About Emerging Microbes & Infections

Emerging Microbes & Infections

Overview

Emerging Microbes & Infections, usually abbreviated EMI, is an open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal based in Shanghai, China, and devoted to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. Launched in 2012, it publishes research on microbes and infections of increasing biological and clinical significance and pathogenic frequency. Its publisher, Taylor & Francis, describes it on its journal page as a peer-reviewed open access journal publishing research on emerging infections, and individual articles carry the imprint of Taylor & Francis Group on behalf of Shanghai Shangyixun Cultural Communication Co., Ltd, which anchors the title to its Shanghai origin. The journal's electronic ISSN is 2222-1751, the identifier under which indexing services record its coverage from 2012 onward. For a directory reader, EMI is best understood not as a general microbiology magazine but as a specialist research journal created for a particular problem: new pathogens, and old pathogens returning in new forms, generate large amounts of fast-moving information that existing specialty journals were not designed to carry in one integrated place.

That problem shapes everything about the journal. Its stated mission is to provide an integrated forum for the timely dissemination of information about microbes and infections, and it is explicitly committed to bridging the gap between scientific communities in developed and developing countries, where, as its mission statement notes, most emerging microbes and infections have occurred in recent years. It accepts original research articles, review articles, letters and commentaries, in English, for an international readership of microbiologists, clinicians, public health professionals and researchers working on drugs and vaccines.

Launch in 2012 and Development

Emerging Microbes & Infections began publishing in 2012, and its first volume appeared under article identifiers that already show the journal working at full speed on the questions of its founding year, including emerging virus diseases and the animal origins of new human infections. Indexing records give its coverage history as 2012 to the present, an unbroken run from that launch. The timing was not accidental in scientific terms. The journal was founded in the decade after the SARS outbreak of 2003 had demonstrated how quickly a previously unknown coronavirus could move from an animal reservoir into hospitals and international travel networks, and its editorial community reflects that history. An editorial published in the journal in 2022, marking work by its board members, records that Professor Kwok-Yung Yuen of the University of Hong Kong — recognised, with Professor Joseph Sriyal Malik Peiris, for discovering SARS-CoV-1 as the causative agent of the 2003 SARS outbreak and its zoonotic origin — had been a founding member of the EMI editorial board since 2012 and a current associate editor, and that Professor Peiris also joined the board.

The journal has since moved to its present home with Taylor & Francis. Articles from 2022 onward are published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, on behalf of Shanghai Shangyixun Cultural Communication Co., Ltd, under DOIs in the 10.1080/22221751 series built on the journal's ISSN. That arrangement — a Shanghai-based sponsoring company, an international commercial publisher, and an editorial board that includes leading Hong Kong and international figures in emerging infections — is the publishing form of the bridge the journal's mission describes.

Mission: Bridging Developed and Developing Countries

The most distinctive sentence in the journal's own description is its commitment to bridging scientific communities in developed and developing countries. EMI presents this not as a slogan but as a response to geography: emerging infections have disproportionately occurred in developing countries in recent years, while much of the established publishing infrastructure for microbiology and infectious diseases has historically sat elsewhere. A journal edited from Shanghai, publishing in English and open access, is positioned between those two realities. Researchers working where an outbreak actually occurs can publish in the same venue, under the same peer review, as researchers in long-established institutes elsewhere, and readers anywhere can read the result without a subscription barrier.

Open access is therefore part of the mission rather than a separate business detail. Because the journal is freely available to read, a clinician, surveillance officer or laboratory scientist who needs a paper during an unfolding event does not have to route the request through a subscribing library. The journal's listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals confirms its open-access status in an independent directory, alongside its indexing in Scopus, PubMed and Embase in journal directory records.

Scope and Subject Coverage

Taylor & Francis states the journal's scope as a defined list of topics of critical biological and clinical value. Emerging Microbes & Infections covers epidemic surveillance; clinical manifestation; diagnosis and management; cellular and molecular pathogenesis; innate and acquired immune responses between emerging microbes and their hosts; drug discovery; and vaccine development research. Read as a whole, that list follows an outbreak from first detection to countermeasure: surveillance notices that something new is circulating, clinical papers describe what it does to patients, diagnostic and management work turns that knowledge into practice, pathogenesis and immunology explain the mechanism, and drug and vaccine research responds to it.

Subject categorisations in Scopus-based journal rankings place the title across drug discovery, epidemiology, immunology, infectious diseases, microbiology, parasitology and virology, which matches the publisher's list and explains the journal's breadth. A paper on a parasite, a virus or a bacterial pathogen can all sit within the same title provided the infection is emerging or re-emerging in significance or frequency. That qualifying idea — emergence — is the real scope boundary. Routine work on a well-characterised organism with no new clinical or epidemiological significance belongs in a general microbiology journal; work showing a pathogen spreading, changing, crossing species or resisting treatment is the material EMI was created to publish.

Article Types and Peer Review

The journal accepts four main forms: original research articles, review articles, letters and commentaries. Original research carries new data from the laboratory, the clinic or the field. Reviews synthesise what is known about a pathogen or a problem, a format that matters greatly in emerging infections, where the literature on a new agent can be scattered across outbreak reports and preprints. Letters allow short, rapid communications, and commentaries let specialists argue about interpretation and policy while an event is still developing. Taylor & Francis states that the journal operates a single-anonymized peer review policy, in which reviewers know the authors' identities but reviewers remain anonymous to authors. The journal's editorial office can be contacted at the address given on its Taylor & Francis page for submission and editorial enquiries.

