ISSN

2412-2785 (PRINT)
2519-7533 (ONLINE)

Focus and scope

The Journal of Insulin Resistance is a peer-reviewed, clinically oriented open access journal covering advances in disorders related to insulin resistance. Articles will focus on pathophysiology, prevention, management and advancing therapy for different patient populations with insulin resistance and related disorders, including obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, non-alcoholic steato-hepatitis, Alzheimer’s dementia, sexual dysfunction, amongst others.

The journal will feature original research with a broad biomedical approach from bench to bedside, including basic research and clinical case studies, as well as review articles and editorials. Content will be of interest to an academic and clinician-based audience i.e., medical practitioners, clinical educators, dietitians, nutritionists, nurse practitioners, pharmacists, and other health care professionals. Submissions in English (full article) will be considered for publication.

Historic data

AOSIS launched the Journal in 2015, following a unique conference that was held in Cape Town in 2015 ('The Old Mutual Health Convention') to discuss the global obesity epidemic and its co-morbidity of lifestyle diseases. The invitation to the conference stated: 'The world is facing a tsunami of lifestyle-related chronic diseases that will cost our global economy $47 trillion over the next twenty years. These diseases are eminently preventable and treatable, and yet currently, every year, they kill twice as many people around the world as infectious diseases do. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), in America, more than 1/3 of adults are obese as are approximately 12.5 million children'.

During the conference, the conventional nutrition guidelines were heavily criticised in that despite food producers and consumers’ adherence to guidelines, the failure to curb the escalating obesity and diabetes prevalence was apparent. These guidelines, promoting a 'high carbohydrate-low-fat' dietary approach, are based on the premise that the cause of obesity is an excessive intake of calories from too much food, and an inadequate expenditure of calories from too little exercise. High fat food, especially foods high in saturated fat, were considered to be the main culprit due to their high energy density and historical links to elevated cholesterol levels and cardiovascular disease prevalence. It was also proposed that the scientific evidence for these guidelines was fatally flawed and largely absent. The guidelines and what followed was tantamount to a large-scale population experiment, based on poor evidence, which failed with dire consequences. The alternative model to obesity was proposed to be the hormonal model, i.e., that a high carbohydrate diet causes chronically elevated insulin levels, leading to insulin resistance, which is driving obesity. It was also argued that the evidence that saturated fat in the diet is the cause of cardiovascular disease was flawed. The key metabolic 'fault' driving obesity was proposed to be insulin resistance, with an underlying genetic propensity in the majority of people. It became clear that the scientific field of 'insulin resistance', i.e., its pathophysiology, morbidity and management must be a key area for research, academic discourse, and education of health professionals. Although there are many journals focusing on nutrition, obesity, and endocrinology they are guided by the conventional nutrition and energy balance principles. It was concluded that a journal is much needed to focus on this new paradigm, the alternative hormonal model underlying obesity and insulin resistance. And so the Journal was established.

Publication frequency

The journal publishes at least one issue each year. Articles are published online when ready for publication and then printed in an end-of-year compilation. Additional issues may be published for special events (e.g. conferences) and when special themes are addressed.

Types of articles published

Read full details on the submissions guidelines page.

Open access

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access. Learn more about the journal copyright, licensing and publishing rights.

Review process

The journal has a double-blinded peer review process. Manuscripts are initially examined by editorial staff and are sent by the Editor-in-Chief to two expert independent reviewers, either directly or by a Section Editor. Any potential reviewers with declared conflicts of food or pharmaceutical industry affiliations will be assessed on their reviewing suitability. Conflicts that are deemed substantial will mean exclusion from the manuscript review process. Read our full peer review process.

Marketing

AOSIS has a number of ways in which we promote publications. Learn more here.

Membership

AOSIS is a member and/or subscribes to the standards and code of practices of several leading industry organisations. This includes the Directory of Open Access Journals, Ithenticate, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, CrossRef, Portico and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Learn more here.

All articles published in the journal are included in:

• Directory of Open Access Journals
• EBSCO Host
• GALE, CENGAGE Learning
• Google Scholar
• Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, Level 1

We are working closely with relevant indexing services to ensure that articles published in the journal will be available in their databases when appropriate.

The full text of the journal articles is deposited in the following archives to guarantee long-term preservation:

• AOSIS Library
• SA ePublications, Sabinet
• South African Government Libraries
• Portico

AOSIS is also a participant in the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) initiative. LOCKSS will enable any library to maintain their own archive of content from AOSIS and other publishers, with minimal technical effort and using cheaply available hardware. The URL to the LOCKSS Publisher Manifest for the journal is, https://insulinresistance.org/index.php/jir/gateway/lockss. Please inform us if you are using our manifest as we would like to add your name to the list above.

A journal's Impact Factor was originally designed in 1963 as a tool for libraries to compare journals, and identify the most popular ones to subscribe to. It was never intended to measure the quality of journals, and definitely not the quality of individual articles.

The Impact Factor is a journal-level measurement reflecting the yearly average number of citations of recent articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher Impact Factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. Therefore, the more often articles in the journal are cited, the higher its Impact Factor.

The Impact Factor is highly discipline-dependent due to the speed with which articles get cited in each field and the related citation practices. The percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication varies highly amongst disciplines. Accordingly, one cannot compare journals across disciplines based on their relative Impact Factors.

We provide several citation-based measurements for each of our journals, if available. We caution our authors, readers and researchers that they should assess the quality of the content of individual articles, and not judge the quality of articles by the reputation of the journal in which they are published.