The Journal of Dermatology

About The Journal of Dermatology

The Journal of Dermatology — Journal Profile

The Journal of Dermatology is the official, peer-reviewed journal of the Japanese Dermatological Association and the Asian Dermatological Association, published by Wiley. Established in 1974, it appears monthly in English, carries print ISSN 0385-2407 and online ISSN 1346-8138, and describes its mission, in Wiley's words, as providing a global forum for the exchange of new and significant research in dermatology. This profile is built from the journal's own Wiley Online Library pages retrieved for this profile, from the OpenAlex source record for ISSN 0385-2407 retrieved directly, and from SCImago-based secondary reporting, each attributed where it is used. The Journals World record for this post independently lists the same publisher (Wiley) and the same ISSN pair, so the site's stored identity agrees with the official record.

Overview and history

Few national society journals have as clean a public identity as this one. The copyright line on the Wiley journal home page reads © Japanese Dermatological Association; the journal is the association's official publication, shared also with the Asian Dermatological Association, which gives it a dual national-and-regional mandate. Its founding in 1974 places its origin in the period when Japanese dermatology was consolidating its clinical and research institutions, and its unbroken run from 1974 to the present — SCImago-based coverage listings run 1974–2025 — makes it one of the long-standing English-language dermatology titles from Asia.

That last point matters more than it might seem. The journal publishes in English, from Japan, for an international readership. It is therefore simultaneously a society journal — carrying the Japanese Dermatological Association's guidelines, consensus statements and proceedings-related material — and an international research journal competing for submissions with the other major general dermatology titles. Its most-cited content reflects both roles: alongside original research, the journal is a home for the Japanese guidelines for the management of conditions such as atopic dermatitis and for expert consensus documents of the Japanese Dermatological Association, material that is cited because practising clinicians need it, not only because researchers build on it.

Wiley lists the current editor as Takafumi Kadono on the journal home page retrieved for this profile. Editorial leadership of a society journal rotates, so authors should always confirm the current editor-in-chief and board on the Wiley site at the moment of submission rather than rely on any profile, including this one, whose board information will age.

Scope and article types

Wiley's description is deliberately broad: the journal provides a forum for new and significant research in dermatology and promotes the discipline in Japan and throughout the world, and its research articles are supplemented by reviews, theoretical articles, special features, commentaries and proceedings material. In practice, and as OpenAlex's topic assignment for the source confirms, the content centres on dermatology and skin diseases, including psoriasis treatment and pathogenesis, genetic and rare skin diseases, skin cancer and skin lesions, and skin and cellular biology. Clinical dermatology, dermatopathology, epidemiology, immunodermatology and therapeutics all sit inside the remit.

The article-type mix visible on the current Wiley pages is equally instructive: original articles sit alongside concise communications — the short-report format Wiley describes as preliminary or short reports and letters of two printed pages or less, published as soon as possible — letters to the editor, reviews, guideline documents and special issues devoted to topics of high current interest to dermatologists worldwide. An author with a full clinical or experimental study, a rigorous review, a short but urgent observation, or a society guideline each has a distinct, named route into the journal. An author whose work is primarily cosmetic marketing, anecdotal case description without a teaching point, or outside skin medicine altogether does not, and should look elsewhere.

Fit assessment for this journal should be comparative. Read a recent issue: the papers combine a clear dermatological question, a defined patient group or experimental system, and results that change or confirm clinical or scientific understanding. Manuscripts whose contribution is incremental in a way the journal's readership will still use — a validated diagnostic comparison, a well-conducted treatment study in a Japanese or Asian population, a careful clinicopathological correlation — are squarely in scope. Work that merely repeats a known finding in a small, uncontrolled series will struggle here, as it would at any Q1 dermatology title.

Publisher and society relationship

Wiley is the publisher and platform operator: the journal lives on Wiley Online Library, submissions and author services run through Wiley systems, and Wiley's bibliographic listings name Wiley (in some listings Wiley-Blackwell, the imprint name retained in several databases) as publisher. Ownership and scientific authority, however, rest with the societies: the journal is the official publication of the Japanese Dermatological Association and the Asian Dermatological Association, and the copyright line names the Japanese association. Authors should understand the practical meaning of that arrangement — production, platform, marketing and open-access administration are Wiley functions, while editorial policy and society content are association functions — because it determines whom to contact about what. A production or access problem goes to Wiley; a question about guideline endorsement or society policy goes to the association through the journal's editorial office.

No publisher conflict was found for this post: the Journals World record's Wiley attribution and ISSN pair (0385-2407, 1346-8138) match Wiley's own masthead exactly.