Peer review in a journal of this kind carries a particular tension, which its article mix is designed to manage. Speed matters, because findings about a spreading pathogen lose value if they appear months late; rigour matters just as much, because public health decisions may be taken on the strength of published claims. Short formats, an international board with direct outbreak experience, and open-access publication after acceptance are the structural answers the journal offers to that tension.

Publisher and Open-Access Model

Emerging Microbes & Infections is published by Taylor & Francis, with articles appearing on the Taylor & Francis Online platform under the journal code by which the publisher organises the title. As noted above, the copyright and imprint lines on its articles record publication on behalf of Shanghai Shangyixun Cultural Communication Co., Ltd, preserving the journal's Shanghai identity inside an international publishing operation. Earlier material from the journal's first years is still part of the same bibliographic record: libraries and indexes treat the title as one continuous journal from 2012, identified by eISSN 2222-1751, regardless of the platform on which a given article is read.

For authors, the open-access model means accepted work is available to all readers immediately, which in this field includes the public health agencies, hospital teams and laboratories most likely to act on it. For readers, it means the journal can be used as a working reference during an outbreak without institutional access. Those practical consequences explain why so many emerging-infection titles founded in the same period chose the same model.

Sister Journal: EMI — Animal and Environment

Taylor & Francis presents Emerging Microbes & Infections as the sister journal of EMI: Animal & Environment. The sister title publishes research on emerging pathogenic organisms from animals or the environment which have inter- and intra-species transmission potential, with a specific focus on those influenced by the change of environment. The pairing is scientifically logical. Many emerging human infections begin as animal or environmental organisms that cross into people, so a journal family that separates, and connects, the human clinical literature and the animal-environment literature mirrors the One Health structure of the field itself. The main journal keeps its focus on infections of direct biological and clinical significance to human medicine, while the sister title gives the upstream, ecological side of emergence its own dedicated venue under the same EMI name.

Indexing and Discoverability

Directory and citation records list Emerging Microbes & Infections as indexed in Scopus, with coverage from 2012, in PubMed, in Embase and in the Directory of Open Access Journals, and journal search services also record its presence in Web of Science listings. In Scopus-based SCImago categorisation it is placed in the first quartile across its subject categories, including microbiology, virology, immunology, infectious diseases, epidemiology, parasitology and drug discovery — a categorisation fact about how the title is classified, which readers should distinguish from any single year's citation metric, since such metrics change annually and this profile does not rest its account on them.

Indexing matters for this journal in a specific way. Emerging-infection research is searched, not browsed: during an outbreak, a researcher queries PubMed or Scopus for a pathogen name and reads whatever the databases return. A journal that is present in those databases, with consistent ISSN and DOI metadata, is part of that emergency literature; a journal outside them effectively does not exist for that reader at that moment. EMI's unbroken indexing coverage since 2012 is therefore a substantive part of its record, not a bibliographic footnote.

Editorial Community and Shanghai Base

The journal is based in Shanghai, one of China's principal centres for biomedical research, with major institutes working on pathogens, vaccines and public health. Its editorial community, as its own editorials record, extends well beyond the city: Professor Kwok-Yung Yuen, a founding board member from 2012 and an associate editor, and Professor Joseph Sriyal Malik Peiris, both of the University of Hong Kong, received the 2021 Future Science Prize in Life Science for their SARS-CoV-1 discoveries, work the journal's editorial office marked as directly relevant to combating COVID-19 and emerging infectious diseases. An editorial office byline in that same period lists Shan Lu and Yu-mei Wen writing for the EMI editorial office, illustrating the journal's working structure of Shanghai-based editorial staff alongside an international board of practising specialists.

That structure — local editorial office, international board — is common to the strongest Chinese-founded English-language journals of its generation, and it serves the stated mission. Submissions and intelligence about new infections arrive from the regions where emergence happens; the board supplies refereeing depth across virology, bacteriology, parasitology and immunology; and the publisher supplies global distribution.

Audience and Readership

The journal addresses microbiologists, clinicians treating infectious diseases, epidemiologists and public health professionals, immunologists, and researchers developing drugs and vaccines, together with the policy-facing readers who follow those literatures during major outbreaks. Its reviews and commentaries also serve readers entering a fast-moving topic — for example, a clinician confronting a pathogen newly arrived in their region — who need a peer-reviewed synthesis rather than a stream of individual reports. Because the journal is open access and in English, that audience is genuinely global, and its commitment to developing-country scientific communities means authorship as well as readership is expected from the places where emerging infections are most often first observed.

Place in Chinese Scientific Publishing

Emerging Microbes & Infections is one of the clearest examples of a Chinese-founded journal built from the start for an international, English-language, open-access readership rather than converted later from a domestic title. Founded in Shanghai in 2012, published today by Taylor & Francis on behalf of its Shanghai sponsoring company, indexed continuously since its first year and organised around a mission of bridging developed and developing country research communities, it occupies a defined niche: the integrated, rapid, freely readable record of emerging and re-emerging infection research. Researchers considering it as a submission venue should check the current aims and scope and author instructions on its Taylor & Francis page; readers meeting it for the first time can rely on the facts in this profile — its 2012 launch, its Shanghai base, its eISSN 2222-1751, its seven stated topic areas and its four article types — as a verified starting point.