World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics

About World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics

World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics: Karger's long-running nutrition book series

The World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics is one of the oldest continuing review publications in nutrition science. Published by S. Karger AG of Basel, Switzerland, it is best understood — as OpenAlex explicitly classifies it — as a book series rather than a conventional article-by-article journal: each numbered volume is a self-contained edited book, usually built around one theme in nutrition or dietetics, written by invited specialists and edited by a series editor. The series has been appearing since the late 1950s; Scopus coverage recorded in SCImago-derived listings runs from 1959, with the interrupted pattern 1959–1961, 1964–1966, 1968–2001, 2003–2005 and 2007 onwards, and the volume numbering had passed 110 by the middle of the 2010s and continues into the 2020s, with a Nutrition and Growth: Yearbook 2026 volume listed by Karger among its recent books in the series' wider family of yearbook volumes.

Because the series behaves like a journal in catalogues — it carries a print ISSN and an electronic ISSN, it is indexed in Scopus, and its chapters receive DOIs — it is frequently listed, ranked and compared alongside journals, which is exactly how the stored Journals World record treated it. This profile explains what the publication actually is, who publishes and edits it, what its volumes contain, how its citation record should be read, and where researchers will and will not find it indexed. Every figure is attributed to a named source, and details that could not be verified are labelled as such.

At a glance

The ISSN assignment is a point on which secondary sources openly disagree, so it is worth being precise. The series' own front matter resolves the question: the printed frontispiece of volume 111 states "ISSN 0084–2230 / e-ISSN 1662–3975", making 0084-2230 the print ISSN and 1662-3975 the electronic ISSN. OpenAlex agrees, listing the ISSN set as 0084-2230 and 1662-3975 with 0084-2230 as ISSN-L. Some aggregator pages reverse the two numbers; where they conflict with the publisher's own front matter, the front matter governs, and this profile follows it. Both numbers are the journal's stored ISSNs in its Journals World record, so the record's identity is sound even where third-party listings swap the labels.

A book series that databases treat as a journal

The single most important fact about the World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics is its format. A normal journal issues a stream of independently submitted articles. This series instead publishes edited volumes: a volume editor (or the series editor) assembles a team of expert contributors, each writes a chapter reviewing one aspect of the volume's theme, and Karger publishes the result as a hardback and e-book with its own ISBN, while the chapters also carry DOIs under the series' ISSNs. Karger's volume 113, Pediatric Nutrition in Practice (second edition, 2015), illustrates the pattern: its chapters are cited in the form "Koletzko B, et al. (eds): Pediatric Nutrition in Practice. World Rev Nutr Diet. Basel, Karger, 2015, vol 113, pp 244–249" with a chapter DOI — a book citation, a series citation and a journal-style citation all at once.

This hybrid status explains several otherwise puzzling features of the series' record. Its Scopus subject categories — Food Science and Nutrition and Dietetics in SCImago's classification — are assigned at series level, not per article. Its citation counts aggregate book chapters, which are cited slowly but for a long time. And its "issues" appear irregularly: a thematic volume appears when its editor delivers it, not on a monthly or quarterly clock, which is why Scopus coverage shows gaps in the 1960s and 2000s rather than an unbroken run. Researchers evaluating the series should therefore judge it as they would a respected book series — by the quality of its editors and contributors and the longevity of its volumes — and use journal-style rankings only as a rough secondary signal.

History and development

Karger, founded in Basel in 1890, built a substantial nutrition list during the twentieth century, and the World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics began at the end of the 1950s as its English-language review vehicle for the rapidly professionalising science of nutrition. The coverage pattern preserved by Scopus — 1959–1961, 1964–1966, 1968–2001, 2003–2005, 2007 to the present in SCImago-derived listings — traces a series that paused and resumed in its early years and then settled into near-continuous publication from the late 1960s onward. By volume 108 (2013), devoted to evidence-based research in pediatric nutrition, and volume 109, Nutrition and Growth (2014), the series was firmly organised around single-theme volumes edited from within the pediatric and clinical nutrition community. Volume 110, Nutritional Care of Preterm Infants: Scientific Basis and Practical Guidelines (2014), edited by Berthold Koletzko, brought together, in its publisher's description, "leading experts from all 5 continents" to set out the evidence for feeding very-low-birth-weight infants — a volume that became a standard clinical reference. Volume 111, Nutrition for the Primary Care Provider, edited by D. Bier with series editor B. Koletzko, organised its contents under nutrition for health, nutrition in disease states, and food policy, with chapters ranging from nutrient adequacy and energy balance to cancer prevention, nutritional management in HIV/AIDS, osteoporosis, liver disease and global food policy and sustainability. Volume 113 returned to pediatric nutrition in practice. The yearbook strand visible in Karger's catalogue — annual Nutrition and Growth yearbooks continuing to a 2026 volume, with contributions from Koletzko and an international paediatric endocrinology and nutrition authorship — shows the franchise still active in the mid-2020s.

