly examined sector of healthcare to ordinary scientific validation, and its successor's mission — helping professionals, delivery leaders, policymakers and scientists evaluate and integrate these practices into care protocols, payment strategies and policy — restates the same contract for the integrative era. A manuscript that helps any of those audiences make a better decision is on mission; a manuscript that merely adds one more positive small study of an already crowded intervention, without the design rigour the journal requires, is not, however enthusiastic its conclusions.

Finally, a note on expectations for authors new to the field. Publication in this journal has historically carried weight in academic integrative medicine precisely because acceptance was never a formality: MEDLINE indexing, mainstream reporting standards and an editor-led review process filtered out the promotional material that fills weaker venues in this space. Authors should budget the same preparation effort they would give a submission to a conventional specialty medical journal — protocol discipline, complete reporting, honest limitations — because that is the standard their manuscript will meet in review.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 1075-5535 and online ISSN 1557-7708 for The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, as carried by this record. The continuing title, Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine, uses 2768-3605 (print) and 2768-3613 (online).

Is the journal still published? The journal continues, but under its new title from 2022. The original title covers the 1995–2021 run; new submissions go to the Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine.

Who published it? Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., of New Rochelle, New York, which remains the publisher of the continuing title. The journal was the official journal of the Society for Acupuncture Research.

Who edited it? Kim A. Jobst was the founding editor; John Weeks succeeded him as editor-in-chief and led the journal through its later years under the original title.

What is its impact factor? An impact factor of 2.3 was reported for 2023 for the original title from the Journal Citation Reports. Metrics for the continuing title are accumulated separately under its new ISSNs; check the current JCR release for the latest figure.

Where is it indexed? In MEDLINE/PubMed, the Science Citation Index, Scopus, Embase, CINAHL, PsycINFO, CAB Abstracts and Current Contents/Clinical Medicine, among the services listed in this profile.

What kinds of papers does it take? Original clinical and observational research, systematic and narrative reviews under strict reporting rules, short reports, research letters, tightly limited case reports, commentaries and letters — with complementary, alternative and integrative interventions, whole systems research, and integration policy and costs all in scope.