Acta Informatica Medica

Overview

Acta Informatica Medica is a peer-reviewed international journal devoted to biomedical and medical informatics. Founded in 1993 as the official journal of the Bosnian-Herzegovinan Society of Medical Informatics, it has grown into a recognized venue for research on the application of information science and technology to medicine and healthcare. Since 2019 it has also served as an official journal of the European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI), alongside journals such as the International Journal of Medical Informatics and Methods of Information in Medicine.

The journal is published by Avicena Publishing, based in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It carries the print ISSN 0353-8109 and the online ISSN 1986-5988, with the ISO 4 abbreviation Acta Inform. Med. The journal's website is actainformmed.org, where current issues, archives, and author guidelines are maintained.

Over three decades of publication, Acta Informatica Medica has played an important role in distributing biomedical informatics knowledge, publishing contributions from experts worldwide and supporting the development of the field in South-Eastern Europe and beyond.

Aims and Scope

Acta Informatica Medica covers the area of medical informatics (biomedical informatics) in its full breadth. Subject matter includes:

• Clinical informatics — hospital information systems, electronic health records, clinical decision support systems, and computerized physician order entry
• Health information management — data standards, interoperability, health data exchange, and medical coding
• Telemedicine and e-health — remote care delivery, mobile health applications, and digital health interventions
• Bioinformatics and computational biology — as applied to medical and clinical problems
• Public health informatics — surveillance systems, epidemiological data analysis, and health information policy
• Nursing and allied-health informatics — information systems supporting nursing practice and allied health professions
• Medical education informatics — e-learning, simulation, and informatics curricula in medical training
• Ethics, law, and standards — data protection, patient privacy, and governance of health information

The journal publishes original research articles, reviews, case reports, professional papers, and conference-related contributions, including abstracts from regional meetings on science writing, editing, and publishing.

Publication Details

• Publisher: Avicena Publishing (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
• Print ISSN: 0353-8109
• Online ISSN: 1986-5988
• Language: English
• Founded: 1993
• Founder editor: Izet Masic
• Official journal of: Academy of Medical Sciences of Bosnia and Herzegovina; European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI, since 2019); originally the Bosnian-Herzegovinan Society of Medical Informatics
• Journal site: actainformmed.org

Editorial Leadership and History

Acta Informatica Medica was founded in 1993 by Professor Izet Masic as the official journal of the Bosnian-Herzegovinan Society of Medical Informatics (BHSMI). Its founding came in the early years of Bosnian independence, and the journal's three-decade run represents a sustained achievement in maintaining an international scholarly periodical through the region's difficult post-war reconstruction.

Under Professor Masic's long editorship, the journal built its indexing portfolio, expanded its international authorship, and became the official journal of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2019, the European Federation for Medical Informatics accepted Acta Informatica Medica as one of its official journals — a significant recognition placing it alongside long-established EFMI titles and affirming its standing in the European medical informatics community.

The journal has supported regional scholarly communication beyond its regular issues, publishing contributions from the Mediterranean Seminar on Science Writing, Editing and Publishing (SWEP) conferences held in Sarajevo in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2021 — part of its mission to promote science and scientific publication in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the wider region.

For the current Editor-in-Chief and editorial board, readers should consult the journal's official website, as leadership evolves over time.

Peer Review Process

Acta Informatica Medica is a peer-reviewed journal. Manuscripts undergo editorial screening followed by evaluation by independent referees with expertise in medical informatics or the relevant clinical domain. The journal follows the guidelines and recommendations of the ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors), COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), EASE (European Association of Science Editors), and WAME (World Association of Medical Editors).

It also endorses the Sarajevo Declaration on Integrity and Visibility of Scholarly Journals, adopted by 17 editors of biomedical journals at the SWEP 2018 conference in Sarajevo — a regional commitment to publication integrity and journal visibility. Specific details of review timelines and referee counts are not published in a single consolidated document; authors should consult the journal's current author guidelines.

Abstracting and Indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in an unusually broad set of databases — reported at around 30 online databases — including:

• PubMed / MEDLINE
• PubMed Central (full-text archive)
• Scopus — coverage 2012–2024
• Embase
• Hinari (WHO programme for developing-country access)

Indexing in PubMed and PubMed Central is particularly significant for a biomedical journal, giving its articles visibility to the global clinical and life-sciences research community and ensuring long-term open archiving of the full text.

Impact Metrics

Metrics reported by third-party aggregators (varying by year and provider):

• Scopus CiteScore: 2.7–3.5 depending on year (Editage reports 2.7; a PMC-published analysis notes growth from 2.7 to 3.5 between 2021 and 2022).
• h-index: 29–36 (Scopus-based; Editage reports 29, Resurchify 36 — reflecting different data snapshots).
• SJR: approximately 0.37–0.45, best quartile Q3 in Medicine (miscellaneous).
• SNIP: 0.72 (per Editage).
• Scopus impact score: approximately 1.21–1.89 depending on year (Resurchify reports 1.21; ResearchBite 1.89 for an earlier window).
• Overall rank: around 11,400–13,400 in Scopus-based rankings.

