Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences

About Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences

Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences — Journal Profile

Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences is a Japanese medical journal associated with Dokkyo Medical University and its medical society in Mibu, Tochigi. The JournalsWorld record for this title, post 35350, slug dokkyo-journal-of-medical-sciences, carries two ISSNs, 0385-5023 and 0911-5900, a stored h-index of 7, and a coverage summary beginning in 1978. Those identifiers are the anchor for this profile. The title is easy to confuse with newer English-language Dokkyo publishing, and it is also easy to lose in searches because many articles were written in Japanese, cited in specialised databases, and indexed under the abbreviated form Dokkyo J. Med. Sci. A careful reader therefore starts with the ISSNs, not with the title words alone, and treats every later statement in this profile as belonging to the serial that carries those two numbers.

The journal served, for more than four decades, as a house and society record for medical research produced at and around Dokkyo. University medical journals of this kind have a particular role in Japanese academic medicine. They publish work by faculty, hospital clinicians, graduate students and collaborators; they preserve case experience from a single large medical centre that might otherwise remain only in departmental files; and they give early-career researchers a peer-reviewed place to report clinical observations, laboratory work and public-health studies in full. Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences should be read in that tradition. Its importance is not measured well by global citation league tables. It is measured by the continuity of the record it kept, by the range of departments that used it, and by what its articles reveal about medical practice and research at Dokkyo over time.

Quick facts

• Full title: Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences
• Abbreviation: Dokkyo J. Med. Sci., as given in secondary listings
• ISSNs in the JournalsWorld record: 0385-5023 and 0911-5900
• Country: Japan
• Institutional home: Dokkyo Medical University, Mibu-machi, Shimotsuga-gun, Tochigi, Japan
• Publisher named in secondary listings: Dokkyo University School of Medicine; the wider society is the Dokkyo Medical Society
• Subject category in secondary listings: Medicine (miscellaneous)
• Stored h-index in the JournalsWorld record: 7
• Coverage in the stored record: from 1978, with later end dates differing between secondary listings
• OpenAlex source resolved from ISSN 0385-5023: S2764886255, checked for this profile
• Article charges: could not be verified from a source fetched for this profile
• DOAJ status: could not be verified

Identity and history

The stored coverage beginning in 1978 places the journal in the first decade of Dokkyo Medical University itself, which was founded in the 1970s in Mibu, Tochigi Prefecture, north of Tokyo. A new medical university needs a serial outlet quickly. Departments are being built, a university hospital is accumulating clinical experience, and researchers need a place where work that is locally important — a case series from the hospital, a study of a regional patient population, a laboratory method developed in a Dokkyo department — can enter the permanent literature with volume, issue and page numbers that later authors can cite. Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences filled that need, and bibliographic records show it still doing so decades later, with articles in the 2000s and 2010s on radiology, nuclear medicine, sleep medicine, oncology, public health and many other fields.

Individual articles help show the breadth. A 2007 paper on anaphylactic reaction to iodinated contrast media, published in volume 34, issue 3, reported three cases from computed tomography practice and reviewed how patients at risk should be identified before a contrast study. A 2009 paper examined physiological stomach uptake in FDG-PET examinations and the effect of a proton-pump inhibitor. Another study from the same period looked at obstructive sleep apnoea and asymptomatic cerebrovascular disease in 192 patients. These are not articles chasing an international headline. They are the working literature of a medical centre: imaging pitfalls, diagnostic accuracy, complications, local cohorts and practical lessons for the next clinician who meets the same problem. That is precisely the literature a university journal exists to preserve.

Later examples show the same pattern continuing into fields such as community medicine and epidemiology. A study of smoking, exercise habits and dental checkups among community residents in Japan appeared in the journal in 2013, in volume 40. Research of that kind connects the university hospital to the population around it, and it reflects Dokkyo's teaching in community-oriented medicine. Readers tracing a topic through the journal should therefore expect a mixture of Japanese-language and English material, of basic and clinical work, and of papers whose value lies in a carefully described Dokkyo cohort or case rather than in a multicentre trial. Judging the journal only by whether its papers are heavily cited internationally would miss most of what it published.

