HepatoBiliary Surgery and Nutrition

About HepatoBiliary Surgery and Nutrition

About HepatoBiliary Surgery and Nutrition

HepatoBiliary Surgery and Nutrition, usually abbreviated HBSN and cited as Hepatobiliary Surg Nutr, is an open-access, peer-reviewed, bi-monthly journal launched in December 2012 and published by AME Publishing Company. Its own Guidelines for Authors, consulted for this profile and updated in September 2026 in the version seen, give its print ISSN as 2304-3881 and its online ISSN as 2304-389X, which match the ISSNs in the record held on this site. The journal’s stated purpose is to describe new findings in hepatopancreatobiliary disease and nutrition and to provide current and practical information on diagnosis, prevention and clinical investigations. Few journals combine those two halves — surgery of the liver, biliary tract and pancreas, and the nutritional care of the same patients — in a single title, and that combination is the key to understanding both its scope and its readership.

The journal states that it is published by AME Publishing Company with support from Wolters Kluwer, and that its content is made available on Wolters Kluwer Health’s Lippincott and Ovid platforms as well as through its own site. Its editor-in-chief, on the journal’s own editor page, is Yilei Mao, MD, PhD, of the Department of Liver Surgery at PUMC Hospital, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, in Beijing. The editorial office contact given in the author guidelines is editor@thehbsn.org. Readers should use the journal’s live editorial pages for the current board, because board membership in a fast-growing medical journal changes often and a copied list soon misleads.

At a glance

Scope in detail

The journal’s own list of specific areas of interest includes surgical techniques, clinical and basic research, transplantation and other therapies, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), targeted drugs, gut microbiota, metabolism, cancer immunity, genomics, and nutrition and dietetics. It also welcomes contributions from related fields such as public health, human genetics, basic sciences, education, sociology and nursing where they bear on its central subject. That is a deliberately wide perimeter around a narrow anatomical and clinical core, and it explains why the journal can publish a technical paper on a resection, a trial of a systemic therapy for hepatocellular carcinoma, a study of the gut microbiome in liver disease and a paper on perioperative nutrition in consecutive issues.

Liver, biliary and pancreatic surgery

Surgical technique and surgical outcomes are the historical core. Hepatectomy, surgery for perihilar cholangiocarcinoma, biliary reconstruction, pancreatic surgery, minimally invasive and robotic approaches, and the management of complications all belong here. The journal also maintains a surgical video strand: its home page records that accepted surgical videos are included in the AME Surgical Video Database (ASVIDE), and its article categories include a Surgical Technique format with a prescribed structure covering preoperative preparations, a step-by-step description, postoperative considerations, and tips and pearls. Authors submitting technique work should expect to describe the procedure in enough detail for another surgeon to understand the steps, the indications and the failure modes, not merely to report that the procedure was performed successfully.

Transplantation

Liver transplantation is named in the journal’s focus from its earliest announcements, covering donor selection, living-donor and deceased-donor procedures, surgical technique, postoperative management and complications. Transplant papers sit alongside resection papers because the same teams often do both and because the choice between resection and transplantation is itself a live clinical question in hepatocellular carcinoma and in end-stage liver disease.

Oncology, targeted therapy and cancer immunity

Hepatocellular carcinoma, cholangiocarcinoma and pancreatic cancer generate a large share of the journal’s clinical and translational content, including targeted drugs, immunotherapy and cancer immunity, genomics and molecular developments, imaging and pathology. Research listings for the journal show internal medicine, hepatocellular carcinoma and surgery among its most frequent research topics, which matches the editorial description. Authors of oncology manuscripts should note that the journal’s readership is heavily surgical and hepatological, so a purely molecular paper needs a clear line to a clinical decision if it is to find its audience here.

Metabolic liver disease and nutrition

Nutrition is the half of the title that distinguishes HBSN from other hepatobiliary surgery journals. NAFLD and NASH, metabolism, dietetics, nutritional assessment and nutritional support before, during and after major hepatopancreatobiliary surgery all fall within scope, as does the nutritional management of patients with advanced liver disease. Practical papers in this area have addressed matters such as how major hepatectomy changes biochemistry and metabolism, why fat intake and bile salt replacement need attention after biliary surgery, and how parenteral support should be tapered as diet recovers. A nutrition manuscript with no connection to liver, biliary or pancreatic disease or surgery would be a poor fit despite the word nutrition in the title; the connection is the test.

