About Chonnam Medical Journal

Chonnam Medical Journal — Full Journal Profile

Chonnam Medical Journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal of general medicine published in Gwangju, South Korea, by Chonnam National University Medical School together with the Chonnam National University Research Institute of Medical Sciences. It appears three times a year in English and exists to promote the exchange of scientific information from basic and clinical research. Its abbreviated title is Chonnam Med J, often shortened further to CMJ, and its articles carry DOIs under the journal's own prefix, as seen across its archive at cmj.ac.kr and in PubMed Central.

For an author outside Korea, the journal can look at first glance like a house journal for one university hospital system. That reading is too narrow. The editors state an international, general-medical remit covering human and animal, clinical and experimental studies, and the archive bears that out: cardiology, gastroenterology, oncology, infectious disease, obstetrics, preventive medicine and laboratory medicine from authors in several countries sit alongside work from Chonnam National University Hospital itself. This profile sets out the verified identity, scope, article types, access model and practical submission considerations, and it separates what the journal itself states from what a directory should not invent on its behalf.

At a glance

The ISSN history needs care. Current listings give 2233-7385 and 2233-7393 for the modern journal, while older Korean citation material records pISSN 0377-9564 for the earlier print run. These are successive identifiers for the same continuing title, not evidence of separate journals. Cataloguers and authors checking a reference should match the ISSN to the year of the article they hold, and should treat the title, the Gwangju publisher line and the DOI pattern together as the reliable identity check.

History and institutional home

Chonnam Medical Journal grew out of the medical school and hospital community of Chonnam National University in Gwangju, in the south-west of South Korea. University medical journals of this kind traditionally began as vehicles for a school's own research output, and the Chonnam title retains that institutional anchor in its dual publisher line: the medical school itself and its Research Institute of Medical Sciences. That anchor matters because it explains both the journal's stability — it is supported by an established national university rather than by article revenue alone — and its breadth, since a full medical school spans laboratory science, every major clinical specialty, public health and medical education.

Over time the journal has moved, as many Korean university medical titles have, toward an explicitly international posture: publication in English, a regular three-issue annual schedule with fixed publication dates, open-access distribution, and inclusion of its articles in the major biomedical discovery routes used by clinicians worldwide. Its content is visible through PubMed, where a journal search returns a run of several hundred items extending to the present, and individual articles are freely readable in full. That visibility is the practical dividing line between a purely local house journal and a general medical journal with an international readership, and Chonnam Medical Journal sits on the international side of it.

The journal's modern identity is therefore best described as a university-published, English-language, open-access general medical journal with Korean roots and a global submission invitation. It is not a specialty society journal, and it does not claim to be a high-volume mega-journal. Its scale — three issues a year — implies selectivity shaped by editorial capacity as much as by quality thresholds, a point authors should weigh when they read the submission guidance later in this profile. A well-matched, well-reported general medical paper has a coherent home here; a paper needing a guaranteed rapid decision or a very large specialty audience should be placed where those needs are the journal's stated purpose.

Scope in depth

The journal's own scope statement aims to promote the exchange of scientific information generated from basic and clinical research, welcoming both human and animal — clinical and experimental — studies, including physiology, pathophysiology, diagnostics and therapeutics, together with epidemiological studies in the general population. The subsections below translate that single statement into the territories an author will actually recognise in the archive, and note what convincing work in each territory requires.

Cardiovascular medicine and intervention

Cardiology is one of the most visible strands in the journal, reflecting the strengths of a major university hospital: coronary intervention and diagnostics, acute myocardial infarction research, cardiac imaging, heart failure, electrophysiology and arrhythmia work all recur in its pages and in the topic profile of the JournalsWorld record. Convincing submissions in this territory define the cohort and the care pathway precisely, report devices, imaging protocols and follow-up completeness in full, and resist inflating a single-centre registry into a general treatment claim. Comparative work should state how treatment allocation happened in practice, because confounding by indication is the first question any experienced cardiology reviewer will ask, in this journal or any other.

Gastrointestinal, liver and cancer care

Gastroenterology, hepatology and oncology form a second strong territory, including gastrointestinal bleeding diagnosis and treatment, gastric cancer management, liver disease and wider solid-tumour work. The journal's regional setting gives this research particular texture: gastric cancer screening and treatment, hepatitis-related disease and endoscopic practice in a Korean population are topics where local data carry international interest when they are reported with clear staging, treatment and outcome definitions. Authors should give diagnostic criteria, endoscopic or imaging detail and pathology confirmation the prominence they deserve, and should separate early feasibility or case-series observations from survival claims that need larger, longer data.

