Acta Clinica Croatica

About Acta Clinica Croatica

Overview

Acta Clinica Croatica (Acta Clin. Croat.) is an internationally peer-reviewed general medical journal published by the Sestre Milosrdnice University Hospital Center and its Institute for Clinical Medical Research in Zagreb, Croatia. Published continuously since 1962, it is one of the oldest continuously running biomedical periodicals in Croatia and serves as the flagship scholarly journal of one of the country's largest university hospital centres.

The journal is open to physicians and scientists from across biomedicine and healthcare, publishing original scientific papers, professional papers, case reports, review articles, and letters to the editor. Its international editorial board comprises Croatian and international experts, and manuscripts undergo double-anonymized peer review by both national and international reviewers. The journal appears quarterly (four issues per year) and is published in English, with Croatian summaries.

Acta Clinica Croatica is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science), Scopus, and MEDLINE/PubMed, and is archived in Croatia's national open-access journal portal Hrčak. It is published open access under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, and third-party directories classify it as diamond open access (free for readers and free for authors).

This profile covers the journal's history and lineage, aims and scope, editorial leadership, peer-review arrangements, indexing, impact metrics (with full attribution, since aggregator figures differ), open-access policy, publication ethics, submission guidance, and frequently asked questions.

History and Title Lineage

The journal's publishing history, as recorded by the Croatian national portal Hrčak and the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) catalog, has two commonly cited start points. Hrčak states that Acta Clinica Croatica "has been published continuously since 1962," bringing original scientific papers, professional papers, case reports, and review articles to readers for more than six decades. The NLM catalog records a publication start year of 1991 under the current title, noting that the journal continues Anali Kliničke bolnice "Dr M. Stojanović" (ISSN 0301-2255), the annals of the Dr M. Stojanović Clinical Hospital — the predecessor institution of today's Sestre Milosrdnice University Hospital Center.

This dual dating reflects a common pattern in hospital-based journals: the scholarly enterprise is older than the current title. The NLM record also documents the publisher's evolution, with the imprint shifting in September 1995 to the Sestre Milosrdnice University Hospital and its Institute for Clinical Medical Research. A supplement series, Acta Clinica Croatica. Suplement, accompanies some issues.

The journal's persistence through the political and institutional upheavals of the 1990s in Croatia — it continued publishing through the Homeland War years — is a point of institutional pride noted in anniversary retrospectives. Few hospital-based journals in Southeast Europe can claim an unbroken run of comparable length.

Identifiers: print ISSN 0353-9466, online ISSN 1333-9451 (ISSN-L 0353-9466), CODEN ACLCED, NLM ID 9425483. The electronic edition is dated from volume 39, no. 1 (March 2000) in the ISSN Portal record.

Aims and Scope

Acta Clinica Croatica describes itself as "an internationally peer reviewed general medical journal open to physicians and scientists from the field of biomedicine." Its scope is deliberately general-clinical rather than subspecialty: Hrčak classifies it under the scientific disciplines of Clinical Medical Sciences and Biomedicine and Healthcare (UDC 61).

Article types published include:

• Original scientific papers — primary clinical and biomedical research;
• Professional papers — practice-oriented contributions;
• Case reports — instructive single or small-series clinical cases;
• Review articles — syntheses of clinical topics;
• Letters to the editor — commentary and correspondence.

The journal's language is English (with earlier decades carrying Serbo-Croatian text and bilingual summaries; since September 1995 the text has been chiefly English). This bilingual heritage is visible in the NLM cataloguing notes and reflects the journal's transition from a domestic hospital bulletin to an internationally indexed periodical.

Editorial Leadership and Governance

The journal is published by the Sestre Milosrdnice University Hospital Center and the Institute for Clinical Medical Research, Vinogradska cesta 29, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia. The editorial office contact is acta@kbcsm.hr (tel. +385 1 3787 173).

Hrčak lists Prof. Mirna Šitum as Editor-in-Chief. The journal's site states that "the international Editorial Board of the journal consists of renowned Croatian and international experts." Readers should verify the current masthead on the journal's official website (actaclinica.kbcsm.hr) before submitting, as editorships rotate.

Manuscripts are submitted through the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform at the Croatian national installation. The journal provides published guidelines for authors and guidelines for reviewers, plus an impressum, all linked from its Hrčak and official-site pages — a transparency practice that signals editorial seriousness.

Peer-Review Process

Peer review at Acta Clinica Croatica is described on Hrčak as "equally national and international peer review, scientific and professional papers, double anonymized, double." In practice this means:

• Manuscripts are evaluated by reviewers drawn in balanced proportions from Croatian and international experts;
• Review is double-anonymized (both author and reviewer identities concealed);
• Both scientific (research) and professional (practice) papers go through the same review track.

The journal's published guidelines for reviewers set out expectations for constructive, confidential, and timely assessment. Authors receive editorial decisions based on these independent evaluations; the editor-in-chief retains final decision authority.

