Journal of General Virology

Journal of General Virology is a not-for-profit peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Microbiology Society. The journal was established in 1967 and covers research into animal, insect and plants viruses, also fungal viruses, prokaryotic viruses, and TSE agents. Antiviral compounds and clinical aspects of virus infection are also covered.
As of 2026, Rachel Fearns is the current editor-in-chief, following Paul Duprex who served from 2020-2025. Mark Harris served as editor-in-chief 2015-2020.

WWW Official Site

Journal

Article types

Journal of General Virology publishes primary research articles, Reviews, Short Communications, Personal Views, and Editorials.
Since 2017 the journal has partnered with the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses to publish Open Access ICTV Virus Taxonomy Profiles which summarise chapters of the ICTV's 10th Report on Virus Taxonomy. All ICTV Virus Taxonomy Profiles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Metrics

The Microbiology Society journals are a signatory to DORA and use a range of Article-Level Metrics as well as a range of journal-level metrics to assess quality and impact. An Altmetric score and Dimensions citation data are available for all articles published by the Microbiology Society journals.

Abstracting and indexing

Journal of General Virology is indexed in Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, CAB Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts Service, Current Awareness in Biological Sciences, Current Contents– Life Sciences, Current Opinion series, EMBASE, MEDLINE/Index Medicus/PubMed, Russian Academy of Science, Science Citation Index, SciSearch, SCOPUS, and on Google Scholar.

Open access policy

Journal of General Virology is a hybrid title and allows authors to publish subscription articles free-of-charge. Authors can also publish Open Access articles under a Creative Commons Attribution license by either paying an article processing charge or fee-free as part of a Publish and Read model.