Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research

• 1. Introduction

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  Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research has been the flagship publication for scientific inquiry into alcohol abuse and its treatment since 1977. For nearly five decades, researchers around the world have turned to its pages to share findings on one of humanity's most persistent public health challenges. What makes a journal like this tick? Who backs it, who reads it, and how does it measure up against its peers? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Origins and Identity

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  The journal was established in 1977 under the name Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. That original name held for more than four decades, becoming a recognized fixture in scientific literature. In 2023, the publication adopted its current name, Alcohol: Clinical and Experimental Research, a shift that updated how the journal presents itself to the research community. The change in name did not alter its core purpose: covering research on alcohol abuse and the ways it can be treated.

• 3. The Institutions Behind It

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  Wiley-Blackwell handles the publishing duties for the journal. Two international societies stand behind it as the organizations on whose behalf it is published. The first is the Research Society on Alcoholism. The second is the International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism. This arrangement, where a commercial publisher partners with specialist scientific societies, is a common structure in academic publishing. It ties the journal's editorial direction to communities of researchers who work directly in the field.

• 4. Where Researchers Find It

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  The journal is abstracted and indexed across a wide range of databases, which determines how easily other researchers can discover and cite its articles. That list includes Index Medicus, MEDLINE, and PubMed, the triad that forms the backbone of medical literature searching. It also appears in Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, EMBASE, Scopus, the Science Citation Index, the Neuroscience Citation Index, and Psychological Abstracts/PsycINFO, among others. Coverage in PsycINFO is notable because it signals that the journal is tracked not only by biomedical researchers but also by those working in psychology and behavioral science. CAB Abstracts, CAB HEALTH, and CABDirect extend its reach further into applied life sciences. Academic Search and Current Contents round out the list, placing the journal within reach of broader scholarly audiences.

• 5. Standing in the Field

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  According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal recorded a 2020 impact factor of 3.455. That number placed it 12th out of 21 journals in the category labeled "Substance Abuse." Impact factor is a measure of how frequently articles in a journal are cited on average over a two-year window, and a ranking of 12th out of 21 puts the journal in roughly the middle of its peer group. For a field as specialized as substance abuse research, sitting in the upper half of a defined ranking category reflects a stable position in the scientific conversation around alcohol and its effects.