Two long-run themes run through that history. The first is pediatrics: preterm and infant feeding, growth, and pediatric nutrition practice recur as volume topics across decades, reflecting the series editorship's base in Munich's children's hospital research community. The second is the translation of evidence into guidance: again and again the volumes are framed as scientific basis plus practical guidelines, written for clinicians who must act on incomplete evidence. A series that began as a general review of world nutrition has thus become, in practice, one of the places where the clinical nutrition community periodically consolidates what it knows.

Publisher: S. Karger AG

S. Karger AG is a Swiss, family-owned medical and scientific publisher headquartered in Basel, with a catalogue spanning clinical medicine, biomedical research and health sciences, including well-known nutrition journals such as the Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism. Karger is the publisher named by every authoritative source consulted for this profile: SCImago-derived listings give "S. Karger AG" and country Switzerland; OpenAlex gives host organisation "Karger Publishers" and country CH; and the series' own volumes are published from Basel, with front matter directing readers to Karger's website for the series. The older Journals World template record rendered the publisher as a bare number, "236 (Switzerland)"; the country was right but the name was missing, and the verified name is S. Karger AG. Karger sells the series primarily to institutions and specialists: volumes are priced as books, in hardback and electronic form, rather than as a personal subscription journal, which is consistent with its book-series nature.

Editorial leadership

Series-level editorial responsibility in recent decades is documented on the volumes themselves. Karger's front matter for volume 111 names "Series Editor: Koletzko, B. (Munich)", and the second edition of Pediatric Nutrition in Practice (volume 113, 2015) is edited by Berthold Koletzko and collaborators. Professor Berthold Koletzko, of the Dr. von Hauner Children's Hospital at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, is one of Europe's most prominent pediatric nutrition researchers, and his long association explains the series' pediatric centre of gravity. Individual volumes additionally carry their own editors — volume 110 was edited by Koletzko; volume 111 by D. Bier, with co-editors named in Karger publicity as D.H. Alpers, E. Vorster and M.J. Gibney in the series' surrounding material — and chapter authors are invited specialists rather than unsolicited submitters. Readers should note the practical consequence: this is not a venue to which a researcher sends an uninvited manuscript. Contributions are commissioned around a volume plan, so an author who wishes to write for the series needs to be known to, or approach, a volume editor working on a relevant theme; there is no open submission portal for the series on the publisher's site that could be verified during preparation of this profile, and no article processing charge for the series is published by Karger in the sources consulted — charges and honoraria, if any, are matters of the individual commissioning arrangement and are stated here as not publicly disclosed rather than invented.

Scope and contents

SCImago classifies the series under Food Science and Nutrition and Dietetics, and the volume contents bear that out while ranging wider. Across the volumes sampled for this profile, recurring subject clusters include:

• Infant, child and adolescent nutrition — preterm infant feeding, parenteral and enteral nutrition, growth assessment, nutrient requirements in childhood, and pediatric nutrition in everyday clinical practice.
• Clinical nutrition and diet therapy — nutritional care in gastrointestinal and liver disease, cancer, HIV/AIDS, osteoporosis, neurological disorders, anaemias of nutrient deficiency and eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa.
• Nutrients and metabolism — amino acids and proteins, lipids, micronutrients and vitamins, energy balance and body composition, and nutrient adequacy.
• Public health nutrition and food policy — undernutrition in the developing world, the changing global pattern of malnutrition, food policy and sustainability, food preparation, processing, labelling and safety, and the food industry's role in consumer health.
• Evidence method — how clinical nutrition practice should appraise and apply research evidence, the explicit theme of the volume on evidence-based research in pediatric nutrition.

The intended readership follows from those clusters: pediatricians and neonatologists, clinical dietitians, nutrition scientists, gastroenterologists and other clinicians who manage feeding as part of treatment, and public-health specialists concerned with malnutrition in both its under- and over-nutrition forms. A chapter in this series is a state-of-the-art review with recommendations, not a report of a single new experiment, and it is cited accordingly — as a synthesis to orient a clinic guideline, a thesis introduction or a teaching session.

Indexing

The series is covered by Scopus, which is the basis of its SCImago record and of the coverage history quoted above. OpenAlex indexes it comprehensively as a source in its own right: resolving either ISSN through OpenAlex leads to the single source record S2754680136, which at consultation counted 1,634 works and 24,487 citations for the series. That OpenAlex record also confirms, in structured form, the publisher (Karger Publishers), the country (CH), the homepage pattern Karger uses for its serials, and the book-series type. Because Karger is a biomedical publisher, the series' volumes are also the kind of content libraries discover through book catalogues and the publisher's own platform; a chapter-level search on Karger's site is often the fastest route to a specific topic.

Two negative findings should be recorded carefully. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals through its official search API, queried separately for ISSN 1662-3975 and for ISSN 0084-2230, returned zero results on both queries. That is the expected outcome for a priced book series and is reported as the result of those API queries; the series is a commercial, paywalled publication, not an open-access one. And Web of Science journal-style impact data for the series is not published in the sources consulted, so no Journal Impact Factor is claimed for it in this profile; any site quoting one for this title should be asked for its source and year.

