Are letters to the Editor Published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease Undervalued?

Letters to the editor (LTEs) play small, but sometimes important, functions, in biomedicine, including the neurosciences. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (JAD), a prominent and solidly ranked (Q2 on SJR, #43) journal dedicated exclusively to this neurological disease, publishes LTEs for free. However, there are three limitations to JAD LTEs: they are limited exclusively to an HTML format, no DOI is assigned to them, and they are not indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, or PubMed. This paper argues that this three-pronged limitation reduces their visibility, and in doing so, undervalues them. This may be perceived as unfair to the authors of JAD LTEs. To support this supposition, it is noted that only one of the seven LTEs published in JAD in 2023 and 2024 is represented on Google Scholar, amplifying their lack of visibility. While JAD represents one of the few neuroscience journals dedicated exclusively to research related to Alzheimer’s disease (AD), indexing its LTEs and making them more visible to the AD community would benefit both the journal and the AD/neuroscience community. A suggestion was made to JAD in October 2024 to index all of its LTEs.