Indexing and discoverability

The journal is indexed in the major biomedical and multidisciplinary systems appropriate to a journal of its standing. It is covered by MEDLINE — the journal's contents are listed in biomedical bibliographic services such as Medscape's journal listing, which is built on the MEDLINE record — and it holds a Journal Impact Factor in Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports, which presupposes Web of Science coverage. It is covered by Scopus, the database underlying both the CiteScore that Wiley displays and the SCImago ranking discussed below. OpenAlex also holds a complete-looking source record for the title, with strong recent year-by-year coverage. For an author, the practical conclusion is simple: a paper published here will be findable, citable and counted in every mainstream evaluation system in medicine. Verification of current indexing should still be done in the systems themselves — the NLM Catalog for MEDLINE, the Scopus source list, and Journal Citation Reports — because indexing status is a property that databases, not journals, ultimately certify.

Metrics, with attribution

Wiley's own journal home page, retrieved for this profile, displays the following headline metrics: CiteScore 4.2, Journal Impact Factor 2.3, an acceptance rate of 24%, and a median of 5 days from submission to first decision. Those four numbers, taken together, describe a selective but fast-moving journal: roughly one submission in four is accepted, yet the median first decision arrives in under a week, which reflects an active editorial triage stage that declines many manuscripts quickly rather than sending everything to full review. Authors should plan for that triage: the opening pages of the manuscript — title, abstract, and the clarity of the contribution — do disproportionate work here.

OpenAlex's source record for ISSN 0385-2407, retrieved directly for this profile, records 12,725 works and 144,018 citations, with an h-index of 101, an i10-index of 4,278 and a two-year mean citedness of about 1.48. Its year-by-year counts show a large, continuing journal — several hundred works per year in recent years, with a substantial open-access share. SCImago-based secondary reporting gives a different but complementary picture, as SCImago measures from Scopus with its own methods: an SJR of 0.994 and an h-index of 86 in the Resurchify summary of SCImago data, with a best quartile of Q1 in Dermatology. The two h-index figures (101 on OpenAlex, 86 on SCImago) are not in conflict; they are computed over different databases and windows, and the difference is a useful reminder that an h-index is a property of a database's coverage of a journal, not of the journal alone.

One caution on vintage: Journal Impact Factor and CiteScore values change every year, and secondary sites display different years' figures side by side — CiteScore values of both 4.2 and 4.4 for this journal can be found in current secondary listings. The figures quoted in this profile are the ones Wiley itself displayed on the journal home page when it was retrieved, and authors quoting metrics in a grant application or evaluation dossier should re-check the current Journal Citation Reports and Scopus values rather than copy any profile's numbers, including these.

Open access, charges and licensing

The Journal of Dermatology is a hybrid journal: authors may publish under the subscription route, or choose open access on acceptance. OpenAlex's source record lists an article publication charge of US$3,630 (with euro and sterling equivalents of €3,050 and £2,400) for the journal, which corresponds to the charge applied when the open-access option is selected; authors who do not select open access are not charged that APC under Wiley's standard hybrid model. As with all Wiley society journals, the corresponding author's institution or funder may hold a Wiley open-access agreement that covers the charge in full or in part, and eligibility is determined at acceptance. Because charges and agreements change, confirm the current figure on the journal's Wiley open-access page before budgeting — and treat the figure here as the OpenAlex-recorded value at retrieval time, not a price guarantee.

How to submit, and how to verify

Submissions are made through the journal's Wiley Online Library presence, following the journal's author guidelines linked from the journal home page. Before submitting, work through this verification and preparation sequence. First, confirm the masthead: online ISSN 1346-8138, print ISSN 0385-2407, © Japanese Dermatological Association — three identifiers that together exclude every look-alike title. Second, distinguish this journal from similarly named titles, including the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, the European Journal of Dermatology, and national dermatology journals whose names translate similarly; title confusion in this field is common and consequential. Third, choose the article type deliberately, because format limits — especially for concise communications and letters — are enforced. Fourth, prepare the manuscript to the journal's stated requirements on ethics approvals, patient consent for identifiable material and clinical photographs, and trial registration where applicable; dermatology's reliance on clinical images makes its consent requirements stricter in practice than those of many fields, and missing consent documentation is a preventable cause of delay or rejection. Fifth, decide the open-access question and its funding before acceptance, not after, so that a covered charge is not missed through late paperwork.

Who should consider this journal

This is a journal for dermatologists and skin researchers who want a society-backed, internationally indexed, Q1-in-dermatology audience and who can meet its selectivity: with an acceptance rate around one in four, most submissions will not succeed, and the fast median first decision means unsuccessful authors will at least know quickly and can move to a well-chosen alternative. It is especially apt for work of Japanese, Asian and international clinical relevance, for society guidelines and consensus work, and for concise reports of genuine novelty. It is a poor target for work outside dermatology, for unconsented case imagery, or for manuscripts whose authors cannot accept a substantial probability of triage rejection.