Metrics, attributed and interpreted

SCImago-derived data (Scopus-based, as reproduced by Resurchify's SCImago-sourced listing) give the series an SJR of 0.218, an h-index of 46, a best quartile of Q3 across its categories Food Science (Q3) and Nutrition and Dietetics (Q3), an overall rank of 20,202, and a two-year impact score of 0.22, with 104 citing documents in the three years preceding 2024. A second Scopus-derived compilation (Researcher.Life) gives a CiteScore of 0.34 and an h-index of 33 on its own counting. The stored Journals World template record gave h-index 48 and a Q4 label; neither matches the SCImago-derived figures consulted here, and the Q3 best quartile and h-index 46 from SCImago are the values this profile reports, with their source named. OpenAlex, counting its much larger open corpus of books and chapters, reports 1,634 works, 24,487 citations, an h-index of 68, an i10-index of 513 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.02 — the last figure being low precisely because it averages across a huge back catalogue of older book chapters, most of which are no longer in their two-year citation window.

The spread between an h-index of 46 (Scopus/SCImago), 33 (a second Scopus compilation) and 68 (OpenAlex) is a clean illustration of why this series must never be summarised by a single unattributed number. Book chapters are cited in books, guidelines and theses that journal databases capture unevenly; each corpus therefore sees a different series. What all three sources agree on is the shape of the record: a large, decades-deep body of review material that continues to accumulate citations, with individual landmark volumes — the preterm-infant and pediatric-practice volumes in particular — doing most of the work. For a clinician, the practical metric is not the series average but whether the specific volume on their topic is the current edition; for a librarian, it is the continuing citation of the back list, which all three sources confirm.

How the series is sold and accessed

Karger markets the World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics as books. Each volume has its own ISBN, is sold in hardback and as an e-book, and is also reachable chapter by chapter through Karger's platform, where chapters carry DOIs in the 10.1159 range visible in the volume texts sampled. Institutional access is typically through a library's Karger e-book holdings or a print copy; individual clinicians more often meet the series through a guideline bibliography than through a personal subscription. No open-access edition of the series exists in the sources consulted, and the DOAJ queries described above returned no listing, so readers without institutional access should expect a paywall or a purchase price and should use interlibrary services accordingly. Pricing for individual volumes varies by volume and format and is set on Karger's book pages; it is not reproduced here because a single current price for the series as a whole does not exist and quoting one volume's price as the series price would mislead.

Distinguishing the series from its neighbours

Four confusions recur. First, the series is not the Annals of Nutrition and Metabolism, Karger's subscription journal in the same field, nor Nestlé Nutrition Institute Workshop Series, another Karger book series with a similar volume format; each has its own ISSNs. Second, it is not the journal Nutrition and Dietetics (the Australian dietitians' journal, published by Wiley) — the shared words "nutrition and dietetics" are generic to the field. Third, its chapters are not journal articles for tenure-counting purposes in systems that distinguish the two; they are commissioned book chapters in an indexed series, and authors should describe them accurately. Fourth, the two ISSNs belong to one series: a catalogue record showing only 0084-2230 (print) and another showing only 1662-3975 (electronic) describe the same publication, linked by ISSN-L 0084-2230.

Frequently asked questions

Is the World Review of Nutrition and Dietetics a journal? It is catalogued with ISSNs and indexed like one, but OpenAlex classifies it as a book series and its publication pattern — themed, edited, ISBN-bearing volumes — is that of a book series. Treat rankings as approximations.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 0084-2230 and electronic ISSN 1662-3975, per the series' own front matter; ISSN-L 0084-2230.

Who publishes it and where? S. Karger AG (Karger Publishers), Basel, Switzerland.

Can I submit a chapter? Chapters are commissioned by volume editors around a planned theme; no open submission route or published article processing charge could be verified from the publisher sources consulted.

What are its metrics? SCImago (Scopus-based): SJR 0.218, h-index 46, best quartile Q3 in Food Science and in Nutrition and Dietetics. OpenAlex: 1,634 works, 24,487 citations, h-index 68 on its corpus. Name the source when quoting.

Is it open access or in DOAJ? No listing was returned by DOAJ search-API queries for either ISSN, and the series is sold as priced books by Karger.

Sources and verification note

This profile rests on the live Journals World record (post 34039: title, slug world-review-of-nutrition-and-dietetics, stored ISSNs 1662-3975 and 0084-2230), the OpenAlex source record resolved from those ISSNs (S2754680136), the series' own Karger front matter (volume 111 frontispiece for the ISSN pair and series editorship; volume 113 chapter citations), Karger catalogue material for volumes 108–111 and the Nutrition and Growth yearbook line, SCImago-derived listings for categories, SJR, quartile and coverage, and DOAJ search-API queries for both ISSNs (zero results on both). The corrections to the stored template record are: publisher name S. Karger AG (stored as a bare number), best quartile Q3 per SCImago (stored as Q4), and h-index 46 per SCImago (stored as 48). Details that could not be verified — a current priced open-access option, a series-level submission portal — are stated above as not published or not publicly disclosed.