A necessary distinction: the later Dokkyo Medical Journal

Anyone researching this title today will also meet Dokkyo Medical Journal, abbreviated DKMJ, on the J-STAGE platform. That journal began with volume 1 in 2022, is published in English, is described by the Dokkyo Medical Society as open access on J-STAGE, and publishes original papers in medical science and related fields, together with case reports, short communications and review articles. Its editorial office is at Dokkyo Medical University, 880 Kitakobayashi, Mibu-machi, Shimotsuga-gun, Tochigi 321-0293, Japan — the same institutional home as the older journal. The two titles belong to the same university and society world, and a researcher moving from the older literature to current Dokkyo publishing will naturally pass from one to the other.

This profile does not, however, merge the two records. The JournalsWorld post covered here is anchored to Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences and to ISSNs 0385-5023 and 0911-5900. No source fetched for this profile stated, in wording that could be quoted, that the newer English title is a simple continuation carrying the same ISSNs, and the newer journal begins again at volume 1, which is the pattern of a new or relaunched title rather than a continued volume sequence. The honest description is therefore this: Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences is the long-running older serial in the stored record; Dokkyo Medical Journal is the society's current English-language journal on J-STAGE, first issued in 2022; and authors who want to submit new work should follow the current journal's own author information, not the older title's record. Keeping that distinction clean protects citations, library holdings and author decisions alike.

Publisher, place and institutional setting

Secondary listings name the publisher as Dokkyo University School of Medicine, and OpenAlex, resolved from ISSN 0385-5023 for this profile, names the host organisation as Dokkyo Medical University, with country Japan and the university repository as the homepage it associates with the source. Dokkyo Medical University sits in Mibu in Tochigi Prefecture and includes a school of medicine, a school of nursing, graduate study and university hospitals, including the main hospital in Mibu and the Saitama Medical Center in Koshigaya. That setting matters for interpreting the journal. Many papers come from a defined clinical catchment, from departments that also train Dokkyo students, and from collaborations between the university's basic-science and clinical units.

The Dokkyo Medical Society is the learned-society side of the same institution, and it is the society that presents the current Dokkyo Medical Journal. For the older Journal of Medical Sciences, the practical point for readers is provenance: this was not a commercial title assembled from unrelated submissions around the world. It was an institutional journal, edited within a Japanese medical university, publishing substantially the work of that community and its partners. Provenance of that kind is a strength for local clinical and historical questions, and a limit for anyone hoping for a representative international sample. Both halves of that judgement should stay in view.

Scope and subjects

Secondary listings place the journal in Medicine (miscellaneous), which in practice meant the full span of a medical school. Articles traced for this profile cover diagnostic imaging and contrast-media safety, positron emission tomography, sleep medicine and cerebrovascular disease, oncology and genomic profiling contexts, community health, epidemiology, dentistry for medically compromised patients, oral and maxillofacial topics, physiology and microcirculation-related work through Dokkyo departments, and ordinary but important case experience from hospital practice. OpenAlex, for its resolved source record, lists topic labels including innovations in medical education, gastric cancer management and outcomes, pain mechanisms and treatments, disaster response and management, and anaesthesia and pain management. Those labels are algorithmic and should not be read as an editorial aims statement, but they point in the same direction as the article record: broad medicine, anchored in one university.

Because the scope was broad, the journal is most useful to a reader with a specific question. A clinician tracing how a diagnostic problem was handled in a Japanese university hospital, a historian of Dokkyo or of Japanese medical education, a librarian completing a holdings record, or a researcher following a named Dokkyo investigator's early work will all find material here that a narrow specialty journal would not contain. A reader looking for the current best evidence on a treatment question, by contrast, should use the journal as one historical source among many and should check current guidelines and current journals, including the society's present English title, before drawing a clinical conclusion.

Editorial character and article types

No editorial board list for the older title was fetched from an official source for this profile, so no editor names for Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences are stated here; naming them from memory or from a different Dokkyo title would be fabrication. What can be described, from the article record itself and from the society's stated policy for its current journal, is the family resemblance. The current Dokkyo Medical Journal welcomes original papers, case reports, short communications and review articles, requires manuscripts in English, and expects authors to certify that a manuscript is not under consideration elsewhere and has not been published before in any language except as a meeting abstract or short proceedings item. Those rules are stated for the current title, and they are quoted here only as the society's present practice, not as a retroactive rulebook for the older journal.

