Yearbook of Oncology

About Yearbook of Oncology

Yearbook of Oncology — Journal Profile

Yearbook of Oncology (print ISSN 1040-1741) is an annual review publication in clinical oncology, issued within the long-running Year Book family of medical annuals and published by Elsevier, whose imprint history for the series runs through Mosby. It is not a conventional primary-research journal that solicits original trial reports month by month. Its function is different and, for busy clinicians, arguably more practical: each annual volume surveys the oncology literature of the preceding year, selects the papers its editors judge most consequential, re-presents them in abstract form, and surrounds them with expert commentary that explains what changed, what did not, and how a practising oncologist should respond. The Journals World record for the title lists Elsevier BV as publisher, the United States as its country base, and an h-index of 50, a figure consistent with a series whose individual commentaries and abstracts have been cited in the oncology literature for decades.

This profile explains what kind of publication the Yearbook of Oncology actually is, how its annual survey model works, which clinical areas its volumes cover, how its editorial selection process shapes its value, what its bibliometric footprint does and does not show, and how a reader, librarian, trainee or researcher should use it well. It also records the limits of the public evidence: because the Year Book model belongs to an earlier era of medical publishing, some operational details that modern journals publish routinely — current article processing charges, a live online submission portal, a present-day editorial board page — are not publicly disclosed for this title, and this profile says so plainly rather than filling the gaps with guesses.

At a Glance

What Kind of Publication Is This?

The single most important thing to understand about the Yearbook of Oncology is its genre. Twentieth-century medicine produced a distinctive publishing form — the year book — in which a specialty's scattered journal literature was gathered once a year into one bound synthesis. The Year Book family applied that model across many specialties, and oncology, one of the fastest-moving fields in medicine, was a natural candidate. A clinician subscribing to the annual volume received, in effect, a curated map of the previous twelve months: the trials that changed practice, the diagnostic studies that refined staging, the supportive-care findings that made treatment more tolerable, each compressed into an abstract and each followed by a commentary written by a specialist who could place the finding in context.

Elsevier's own description of the 2012 volume states the method plainly in paraphrase: the volume presents abstracts of the articles that reported the year's breakthrough developments in oncology, selected from a very large pool of journals worldwide — more than five hundred titles — with expert commentaries evaluating each article's clinical importance and its application to practice, and the volume appeared annually, timed in November. That combination — breadth of surveillance, selectivity, and signed expert interpretation — is the publication's identity. It should therefore be evaluated as a secondary, interpretive literature: a guide to primary research rather than a source of primary research itself.

This distinction matters for citation practice. When a researcher cites the Yearbook of Oncology, they are usually citing either a commentary's interpretation or using the volume as a finding aid that led them to the original paper. Modern evidence-synthesis tools — systematic reviews, meta-analyses, living guidelines — have taken over part of the year book's historical role, but they have not wholly replaced its pedagogical one: a trainee who reads a well-edited annual volume learns not only what the year's key results were, but how experienced clinicians argued about them at the time.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The topic architecture of the documented volumes maps closely onto the structure of clinical oncology itself. Elsevier's listing for the 2012 volume names supportive care, breast cancer, gynaecologic cancers, genitourinary cancers, haematologic malignancies, thoracic cancer, gastrointestinal cancer and cancer biology as its organising topics. The Journals World record's subject analysis of the wider series adds the granular emphases that recur across volumes: breast cancer treatment studies; endometrial and cervical cancer treatments; ovarian cancer diagnosis and treatment; lung cancer diagnosis and treatment, including work on lung cancer mutations; acute lymphoblastic leukaemia research; and acute myeloid leukaemia research. Taken together, these paint a consistent picture — a series weighted toward the common solid tumours and the major leukaemias, organised by disease site, and concerned above all with treatment: systemic therapy, its sequencing, its toxicities and the supportive care that makes it deliverable.

Three features of that coverage deserve emphasis. First, the inclusion of supportive care as a first-class section, rather than an afterthought, reflects the series' clinical orientation: antiemetic therapy, pain control, infection prophylaxis and quality-of-life research were treated as practice-changing material, not footnotes. Second, the presence of a cancer biology section signals that the editors did not confine themselves to bedside trials; translational findings with plausible clinical futures were abstracted alongside phase III results. Third, the gynaecologic coverage — endometrial, cervical and ovarian disease all named separately in the record's analysis — is unusually complete for a general oncology annual, and it makes the volumes a useful historical source for how gynaecologic oncology practice evolved year by year.