A published analysis of the journal's citation trajectory reported the highest annual Journal Impact IF (2011–2023) at 1.496 and an average annual growth rate of 12.9%, indicating a generally rising citation profile over the 2010s and early 2020s. Readers should verify current values in Scopus and Journal Citation Reports, as figures move with each release.

Open Access and Publication Model

Acta Informatica Medica is an open access journal, with full texts archived in PubMed Central. Its inclusion in the WHO Hinari programme extends access to researchers in developing countries. Specific details of the journal's article processing charges, if any, and its licensing terms should be confirmed on the official journal website, as this profile could not verify a current APC schedule from the sources consulted.

Open archiving in PubMed Central is particularly valuable for the journal's mission: it guarantees that every article remains permanently and freely accessible regardless of the publisher's future, and it places the journal's content in the same discovery environment — PubMed search — used by millions of biomedical researchers each day. For a regional journal, this levels the playing field with titles from the largest commercial publishers.

Publication Ethics

The journal follows the guidelines and recommendations of ICMJE, COPE, EASE, and WAME, and endorses the Sarajevo Declaration on Integrity and Visibility of Scholarly Journals. These frameworks cover authorship criteria, conflict-of-interest disclosure, ethical approval for human-subjects research, patient privacy and consent, plagiarism, and corrections/retractions.

As a medical informatics journal, it handles manuscripts involving patient data, clinical systems, and health interventions, where ethical oversight, data protection compliance, and institutional review board approvals are particularly salient. Authors should ensure their submissions document appropriate ethical approvals and consent procedures.

The Sarajevo Declaration

The Sarajevo Declaration on Integrity and Visibility of Scholarly Journals was adopted by 17 editors of biomedical journals at the SWEP 2018 conference held in Sarajevo, and Acta Informatica Medica is among its endorsers. The declaration represents a regional compact among South-Eastern European biomedical editors to uphold publication integrity — including peer review standards, authorship ethics, and transparency — while working collectively to raise the international visibility of the region's journals.

For a journal published from Bosnia and Herzegovina, endorsing such a declaration is both a quality signal and a strategic act: it aligns the title with international best practice while building solidarity among neighboring journals facing similar challenges of limited resources and modest global visibility. Authors can read the endorsement as a commitment that the journal takes publication ethics seriously and subjects itself to peer scrutiny by fellow editors.

Citation Trajectory

A bibliometric analysis of Acta Informatica Medica published in PMC traced the journal's citation indicators from 2011 to 2023. It reported the highest annual impact figure at 1.496, the lowest at 0.59, total growth of about 103% across the period, an average annual growth rate of 12.9%, and a striking 107.8% jump between 2022 and 2023. The journal's h-index stood at 24 in that analysis, meaning 24 of its articles had each received at least 24 citations.

Scopus CiteScore rose from 2.7 to 3.5 between 2021 and 2022 — a gain of 0.8 points in a single year — reflecting growing uptake of the journal's articles. These trajectories describe a journal on a rising citation path through the 2010s into the 2020s, consistent with the expanding global attention to digital health and medical informatics. As always, readers should check current values in Scopus and Journal Citation Reports, since all metrics are snapshots that move with each annual release.

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should:

• Consult the current author guidelines on the official journal website (actainformmed.org) for manuscript preparation, formatting, and submission procedures.
• Prepare manuscripts in English, with structured abstracts where required for original research.
• Follow ICMJE recommendations for manuscript structure, authorship, and referencing.
• Document ethical approvals and patient consent for any work involving human subjects or identifiable health data.
• Disclose funding sources and competing interests.

Manuscripts that do not follow the journal's formatting requirements may be returned without review, so careful attention to the guidelines before submission saves time for both authors and editors. Non-native English speakers are advised to have their manuscripts professionally edited for language, as clarity of expression affects how efficiently referees can assess the work.

Role in the Region and the Discipline

Acta Informatica Medica occupies a distinctive position as a long-running, internationally indexed medical informatics journal published from South-Eastern Europe. SCImago's listings place it among a small group of Bosnian biomedical journals indexed in Scopus — one analysis counted 16 Bosnian journals in Scopus, 7 of them in biomedical sciences — making it part of a select cohort sustaining the country's presence in the international biomedical literature.

Its acceptance as an EFMI official journal in 2019 integrated it formally into the European medical informatics infrastructure, alongside journals published by major commercial publishers. For researchers in the Balkans and wider South-Eastern Europe, it offers a regionally rooted yet internationally visible outlet; for the global community, it provides a window into medical informatics research and practice in a part of Europe less represented in the mainstream literature.

The journal's support for the SWEP conferences on science writing, editing, and publishing further reflects its service mission: strengthening scholarly communication capacity in its home region, not merely publishing research.

Medical Informatics as a Discipline

Medical informatics — also called biomedical informatics or health informatics — is the interdisciplinary field concerned with the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of biomedical information, data, and knowledge for problem solving and decision making. It draws on computer science, information science, cognitive science, and the clinical and life sciences.