The older journal's own article types can be seen in its contents: original articles reporting a study, case-based papers reporting clinical experience, and review or lecture-like material from Dokkyo departments. For a reader evaluating an individual article, the useful checks are the same as for any single-centre journal of its era: how many patients or specimens were included, whether the methods section describes the setting and period clearly, whether ethics approval and informed consent are stated where human subjects are involved, and whether the authors separate what their data show from what they suggest. The society's current guidance makes the modern expectations explicit — ethics-committee approval for clinical trials, consent described in the methods, conflicts of interest declared, funding acknowledged and author contributions listed — and those expectations are a fair lens for reading older Dokkyo work critically, while remembering that reporting norms have tightened over time.

Metrics, indexing and how to read the numbers

The JournalsWorld record stores an h-index of 7 for this journal. Secondary listings that summarise the SCImago and Scopus record agree on an h-index of 7 and place the journal in the fourth quartile, Q4, for Medicine (miscellaneous), while differing in detail: one summary gives an SJR of 0.109, overall rank 25450 and coverage 1978–2021; another gives an SJR of 0.13, overall rank 26336 and coverage 1978–2024. Those differences are a warning, not a puzzle to be averaged away. They come from different snapshot years of the same underlying Scopus-based data. This profile therefore reports the stored h-index of 7 as the headline figure, attributes the Q4 placement to those secondary SCImago summaries, and does not present any single SJR value or end-of-coverage year as definitive.

OpenAlex tells a different, narrower story, and the difference is instructive. Resolving ISSN 0385-5023 in OpenAlex for this profile returned source S2764886255, named Dokkyo journal of medical sciences, with 392 works and 20 citations in that record, a summary h-index of 2 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.0, with first publication year 1976 and last publication year 2023 in OpenAlex's own counting. The second stored ISSN, 0911-5900, returned no OpenAlex source record on its own. OpenAlex's counts depend on which works it has matched to the source and on citation links in its open data; a largely Japanese-language, single-university journal is exactly the kind of serial such a system undercounts. Neither figure should be silently substituted for the other. A reader who needs a metric for a formal evaluation should go to the Scopus or SCImago record current at the date of that evaluation and cite that snapshot directly.

Indexing claims are kept equally narrow here. Articles from the journal are traceable in international bibliographic systems, including records in the United States National Library of Medicine tradition for Japanese medical serials and in nuclear and medical abstracting files that quote the journal title, volume and ISSN 0385-5023. A current, authoritative list of every database covering the older title could not be verified from a source fetched for this profile, so no database list is asserted. DOAJ status is likewise written as could not be verified: a DOAJ search-API check for each stored ISSN returned no record in the response received, and a zero response of that kind is not proof about listing, so this profile makes no DOAJ claim in either direction. The same discipline applies to impact factor: no Journal Impact Factor for this title was verified from an official Journal Citation Reports source, so none is quoted.

Fees and article charges

Article charges for Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences are not publicly disclosed in any source fetched for this profile, and no fee figure is therefore given. This matters because older Japanese university and society journals often operated on society or institutional funding, membership income and print subscriptions rather than on author-facing charges, but that general pattern is not evidence about this title's own schedule in any particular year. Authors dealing with the society's current English journal should read that journal's current author information in full before submitting, and should ask its editorial office directly if a charge is not stated there. Readers should not carry a fee figure across from another Dokkyo title, another Japanese university journal, or a commercial aggregator page.

How to submit work today

New submissions belong with the society's current journal, Dokkyo Medical Journal, whose author information the Dokkyo Medical Society publishes online. That guidance, fetched for this profile, states that manuscripts should be in English; that original articles are full-length reports of current research in basic or clinical science, limited to 3,500 words including the abstract but excluding references, tables and figures, with an unstructured abstract of at most 250 words and at most 100 references and seven figures or tables; that case reports run 1,500–2,000 words with an abstract of at most 200 words; that short communications run to 1,500 words; that review articles run to 5,500 words and also undergo peer review; and that correspondence is limited to 1,000 words. Manuscripts are submitted through the ScholarOne Manuscripts system for DKMJ, and enquiries go to the editorial office at Dokkyo Medical University in Mibu at the address given in the Quick facts discussion above.