Equally informative is what the series does not attempt. It is not a venue for case reports, surgical technique videos, nursing research or health-services studies in their own right, except where such work bears directly on the clinical questions its sections pose. Authors looking for a submission destination should note that the year book model does not rest on unsolicited manuscripts in the ordinary journal sense: its content is commissioned and selected by editors from the already-published literature, with commentaries written by invited experts.

Editorial Model and the Commentary Tradition

The editorial engine of a year book is selection plus voice. Selection, because no annual volume can hold a year's oncology output — the field publishes tens of thousands of papers annually — so the editors' judgement about which few hundred items deserved abstraction is itself the product. Voice, because the commentary following each abstract is where the volume earns its keep: a good commentary states whether the study should change practice now, should change it only for a subgroup, or should be read as hypothesis-generating; it notes the flaws the abstract format hides; and it tells the reader what trial would settle the question.

The documented editorship of the early-2010s volumes illustrates the calibre the series drew on. The 2011 and 2012 volumes are associated with Robert J. Arceci, a paediatric oncologist of Johns Hopkins standing, as editor — a choice that also explains the attention the series pays to haematologic malignancy and to the interface between adult and paediatric oncology. Year Book editorships in this publishing family were typically held by senior academic clinicians supported by section editors for each topic area, and the volumes' organisation — disease-site sections, each with its own commentary voice — follows that pattern.

For the historian of medicine, this commentary tradition is the series' most durable contribution. Trial results are superseded; the record of how thoughtful clinicians received them is not. A volume from a given year preserves, in one place, the profession's contemporaneous sense of which advances were real — CAR T-cell therapy's precursors, the arrival of targeted agents for lung cancer mutations, the repositioning of ovarian cancer maintenance therapy — and which enthusiasms faded. Used that way, the Yearbook of Oncology is a primary source for the history of oncology as much as a secondary source for its science.

Publication Pattern and Availability

The series' rhythm was annual, with volumes identified by year — the Year Book of Oncology 2011, the Year Book of Oncology 2012 (ISBN 9780323088855) and their predecessors — each summarising the literature of the year it names or the year preceding publication, and released, per the publisher's description, in November. The print ISSN 1040-1741 is the series' stable bibliographic identifier across those volumes, and library catalogues record the title under both spacings, Yearbook and Year Book, a trivial orthographic variant that cataloguers and searchers should nonetheless keep in mind: database searches under one spacing can miss records filed under the other.

Prospective readers should approach availability realistically. The best-documented annual editions belong to the period when the Year Book programme was at full strength, and the early 2010s volumes are the most completely described in publisher listings. Whether any given later year saw a volume, and in what format, is a question to settle in a library catalogue or the publisher's shop at the time of need rather than from this profile, since a current, continuously maintained journal homepage for the title is not publicly disclosed. Surviving volumes circulate widely in medical libraries and the second-hand market, and individual abstracts and commentaries are indexed in the major biomedical databases under the series ISSN, which is the practical route most researchers will take to them today.

Metrics and Bibliometric Footprint

The Journals World record reports an h-index of 50 for the series, alongside OpenAlex-derived counts of indexed works and citations. An h-index of that size for an annual abstract-and-commentary publication is striking and worth interpreting correctly. It does not mean the year book competed with primary journals such as the Journal of Clinical Oncology on their own ground. It means that, over a long run of volumes, at least fifty items published under the series title — overwhelmingly commentaries and editor-selected abstracts that became standard citations for the findings they discussed — were each cited at least fifty times. Commentary citations accumulate because later authors cite the commentary as a convenient, expert-endorsed pointer to a body of work, and because some commentaries themselves became reference points in controversies of their day.

Two cautions follow. First, series-level metrics aggregate decades of volumes; they describe the archive, not a current editorial operation, and should never be compared directly with the two-year impact factors of active primary journals. Second, the absence of a Journal Citation Reports impact factor story for this title in the sources consulted is itself informative: annual review books of this type sit partly outside the impact-factor economy, being catalogued as serials but consumed as books. Libraries historically bought them on standing order, and their value was use at the point of care and in teaching — a value citation counts capture only partially.