The field's core concerns include the design and evaluation of clinical information systems; the representation of medical knowledge in computable form (terminologies, ontologies, and standards such as SNOMED CT, ICD, and HL7 FHIR); decision support that brings evidence to the point of care; the secondary use of clinical data for research and surveillance; and the human-factors challenge of fitting digital tools into clinical workflows without burdening practitioners.

Acta Informatica Medica's three decades of publication span the field's transformation: from early hospital information systems and the first electronic records, through the internet-enabled telemedicine wave, to today's concerns with interoperability, artificial intelligence in clinical decision-making, real-world data, and digital public health. The journal's archive thus constitutes a longitudinal record of how a maturing discipline confronted successive technological shifts.

The EFMI Connection

The European Federation for Medical Informatics is the European regional organization of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), bringing together national medical informatics societies across Europe. EFMI organizes the annual Medical Informatics Europe (MIE) conferences and maintains working groups on topics from nursing informatics to health record banking.

EFMI's official journals serve as the federation's scholarly flagships. Acta Informatica Medica's admission to this group in 2019 — alongside the International Journal of Medical Informatics, Methods of Information in Medicine, and the European Journal of Biomedical Informatics — recognized the journal's sustained quality and its contribution to European medical informatics. For authors, EFMI affiliation signals that the journal meets the standards of Europe's principal medical informatics body; for the journal, it brings visibility among EFMI's thousands of members and conference participants.

Publishing from Bosnia and Herzegovina

Maintaining an internationally indexed scholarly journal from Bosnia and Herzegovina for over 30 years is itself a noteworthy achievement. The country's research infrastructure was severely disrupted in the 1990s, and rebuilding a presence in the international literature required sustained editorial commitment. Acta Informatica Medica, under its founder's long stewardship, provided continuity: a stable, indexed, English-language outlet through which Bosnian and regional researchers could reach the world literature.

The journal's publisher, Avicena Publishing, is a Bosnian scholarly publisher. The journal's archiving in PubMed Central — a US National Library of Medicine repository — gives its content the same long-term preservation guarantees as articles from the world's largest publishers, an important equalizer for a small regional press.

Analyses of Bosnian journals in Scopus show Acta Informatica Medica among the country's most cited biomedical titles, with an h-index in the high 20s to mid-30s depending on the data snapshot — a citation footprint that many longer-established Western journals would envy relative to their resources.

Author Guidance: Writing for the Journal

Medical informatics manuscripts succeed when they clearly articulate both the informatics contribution and the clinical or health-system relevance. Authors considering Acta Informatica Medica should:

• Frame the informatics problem precisely. Whether the contribution is a system, an algorithm, an evaluation, or a policy analysis, the manuscript should state what is new relative to existing informatics knowledge.
• Ground claims in evidence. System descriptions gain strength from evaluation data — usability studies, performance benchmarks, clinical outcome measures, or implementation case studies.
• Address context. Health informatics interventions succeed or fail in specific organizational and cultural settings; describing the deployment context helps readers judge transferability.
• Follow reporting standards. Depending on study type, guidelines such as STARE-HI for health informatics evaluations or CONSORT-EHEALTH for digital interventions strengthen manuscripts.
• Mind the ethics. Any use of patient data requires documented ethical approval and appropriate consent or anonymization; the journal's ICMJE/COPE-aligned policies will be applied during review.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the impact factor of Acta Informatica Medica?

Third-party analyses report Scopus-based impact scores between roughly 1.2 and 1.9 depending on year, with CiteScore 2.7–3.5. Verify current values in Scopus and Journal Citation Reports.

Is Acta Informatica Medica indexed in PubMed and Scopus?

Yes — in PubMed/MEDLINE, PubMed Central, Scopus (2012–2024), Embase, Hinari, and around 30 databases overall.

Who publishes Acta Informatica Medica?

Avicena Publishing, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was founded in 1993 by Izet Masic as the journal of the Bosnian-Herzegovinan Society of Medical Informatics.

What are the ISSNs?

Print ISSN 0353-8109; online ISSN 1986-5988.

Is it an official EFMI journal?

Yes — accepted as an official journal of the European Federation for Medical Informatics in 2019. It is also the official journal of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

What does the journal cover?

Biomedical and medical informatics: clinical informatics, health information systems, telemedicine, bioinformatics, public health informatics, nursing informatics, and related areas.

Is it open access?

Yes — full texts are openly available, including archiving in PubMed Central. Confirm any APC details on the official journal site.

How long has Acta Informatica Medica been publishing?

Since 1993 — over three decades of continuous publication, making it one of the longest-running medical informatics journals from South-Eastern Europe.

Who founded Acta Informatica Medica?

Professor Izet Masic founded the journal in 1993 as the official journal of the Bosnian-Herzegovinan Society of Medical Informatics, and led it as editor through its first decades.

What is the Sarajevo Declaration?

A 2018 declaration on integrity and visibility of scholarly journals, adopted by 17 biomedical journal editors at the SWEP conference in Sarajevo and endorsed by Acta Informatica Medica.