Editorial process in detail

The five-day median submission-to-first-decision figure that Wiley displays tells an experienced author a great deal about how this journal is run. A median that fast is not compatible with sending most manuscripts out to external referees before any decision; it indicates a structured editorial office in which the editor and associate editors screen new submissions promptly, return those that are out of scope, under-powered or incorrectly formatted without external review, and move the remainder into peer review quickly. For authors, the practical consequence is that the journal rewards preparation. A manuscript that arrives in the correct article-type format, with a structured abstract that states the question, the method, the principal result and the conclusion in terms a triaging editor can grasp in two minutes, gives the office every reason to send it forward. A manuscript that buries its contribution, omits its ethics statement, or presents clinical photographs without documented consent gives the same office easy, defensible reasons to stop the process at the desk.

Authors who pass triage should expect the standard Wiley production pathway after acceptance: licence selection through Wiley's author services — with the open-access decision and any institutional agreement applied at that point — followed by copy-editing, proofs and Early View online publication ahead of issue assignment. Society content follows the same production path but originates differently: guidelines and consensus statements are commissioned or developed through the Japanese Dermatological Association's processes and then published in the journal as the association's citable record, which is why those documents accumulate citations steadily for years. Understanding which stream a manuscript belongs to — submitted research or society document — prevents a common category error, in which authors write to the editorial office expecting to propose a guideline, when guideline topics and authorship are in fact determined inside the association.

The journal's place in the dermatology ecosystem

General dermatology publishing is crowded, and The Journal of Dermatology occupies a specific, defensible position within it. It is not a subspecialty title: it does not restrict itself to dermatopathology, paediatric dermatology, dermato-oncology or any other single branch. It is not a purely investigative title either: laboratory work appears, but in a journal whose centre of gravity is the clinic and the patient. And it is not a regional bulletin: although it is the organ of a national association and publishes that association's guidance, its authorship, readership and citation base are international, and its special issues address topics of worldwide interest. That combination — general scope, clinical centre of gravity, society authority, international reach — is what its publisher's description means by a global forum, and it is the standard against which a prospective author should test fit.

The journal also functions as a bridge between Japanese dermatology and the wider literature. Studies of disease presentation, genetics, treatment response and health-system practice in Japanese and other Asian populations appear here in English, in a journal that international indexers cover completely, rather than remaining in domestic-language publications that most of the world cannot read. Authors with such material hold something the journal actively wants: evidence about populations that the large Western general titles under-represent. Conversely, international authors submitting work with no particular connection to the journal's readership should be able to answer, in their cover letter, the question every editor asks — why this journal, for this paper, for these readers.

Citation practice deserves a final word. When citing the journal, use the standard abbreviation J Dermatol and the article's DOI from Wiley Online Library. When evaluating the journal for a dossier, cite the metric, its source and its year together — for example, the Journal Impact Factor as displayed by Wiley at the time of checking, or the SCImago quartile for a stated year — rather than a bare number copied from an aggregator. Dermatology contains several journals with overlapping names and very different standings, and precision about which title a metric belongs to is the difference between a credible dossier and an embarrassing one.

Frequently asked questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 0385-2407 and online ISSN 1346-8138, as shown on Wiley's journal masthead and in the Journals World record.

Who owns and publishes the journal? It is the official journal of the Japanese Dermatological Association and the Asian Dermatological Association, © Japanese Dermatological Association, and it is published by Wiley on Wiley Online Library.

When was it founded and how often does it appear? It was established in 1974 and appears monthly.

Who is the editor? Wiley lists Takafumi Kadono as editor on the journal home page retrieved for this profile; confirm the current editor at submission time, as society editorships rotate.

What are its headline metrics? Wiley displays CiteScore 4.2, Journal Impact Factor 2.3, a 24% acceptance rate and a 5-day median to first decision. OpenAlex records 12,725 works, 144,018 citations and an h-index of 101; SCImago-based reporting gives SJR 0.994, h-index 86 and Q1 in Dermatology. Figures are attributed by source and change annually.

What does open access cost? OpenAlex records an APC of US$3,630 for the open-access option; the subscription route carries no such charge under Wiley's hybrid model, and institutional agreements may cover the APC. Verify the current charge on Wiley's site before budgeting.

Is it indexed in MEDLINE and Scopus? Yes — it is a MEDLINE-covered, Scopus-covered title with a Journal Citation Reports impact factor; verify current status in the NLM Catalog, the Scopus source list and Journal Citation Reports for formal purposes.