Basic, translational and laboratory medicine

The scope explicitly includes experimental and animal studies, physiology and pathophysiology, and the archive includes laboratory and translational work that connects a mechanism to a disease question. The standard here is the same as in any serious general medical journal: a clear hypothesis, methods detailed enough to repeat, appropriate controls, and statistics matched to the design rather than to the result the authors hoped for. Translational papers earn their place when the bridge to human disease is argued, not asserted — when the discussion states what would need to be shown next, in what population or model, before a clinical implication could be entertained. Purely descriptive laboratory reports without that argumentative bridge are weaker candidates wherever they are sent.

Infectious disease, preventive medicine and population health

Epidemiological studies in the general population are named in the scope, and preventive medicine has a natural base in the publishing university, whose departments have contributed population analyses including national survey data studies. Work in this territory should define its population denominator, sampling frame and weighting or adjustment approach transparently, and should discuss the well-known limits of cross-sectional nutrition, exposure and health-behaviour data when those designs are used. Occupational, environmental and lifestyle epidemiology, screening research and health-services studies all fit, provided the paper states what decision — clinical, managerial or policy — its findings could inform, and at what level of confidence.

Surgery, obstetrics and the clinical specialties

Beyond internal medicine, the journal carries surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics, radiology, anaesthesiology and other specialty work, typically as original studies, focused reviews or instructive clinical material. A review on contraceptive practice in perimenopausal women, for example, shows the house style at its best: a common clinical question, a structured tour of benefits and risks with absolute-risk framing, and guidance a practising clinician can apply. Specialty submissions succeed when they keep that general-reader discipline — explaining why the problem matters beyond the specialty, defining terms a non-specialist reviewer needs, and making the take-home message explicit instead of leaving it inside a technical discussion.

Images, letters and the short formats

The journal publishes images in clinical medicine and letters to the editor alongside full articles and editorials. These short formats are not filler; in a general medical journal they do specific work. A strong image piece teaches a recognition point — a finding a clinician should not miss — with a concise, well-annotated presentation and a short discussion of the differential and the action taken. A strong letter adds data, a correction or a reasoned challenge to published work, or reports a small observation cleanly without pretending it is a full study. Authors with a genuinely instructive case or a sharp, brief point should consider these formats seriously rather than stretching thin material into an over-long original article.

What the journal publishes

The journal publishes original articles, review articles, letters to the editor, images in clinical medicine and editorials, in the fields of clinical and experimental medicine. Original articles carry the journal's main research weight and should follow the reporting discipline appropriate to their design: trial, cohort, case-control, diagnostic accuracy, survey or laboratory study each has an established reporting structure, and using it visibly — in headings, flow information and outcome definitions — is the fastest way to show reviewers that the work was conducted, not merely written up, carefully.

Review articles in this journal tend toward the clinically useful end of the spectrum: a defined question, a structured search or at least a transparent selection logic, and recommendations graded by the strength of what supports them. Authors proposing a narrative review should still state how literature was chosen and where disagreement in the evidence lies. Editorials are generally commissioned or closely tied to the journal's contents and community, so unsolicited editorial submissions should be discussed with the office first. Letters and images, as described above, reward brevity and a single clear point.

Whatever the format, English is the language of publication, and the quality of the English is part of what reviewers experience. Authors writing in English as an additional language are strongly advised to have the manuscript read by a fluent colleague or a professional editing service before submission, focusing on the abstract and discussion where imprecision does the most damage. A scientifically sound paper in unclear English risks delay, misunderstanding and an unfairly negative first impression that careful preparation can entirely prevent.

Peer review, ethics and editorial process

The journal describes itself as peer-reviewed, and it operates as an open-access title under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence, under which readers may share and reuse articles for non-commercial purposes with proper citation, as stated on its published articles. Authors should confirm the current licence wording and any submission requirements in the journal's instructions for authors at cmj.ac.kr before submitting, because licence and policy pages, not directory profiles, are the authoritative record, and policies can be updated between an author's first reading and their submission date.

Standard expectations for a PubMed-visible medical journal apply in full: research involving human participants should report ethics approval and consent arrangements; clinical trials should be registered and the registration identified; conflicts of interest and funding should be disclosed; and authorship should reflect genuine contribution. Patient-identifiable material, including in images in clinical medicine, demands particular care — consent for publication and effective de-identification are the author's responsibility, and editors can be expected to ask about them. Preparing those statements before submission, rather than after an editorial query, is a mark of a ready manuscript.