Who Should Use It, and How

Trainees and students gain the most structured benefit. Reading a single annual volume end to end delivers a year's oncology as its contemporaries understood it, section by section, with the reasoning made explicit — an efficient antidote to the fragmentary impression left by headline trial coverage. Practising clinicians historically used the volumes as a catch-up instrument after time away from the literature, and the commentary format remains well suited to that purpose for the years the archive covers. Researchers preparing introductions or historical sections will find the volumes useful for dating practice changes precisely: when a therapy moved from promising to standard is often visible in the shift of commentary tone between consecutive volumes. Librarians and cataloguers should note the title-spacing variant and the single print ISSN under which the run is filed.

Equally, users should know the limits. No annual volume, however well edited, substitutes for current guidelines: oncology practice in breast, lung, gynaecologic, genitourinary, gastrointestinal and haematologic disease has changed profoundly since the best-documented volumes appeared, through immunotherapy, targeted agents, antibody-drug conjugates and molecular stratification that those volumes predate. The correct use of the Yearbook of Oncology today is therefore retrospective and interpretive — understanding how the field arrived at its present positions — rather than as a guide to what to prescribe this week.

Identity Notes and Verification

The record under profile carries the title as one word, Yearbook of Oncology, while the publisher's book listings style it Year Book of Oncology; both refer to the same serial, ISSN 1040-1741, and this profile treats them as one publication. The publisher attribution also deserves a clarifying note: Elsevier BV in the Journals World record and the Mosby name associated with the Year Book programme are not competing claims — Mosby's year book line passed within the Elsevier group, and volumes of the documented period were sold through Elsevier's channels. No second live Journals World record for this ISSN or title was found in the duplicate search carried out for this profile, and no online ISSN separate from the print ISSN is recorded in the sources consulted; an e-ISSN is therefore stated here as not publicly disclosed rather than guessed.

Details a modern journal profile would normally state — article processing charges, acceptance rates, a current editor-in-chief, submission guidelines — do not apply to this publishing model in their usual form and are not publicly disclosed for the title. Their absence from this profile is deliberate: the no-fabrication standard applied throughout Journals World depth profiles requires that unverifiable operational claims be left out, and for a curated annual, the honest description is the one given above — editors select, experts comment, and readers should verify the current availability of any specific year's volume in a catalogue before relying on it.

The Year Book Idea in Historical Perspective

To place the series fairly, it helps to recall the information problem it solved. For much of the twentieth century a specialist's literature arrived as printed journals, weeks or months after acceptance, with no search engine, no alerts and no abstracts database at the desk. A trusted annual that read everything, chose carefully and explained the choices was not a luxury; it was infrastructure. The Year Book programme, of which this oncology annual formed part, was one of the most successful answers to that problem, and its volumes trained generations of clinicians to expect two things from their reading: that selection would be done by people whose judgement they could inspect, and that interpretation would be signed rather than anonymous. Digital publishing dissolved the scarcity that made the model necessary — surveillance is now automated and commentary is continuous — but the expectations the year books set still shape what readers ask of review literature, alert services and journal clubs today. The Yearbook of Oncology's archive is therefore worth keeping in catalogues and in citation databases in its own right: it is both a tool for reconstructing the evidence base of past practice and a record of the profession thinking, in public, about its own progress, one year at a time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Yearbook of Oncology a peer-reviewed research journal? It is an editorially curated annual review serial. Its abstracts reproduce peer-reviewed primary literature and its commentaries are written by invited experts, but it does not operate as a conventional submission-and-refereeing journal for original research manuscripts.

What is its ISSN and abbreviation? Print ISSN 1040-1741; ISO 4 abbreviation Yearb. Oncol.

Which cancers does it cover? The documented volumes organise coverage around breast, gynaecologic (including endometrial, cervical and ovarian), genitourinary, thoracic (including lung), gastrointestinal cancers and haematologic malignancies, plus supportive care and cancer biology.

Can I submit a manuscript? The year book model is based on editorial selection from published literature and commissioned commentary, not on an open submission portal; no current submission route for this title is publicly disclosed.

How should I cite it? Cite the specific annual volume, year and page, and where you rely on a finding, trace and cite the original primary paper the abstract discusses as well.

Sources and Basis of This Profile

This profile is based on the Journals World record for the title (publisher, country, ISSN, h-index and subject analysis as shown on that record), on Elsevier's publisher listing for the Year Book of Oncology 2012 volume (selection method, topic list, annual November timing), on bibliographic abbreviation and ISSN listings for the title, and on the documented editorship of the 2011–2012 volumes. Facts that could not be verified from official or bibliographic sources — including any current editorial office, charges or later-volume schedule — are identified in the text as not publicly disclosed.