Indexing and Abstracting

Acta Clinica Croatica is indexed in:

• Science Citation Index Expanded (Web of Science Core Collection);
• Scopus (coverage reported 1993–2025 by JournalSearches);
• MEDLINE / PubMed — the NLM catalog records MEDLINE indexing from volume 47, no. 1 (March 2008) through volume 64, no. 2 (June 2025). Note: the NLM's current cataloguing entry marks the title as "not currently indexed for MEDLINE" — a status flag that can reflect cataloguing transitions; authors concerned about PubMed visibility should check the live NLM catalog and recent PubMed records;
• Embase (per JournalSearches);
• DOAJ (per JournalSearches);
• Hrčak — Croatia's national portal for open-access scientific journals (added 30 May 2007);
• SafetyLit and other subject databases for relevant content.

Impact Metrics and Rankings

All figures below are third-party aggregator values and are attributed; the journal's current Clarivate Journal Impact Factor should be verified in the Journal Citation Reports:

• Journal Impact Factor: 0.5 (JournalSearches, updated June 2026) to 0.560 (SciJournal, 2025 — down from 0.870 in 2024, a declining 5-year trajectory per SciJournal);
• Scopus CiteScore: 1.7 (JournalSearches);
• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): 0.415 (JournalSearches; SciJournal reports the same 0.415 for 2025, up ~44% from 0.288 in 2024);
• h-index: 35 (JournalSearches and SciJournal agree);
• Quartile: Q3 in Medicine (miscellaneous) per JournalSearches;
• Scopus coverage: 1993–2025.

The journal sits in the lower-middle range of general medicine journals by citation metrics — typical for a hospital-based, regionally anchored title whose value lies more in clinical communication and regional capacity-building than in citation competition. SciJournal characterises it as among the least competitive journals to publish in (0–20 competitiveness band) with a quick publication time (1–3 months).

Open Access and Publication Fees

Acta Clinica Croatica is an open-access journal. Hrčak records its rights statement as CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives), meaning articles may be shared with attribution for non-commercial purposes without adaptation.

JournalSearches classifies the journal as diamond open access — free to read and free to publish, with no article processing charge. This is consistent with the hospital-publisher model: the Sestre Milosrdnice University Hospital Center funds the journal as part of its academic mission rather than recovering costs from authors. Authors should nevertheless confirm the absence of fees in the current author guidelines, since fee policies can change.

Publication Ethics

The journal's published guidelines for authors and reviewers, together with its double-anonymized review model, form the backbone of its ethics framework. Standard expectations apply: originality of submitted work, no simultaneous submission elsewhere, proper attribution, disclosure of conflicts of interest, and ethical approval for human-subjects research. The hospital-based publisher and the Croatian national OJS infrastructure (Hrčak) provide institutional oversight of editorial practice.

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts are submitted through the Open Journal Systems (OJS) installation (linked from the journal's Hrčak page and official site), with all editorial correspondence managed by the Zagreb editorial office. Authors should:

• Consult the guidelines for authors for manuscript structure, referencing style, and article-type requirements;
• Prepare the manuscript in English;
• Ensure the work is original and not under consideration elsewhere;
• Include ethical-approval statements where applicable (human or animal research);
• Direct queries to the editorial office at acta@kbcsm.hr.

The Journal's Institutional Home

The Sestre Milosrdnice University Hospital Center — the Sisters of Mercy University Hospital — is one of Croatia's oldest and largest clinical institutions, with roots in the 19th century. Its Institute for Clinical Medical Research gives the hospital an explicit research mandate, and Acta Clinica Croatica is the principal vehicle through which the institution's clinical research reaches the international literature. Hospital-based journals of this kind play a distinctive role: they give practising clinicians a nearby, credible outlet for case series, clinical observations, and practice research that might not fit the priorities of high-impact specialty journals, while still subjecting that work to genuine peer review and international indexing.

The journal's endurance is itself a finding about Croatian scholarly infrastructure. Maintaining a quarterly, indexed, open-access medical journal from a hospital budget for over six decades — including through the war years of the 1990s, when paper, postage, and institutional continuity were all under strain — represents a sustained institutional commitment to the idea that clinical practice and clinical publication belong together.

The Croatian Open-Access Ecosystem: Hrčak

Acta Clinica Croatica has been part of Hrčak, Croatia's national portal for open-access scientific and professional journals, since 30 May 2007. Hrčak (maintained by the University of Zagreb Computing Centre, SRCE) is one of Europe's notable national journal platforms: it hosts hundreds of Croatian journals, provides OJS-based submission workflows, assigns persistent identifiers, and exposes full metadata for harvesting. For a hospital journal, Hrčak membership supplies professional publishing infrastructure — XML, archiving, usage statistics — that would be uneconomical to build alone.