No guaranteed review timeline or acceptance figure is asserted in this profile, because no such figure was verified from the journal's own current pages during its preparation. Authors working to a degree, promotion or funding deadline should contact the editorial office for current handling expectations and should never treat a three-issue schedule as a promise of speed: fixed publication dates help accepted papers appear predictably, but the review stage before acceptance depends on reviewer availability in the paper's specialty, as it does in every selective general medical journal.

Publication model, frequency and language

Chonnam Medical Journal is published three times per year, on 25 January, 25 May and 25 September according to its scope statement, in English, as an open-access journal. Open access here has practical consequences for readers and authors alike. A clinician anywhere can read the full text without a subscription, and articles are deposited in the open biomedical archive ecosystem, which is why the journal's work surfaces readily in PubMed searches. For authors, that means the audience is not limited to institutions that subscribe — an important consideration for research intended to reach practitioners in settings without large library budgets.

The publishers are Chonnam National University Medical School and the Chonnam National University Research Institute of Medical Sciences. Institutional publishing of this kind typically keeps the journal's mission academic rather than commercial: the title exists to circulate the school's and the wider community's medical research, and its continuation does not depend on maximising article volume. Authors should nonetheless verify any current article charge, waiver or production fee directly in the instructions for authors, because this profile asserts no fee figure: none was verified from an official fee statement during preparation, and inventing or repeating an unverified charge would mislead authors planning a submission budget.

Citation practice for the journal is conventional and stable. Cite the abbreviated title Chonnam Med J, with year, volume, issue and pages or article pagination as published, and include the DOI where one is given — the journal's DOIs follow the pattern visible across its site, built on its registered prefix and the cmj stem. Reference-checkers should match the DOI back to the article landing page when a detail is in doubt, rather than trusting a copied reference string from a secondary source.

Indexing, discoverability and archiving

The journal's articles are discoverable through PubMed, where a title search returns several hundred records across its modern run, and full texts are openly readable through the journal's own site and the open-access biomedical archive that serves it. That combination — bibliographic indexing in the main biomedical database plus free full text — is what gives a three-issue university journal a reach out of proportion to its size. Clinicians searching a clinical question are likely to meet its reviews and original articles directly in the results they already use.

Beyond PubMed, authors evaluating the journal for a formal requirement — a university promotion rule, a funder mandate, a degree regulation — should check each required database's own master list by ISSN at the time of decision. Coverage lists change, and this profile deliberately prints no Scopus, Web of Science or other commercial-database claim that was not verified against the provider's own list during preparation. That is not a suggestion that coverage is absent; it is a refusal to certify a live administrative fact from memory or from a third-party badge, which is exactly the kind of shortcut that later embarrasses an author in an evaluation file.

For librarians, the record should carry the current ISSN pair 2233-7385 and 2233-7393, note the historic print ISSN 0377-9564 for the earlier series, file the publishers as the medical school and the research institute in Gwangju, and link the open-access site at cmj.ac.kr. Recording the frequency as three issues a year with the journal's stated publication dates will help users interpret the archive correctly, especially where a volume's third issue completes the year's set in September rather than at the calendar year's end.

How to read citation metrics for this title

No Journal Impact Factor, SJR value or similar headline metric is printed in this profile, because none was verified from the metric provider's own current record during preparation. The JournalsWorld page for this title displays an h-index figure labelled as unverified, and this profile does not promote an unverified figure into a fact. Authors or evaluators who need a metric should retrieve it from the provider, by ISSN, note its year, and file that primary record — a discipline that protects them if a number is later challenged.

A fairer assessment of this journal's standing uses evidence that can be checked: an established national-university publisher, a regular and punctual three-issue schedule in English, open-access distribution under a named Creative Commons licence, a several-hundred-article presence in PubMed extending to the current period, and a scope that has consistently attracted work across general medicine rather than a single department's output. Those facts describe a legitimate, functioning international medical journal of modest scale, which is precisely the niche its publishers describe.

Authors should also weigh audience fit over metric arithmetic. A clear, well-conducted study or a genuinely useful clinical review in this journal will be read by the general clinicians and researchers who browse PubMed and the open archive — often a more relevant readership for general medical work than a nominally higher metric in a title whose audience never sees the paper. Metrics answer an administrative question; readership answers a scientific one. Good submission decisions keep the two separate and satisfy both checks independently.

Guidance for authors considering a submission

Choose this journal when the paper is general medicine in the best sense: a clinical, epidemiological or experimental study, or a practical review, whose interest extends beyond one narrow technique and whose authors value open access and PubMed visibility from a university publisher. Work rooted in Korean or wider Asian populations, hospital practice, screening, chronic disease and common clinical problems travels particularly well here, because the journal's readership expects and appreciates that context — provided the paper explains the setting clearly enough for an international reader to judge transferability.

