The American Journal of Gastroenterology (american-journal-of-gastroenterology)

The American Journal of Gastroenterology (american-journal-of-gastroenterology)

Journal positioning

The American Journal of Gastroenterology ("the Red Journal") is the flagship journal of the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG), publishing practice-relevant clinical research across luminal gastroenterology, hepatology, pancreaticobiliary disease, and endoscopy, together with ACG clinical guidelines and outcomes scholarship. It serves practicing gastroenterologists and hepatologists and prizes work that informs diagnosis, management, quality, and patient outcomes in real-world GI practice; mechanistic bench studies without a clinical anchor, and underpowered single-center descriptive series with no practice implication, are a weak fit. This skill is a fit / venue-selection / re-framing aid; it is not clinical or regulatory advice and does not replace the journal's current instructions for authors. Before submitting, re-check the live American Journal of Gastroenterology author instructions.

When to trigger

• The author names The American Journal of Gastroenterology for a clinical GI, hepatology, endoscopy, or outcomes study and wants a fit/framing check.
• A GI study must be re-framed around a clear practice-relevant diagnostic, therapeutic, or quality question for practicing clinicians.
• The author is choosing between the Red Journal, a basic GI-science venue, and a hepatology-specialty or general-medicine journal.
• The author needs the journal's reporting-guideline, registration, and desk-reject expectations for clinical GI research.

Scope & topic fit

• Clinical trials and comparative-effectiveness studies in luminal GI disease (IBD, IBS/functional GI, reflux, motility, GI bleeding).
• Endoscopy outcomes, quality metrics, colorectal-cancer screening/surveillance, and procedural comparative studies.
• Clinical hepatology and pancreaticobiliary disease with practice-relevant endpoints (not bench-only mechanism).
• Diagnostic, prognostic, and biomarker studies with clinically meaningful endpoints and an accepted reference standard.
• Health-services, quality-improvement, value-of-care, and epidemiologic GI studies; ACG guidelines and systematic reviews/meta-analyses on focused clinical questions.
• Patient-reported outcomes and management studies that change or clarify GI clinical decision making.

Method & evidence bar

• Studies must be adequately powered with prespecified, patient-centered primary outcomes; surrogate-only endpoints need strong justification.
• The applicable reporting guideline must be followed and its checklist supplied: CONSORT for trials, STROBE for observational studies, PRISMA for systematic reviews, STARD for diagnostic accuracy.
• Interventional trials require prospective registration; the registration number and protocol/statistical-analysis plan are expected.
• Observational and database studies must address confounding, selection, and missing data explicitly; causal language must match the design.
• Endoscopy/procedural and diagnostic studies should report operator/reader variability and an appropriate reference standard where relevant.
• Effect estimates should be reported with confidence intervals and absolute as well as relative measures; clinical (not just statistical) significance must be argued.

Structure & house style

• ACG/Wolters Kluwer format with a structured abstract and, where required, a "Study Highlights" / what-is-known/what-is-new summary; re-check current article types and limits on the live guide.
• The introduction frames a focused, practice-relevant clinical question; the discussion states the management or guideline implication plainly for practicing GI clinicians.
• Tables/figures follow journal statistical-reporting standards; a CONSORT/STROBE/PRISMA flow diagram is expected where applicable.
• Supplements carry the protocol, full statistical methods, and additional analyses.

Official-submission checklist