The journal's Hrčak record is also the single most authoritative public source for its bibliographic facts: ISSNs, CODEN, frequency, peer-review description, licensing, and editorial contact. Researchers citing the journal's metadata should prefer the Hrčak record over commercial aggregators, which occasionally carry stale publisher names (for example, some aggregators still show the predecessor hospital name "Dr. Mladen Stojanović University Hospital").

Indexing in Depth: Web of Science, Scopus, and the MEDLINE Question

The journal's indexing profile is strong for a regional clinical title. Science Citation Index Expanded coverage puts its articles in the Web of Science Core Collection, making them visible to citation analyses and eligible for a Journal Impact Factor. Scopus coverage (1993–2025 per aggregator records) feeds the CiteScore and SJR metrics. Embase indexing extends its reach into pharmacological and biomedical discovery tools.

The MEDLINE situation deserves careful explanation because the sources appear to conflict. The NLM catalog records MEDLINE indexing from volume 47, no. 1 (March 2008) through volume 64, no. 2 (June 2025) — a 17-year run of PubMed visibility. The catalog's current status line, however, reads "Not currently indexed for MEDLINE," and PubMed Central lists the title as "PMC Inactive." These flags typically reflect one of three situations: a title under re-evaluation, a cataloguing lag after a publisher/platform change, or a genuine cessation of indexing. Because the indexed-through date is as recent as June 2025, the likeliest explanations are administrative rather than editorial. Authors for whom PubMed discoverability is decisive should check whether articles from the most recent issues appear in PubMed before submitting, and the journal's editors would do well to clarify the current NLM status publicly.

Whatever the current MEDLINE flag, the journal's articles remain discoverable through Scopus, Web of Science, Hrčak, and Google Scholar, and its DOAJ listing supports open-access discovery.

Readership and Citation Profile

Acta Clinica Croatica serves two overlapping readerships: Croatian and regional clinicians who read it as a practice journal, and international researchers who encounter its articles through Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed. Its citation metrics — impact factor around 0.5, CiteScore 1.7, SJR 0.415, h-index 35 — describe a journal whose articles are cited steadily but modestly, consistent with a general-clinical title publishing case reports and regional clinical studies alongside original research.

The h-index of 35 is arguably the most informative figure: it indicates a durable backfile with dozens of articles that have accumulated meaningful citation counts over the journal's long history. For a hospital journal, that kind of long-tail citation performance matters more than any single year's impact factor.

SciJournal's competitiveness assessment (least-competitive band, 1–3 month publication time) suggests the journal is an accessible outlet for clinically grounded work — a deliberate positioning. Not every worthwhile clinical observation needs to survive review at a top-quartile specialty journal; journals like this one provide the peer-reviewed home for observations that advance practice without chasing citation maxima.

Supplements, Special Content, and Anniversary Material

In addition to its regular quarterly issues, Acta Clinica Croatica publishes a supplement series (Acta Clinica Croatica. Suplement) that accompanies some numbers — typically conference proceedings, thematic collections, or institutional anniversary material. Supplements in hospital journals often carry the papers of national congresses and symposia hosted by the institution, giving them a citable, indexed home.

The journal has also marked its own milestones in print: anniversary retrospectives have traced its path from the Anali of the Dr M. Stojanović hospital through the current title, documenting editorial successions and indexing achievements. For historians of Croatian medicine, these retrospectives are themselves primary sources on the development of clinical research culture in the country.

Authors considering the journal should note its evident strengths: genuine double-anonymized peer review, international indexing, open access without author fees, transparent published policies, and an editorial office that publishes its author and reviewer guidelines openly. Its limitations are those of its genre: modest citation metrics, a generalist scope that cannot offer the audience focus of a specialty journal, and the current ambiguity around its MEDLINE status flag, which the editors should clarify. For clinically grounded manuscripts — particularly case reports, regional epidemiological observations, and practice research from Southeast Europe — it remains one of the region's most established peer-reviewed homes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes Acta Clinica Croatica?
The Sestre Milosrdnice University Hospital Center and its Institute for Clinical Medical Research, Zagreb, Croatia.

How long has it been published?
Continuously since 1962 under the Hrčak record; under the current title since 1991 per the NLM catalog (continuing the hospital annals Anali Kliničke bolnice "Dr M. Stojanović").

Is it indexed in PubMed/MEDLINE?
The NLM catalog records MEDLINE indexing from 2008 to mid-2025; its current entry carries a "not currently indexed" flag that authors should verify against live PubMed records.

Is there a publication fee?
The journal is classified as diamond open access (no APC) by third-party directories; confirm with the current author guidelines.

What licence do articles carry?
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 per the Hrčak rights statement.

Who is the Editor-in-Chief?
Prof. Mirna Šitum per Hrčak; verify the current masthead on the journal site.

What is its impact factor?
Aggregator figures range from 0.5 to 0.56 for the most recent year; verify in the current Journal Citation Reports.

Does it publish supplements?
Yes — a supplement series (Acta Clinica Croatica. Suplement) accompanies some issues, typically for conference proceedings and thematic collections. Anniversary retrospectives have also appeared in print.