Prepare the manuscript to international medical-journal standards from the first submission: a structured abstract that states design, setting, numbers and main results with figures; a methods section that a reviewer could replicate from; ethics, consent, registration, funding and conflict statements in place; tables that stand alone; and references verified against the original sources. State the study's limits in the discussion before a reviewer has to — single-centre design, retrospective records, modest sample, short follow-up are all survivable when declared and analysed, and damaging when discovered.

Before submitting, read the current instructions for authors on the journal's site, confirm the article type that matches the work, check the licence and any charge position directly, and ensure the title page, anonymisation and file requirements match what the submission system asks for today. Policies and systems change; the hour spent checking them is the cheapest insurance in the whole publication process, and it signals to editors that the submitting team is careful — a signal that colours, fairly or not, how the science that follows is received.

Guidance for readers and librarians

Readers will get the most from this journal by treating it as a curated general-medical shelf rather than a news feed. Its reviews are a efficient way to update on a common problem outside one's own specialty; its original articles offer hospital and population data, often from Korean settings, that complement the North American and European data dominating many reading lists; and its images and letters provide short, memorable clinical teaching points. Browsing complete issues, which appear three times a year, is feasible in a way that browsing a weekly mega-journal is not.

Librarians and evidence teams should note the open licence when reusing material in teaching: non-commercial reuse with citation is permitted under the licence stated on the articles, which simplifies use in lectures, journal clubs and internal guidelines, subject always to the licence's exact terms on the article itself. For systematic reviewers, the journal is worth including in searches for Asian hospital and population data in its strong areas, because its articles are indexed where reviewers already search, reducing the risk of it being overlooked as a purely local source.

As with any primary literature, apply critical appraisal before changing practice: check design against question, look for ethics and registration statements, examine follow-up and missing data, and be alert to single-centre generalisation. The journal's openness makes that appraisal easy — full methods are one click away — and that transparency, ultimately, is what allows a modest-scale university journal to be used with confidence alongside far larger titles.

Fit assessment: strengths, limits and cautions

The journal's strengths are coherence and credibility: a named national-university publisher, a clear general-medical scope honestly reflected in its contents, English-language open access, PubMed visibility and a manageable, regular publication rhythm. For authors with solid general medical work — especially hospital, population and clinically practical research — it offers a legitimate international venue without the volume-driven character of very large open-access outlets.

Its limits follow from its scale. Three issues a year means limited slots, so borderline or poorly matched papers face real competition. It is not a specialty flagship, and authors whose evaluation depends on a specific commercial database or metric must verify that position from primary lists rather than assume it. Nor should authors expect the handling speed of a journal whose business model depends on rapid throughput; university editorial offices work carefully, on academic calendars.

Overall, Chonnam Medical Journal is what its scope statement promises: a peer-reviewed, open-access channel for exchanging basic and clinical medical science, published from Gwangju for a worldwide readership. Authors who match its general-medical breadth, write clearly in English and meet standard reporting and ethics expectations will find the fit logical. Readers will find a dependable, browseable source of clinical and population research with a distinctive and valuable East Asian vantage point.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN of Chonnam Medical Journal?

The current ISSNs are 2233-7385 and 2233-7393 (online). Older Korean citation records give pISSN 0377-9564 for the earlier print series of the same continuing title.

Who publishes Chonnam Medical Journal and where?

It is published in Gwangju, Korea, by Chonnam National University Medical School and the Chonnam National University Research Institute of Medical Sciences.

How often does it appear and in what language?

Three times per year, on 25 January, 25 May and 25 September per its scope statement, and it publishes in English.

What does it publish?

Original and review articles, letters to the editor, images in clinical medicine and editorials across clinical and experimental medicine, including human and animal studies and population epidemiology.

Is it open access?

Yes. Articles state that they are open-access articles distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence, permitting non-commercial sharing and reuse with proper citation. Confirm the current licence wording in the instructions for authors before submitting.

Does this profile give its impact factor or fees?

No. No metric or fee figure was verified from the provider's or the journal's own current statement during preparation, so none is printed. Check the journal's instructions for any charge, and any metric provider's own list by ISSN, at the time you need them.

Verification note

This profile is based on the journal's own scope material as carried in its listings, on article pages at cmj.ac.kr showing the publisher line, Gwangju addresses, open-access licence statement and DOI pattern, on the PubMed journal record showing the extent of its indexed run, on the ISSN Portal record for the online ISSN, and on the JournalsWorld record for this post. Historic and current ISSNs are reported with their periods so that successive identifiers are not mistaken for separate journals. No fee, timeline or citation metric is asserted without a primary source behind it.