''Acupuncture in Medicine'' is a bi-monthly peer-reviewed medical journal covering aspects of

acupuncture Acupuncture is a form of alternative medicine and a component of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in which thin needles are inserted into the body. Acupuncture is a pseudoscience; the theories and practices of TCM are not based on scientif ...

and related techniques. The journal was established in 1982 by the British Medical Acupuncture Society, but was published by the BMJ Group on behalf of the Society from 2008 to 2018 and

SAGE Publishing SAGE Publishing, formerly SAGE Publications, is an American independent publishing company founded in 1965 in New York by Sara Miller McCune and now based in Newbury Park, California. It publishes more than 1,000 journals, more than 800 books ...

from 2019. The current

editor-in-chief An editor-in-chief (EIC), also known as lead editor or chief editor, is a publication's editorial leader who has final responsibility for its operations and policies. The highest-ranking editor of a publication may also be titled editor, managing ...

is David Coggin-Carr (

University of Vermont The University of Vermont (UVM), officially the University of Vermont and State Agricultural College, is a public land-grant research university in Burlington, Vermont. It was founded in 1791 and is among the oldest universities in the United ...

). In an opinion piece for ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also r ...

'' on journals about

pseudoscience Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or unfalsifiable clai ...

published by reputable publishers,

Steven Salzberg Steven Lloyd Salzberg (born 1960) is an American computational biologist and computer scientist who is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, where he is als ...

listed this journal, alongside '' Journal of Acupuncture and Meridian Studies'' (published by

Elsevier Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as '' The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', ...

) and ''

Chinese Medicine Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an alternative medical practice drawn from traditional medicine in China. It has been described as "fraught with pseudoscience", with the majority of its treatments having no logical mechanism of action ...

'' (published by

BioMed Central BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open ...

), as examples of "fake medical journals"; his critique was repeated in an article written for ''

Monthly Index of Medical Specialities The ''Monthly Index of Medical Specialities'' or ''MIMS'' is a pharmaceutical prescribing reference guide published in the United Kingdom since 1959 by Haymarket Media Group. MIMS is also published internationally by various organisations, incl ...

'' exploring whether acupuncture was a medical sham or genuine treatment. When the BMJ Group started to publish the journal in 2008,

David Colquhoun David Colquhoun (born 19 July 1936) is a British pharmacologist at University College London (UCL). He has contributed to the general theory of receptor and synaptic mechanisms, and in particular the theory and practice of single ion channel ...

criticized the group for endorsing acupuncture "at a time when it is emerging that the evidence for any specific effect is very thin indeed." While he gave credit to BMJ Group and ''Acupuncture in Medicine'' for not espousing "the mumbo-jumbo about ' meridians' and ' Qi'", he also noted: "like all journals devoted to alternative medicine 'Acupuncture in Medicine''suffers from a fatal conflict of interest. If this journal were ever to conclude that acupuncture is a placebo, it would destroy the journal and the livelihoods of many of the people who write for it."

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in

CINAHL CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature) is an index of English-language and selected other-language journal articles about nursing, allied health, biomedicine and healthcare. Ella Crandall, Mildred Grandbois, and Molli ...

Current Contents ''Current Contents'' is a rapid alerting service database from Clarivate Analytics, formerly the Institute for Scientific Information and Thomson Reuters. It is published online and in several different printed subject sections. History ''Cur ...

/Clinical Medicine, Embase,

Index Medicus ''Index Medicus'' (''IM'') is a curated subset of MEDLINE, which is a bibliographic database of life science and biomedical science information, principally scientific journal articles. From 1879 to 2004, ''Index Medicus'' was a comprehensive ...

MEDLINE MEDLINE (Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online, or MEDLARS Online) is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medic ...

PubMed PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain t ...

, Science Citation Index Expanded, and

Scopus Scopus is Elsevier's abstract and citation database launched in 2004. Scopus covers nearly 36,377 titles (22,794 active titles and 13,583 inactive titles) from approximately 11,678 publishers, of which 34,346 are peer-reviewed journals in top-l ...

. According to the ''

Journal Citation Reports ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collec ...

'', the journal has a 2020

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as ...

of 2.267, ranking 17th of out 29 in the category "Integrative & Complementary Medicine".

References

External links

* Acupuncture BMJ Group academic journals Alternative and traditional medicine journals Publications established in 1982 Bimonthly journals English-language journals {{medical-journal-stub