Those details are included because many readers arriving at the older title are in fact authors looking for the living Dokkyo journal. They are not a promise that a manuscript on any medical topic will be considered, and they do not transfer to the older ISSN record. Before submitting, an author should confirm on the society site that the guidance is still current, prepare the cover-letter certification the journal requires, state ethics approval and consent arrangements for human or animal work, include a disclosure statement and an author-contributions statement, and follow the journal's reference style, in which references are numbered in order of citation and shown in square brackets in the text. A manuscript that ignores those house requirements risks return before review, whatever its scientific merit.

Who should read and cite this journal

Read and cite Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences when the question is specific and the Dokkyo provenance is part of the answer: the history of a technique or service at Dokkyo, a Japanese single-centre case series, an early paper by a Dokkyo group that later published internationally, or a community-health study of a defined Japanese population. In a literature review, describe it accurately — a Japanese university medical journal, broad in scope, modest in international citation reach — rather than inflating or dismissing it. In a clinical argument, treat its papers as primary sources to be weighed alongside larger and more recent evidence. In a bibliographic argument, cite it by ISSN as well as by title, because the later English Dokkyo title makes title-only citation genuinely ambiguous.

Similar journals

Readers interested in this title often also work with other Japanese university and society medical journals that publish broad clinical and basic research from a single institution or region, with the society's own current Dokkyo Medical Journal as the closest relative in place and institution. Beyond Dokkyo, comparable reading includes the journals of other Japanese medical universities, Japanese general-medicine and internal-medicine society journals, and specialty titles in the reader's own field for the imaging, sleep, oncology and public-health topics that appear in the Dokkyo record. None of those titles shares this journal's ISSNs, and none should be cited as if it were this journal. The similarity is one of function — an institutional medical literature — not of identity.

Frequently asked questions

Is Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences the same journal as Dokkyo Medical Journal? They are closely related through Dokkyo Medical University and the Dokkyo Medical Society, but they are treated here as distinct records. This profile is anchored to ISSNs 0385-5023 and 0911-5900 and to coverage beginning in 1978. Dokkyo Medical Journal is the society's English-language journal on J-STAGE that began with volume 1 in 2022. Do not cite one title using the other's identifiers.

What are the ISSNs of Dokkyo Journal of Medical Sciences? The JournalsWorld record carries 0385-5023 and 0911-5900. Secondary listings give the same pair in unhyphenated form, 03855023 and 09115900.

What is the journal's h-index? The stored JournalsWorld record and secondary SCImago summaries give an h-index of 7. OpenAlex's resolved source record gives a lower summary figure, because its matched work and citation set for this largely Japanese-language title is narrower. Quote the source and date whenever you quote either number.

Is the journal still the place to submit a new Dokkyo medical paper? New work should be directed to the society's current English journal, Dokkyo Medical Journal, through its ScholarOne submission system, following the author information on the Dokkyo Medical Society site. This profile makes no claim that new manuscripts are accepted under the older title.

Does the journal charge authors? No charge schedule for this title could be verified from a source fetched for this profile, so charges are described as not publicly disclosed here. Check the current journal's own guidance and ask its editorial office if you are an author.

Is the journal listed in DOAJ? DOAJ status could not be verified for this profile. A search-API response returning no record is not treated here as proof of listing or of non-listing.

Verification notes

This profile was built from the live JournalsWorld record for post 35350, from OpenAlex source resolution by ISSN, from a DOAJ search-API check whose zero response is reported without being overstated, from secondary SCImago summaries whose differing snapshot values are reported as differing, and from the Dokkyo Medical Society's own author information for its current journal, used only for the clearly labelled submission section. Where a fact could not be verified from a fetched source — an editorial board for the older title, a fee schedule, a definitive database list — this profile says so instead of filling the gap. That restraint is deliberate, and it is what makes the facts that are stated here safe to rely on.