Imaging, biology, pathology and related fields

The journal’s home page summarises its coverage as including surgical techniques, clinical and basic research, transplantation and other therapies, related imaging, biology, pathology, immunology, targeted drug and molecular developments and technical advances. Diagnostic and imaging work is therefore welcome when it changes diagnosis, staging, operative planning or follow-up for hepatopancreatobiliary patients. Contributions from nursing, public health, education and sociology are explicitly contemplated by the author guidelines, which is unusual for a surgical title and reflects a strand of content on medical ethics and humanities that the journal has promoted, including a dedicated column on ethics and the doctor–patient relationship.

History and development

HBSN was launched in December 2012. In a message published at the launch, the editor-in-chief described it as the first journal of its scope and coverage in the world, an international, open-access, peer-reviewed English-language journal intended to provide a free forum for rapid dissemination of discoveries in hepatobiliary surgery and nutrition, accepting submissions from around the world and from a growing pool of clinical and basic research in China. The journal was indexed in PubMed and PubMed Central in 2014. In June 2017 the journal announced that it had been included in the Science Citation Index Expanded, reporting that articles from volume 6, issue 2 were then retrievable in SCIE and that coverage extending back to 2015 was expected to follow. Those dates, taken from the journal’s own announcements, mark the two steps that transformed it from a new open-access title into a journal whose articles are visible in the main biomedical and citation databases.

Its subsequent citation performance has been strong for a specialist surgical title. The journal itself announces an impact factor of 8.1 for the 2025 Journal Citation Reports and announced 7.8 for the 2024 citation year, while a 2025 report on the journal, contributed by its editor-in-chief, recorded a 2024 Journal Citation Reports impact factor of 6.1 and a ranking of tenth globally, in the first quartile, among surgical journals. Readers should notice that these figures refer to different JCR years and reporting moments, which is why more than one number circulates for what sounds like the same quantity; the year must always be quoted with the number, and the authoritative source is Journal Citation Reports itself. What the sequence does show, without depending on any single figure, is a sustained rise over several JCR cycles rather than a one-year spike.

OpenAlex, retrieved directly by ISSN and confirmed by a direct fetch of the source record for this profile, gives 1,809 works and 14,454 citations for the source, a summary h-index of 52, an i10-index of 335 and a two-year mean citedness of about 2.01, with indexed publication years running from 1997 to 2026. The 1997 start year in OpenAlex is a database artefact of ingested records rather than the journal’s launch date: the journal’s own account, repeated in its guidelines and its launch editorial, is December 2012, and that is the date to use for the journal’s history. OpenAlex host information records AME Publishing Company and a Hong Kong country code, which reflects the publisher’s registered address rather than the location of the editorial office in Beijing; neither should be used to claim that the journal is a Hong Kong journal in an editorial sense.

Article types and manuscript requirements

The author guidelines set out a detailed category table, and prospective authors should work from it rather than from general advice. Original Articles have no fixed word limit, require a structured abstract of 200 to 450 words with Background, Methods, Results and Conclusions, three to five keywords, a main text organised as Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion and Conclusions, and a highlight box setting out key findings and potential impact. Review Articles are capped at 6,000 words, with systematic review, scoping review, narrative or literature review, clinical practice review and mini-review variants, the mini-review being capped at 3,000 words and 30 references. Clinical Practice Guidelines and Expert Consensus documents have no word limit and must contain clear recommendations. Surgical Technique articles are capped at 5,500 words and follow the prescribed operative structure. Shorter formats include Images in Clinical Medicine at 200 words at most, Editorials and Commentaries at 1,500 words, Viewpoints at 1,000 words and Letters to the Editor at 1,500 words, each with its own abstract, reference and figure limits as set out in the guidelines table.

Original research must also follow reporting standards. The guidelines require articles to be prepared in accordance with EQUATOR Network reporting guidelines, with a completed checklist submitted as supplementary material and the relevant page, line and section indicated for each item: CONSORT for randomised trials, TREND for non-randomised designs, STROBE for observational epidemiology, STARD for diagnostic accuracy, PRISMA for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, ARRIVE for animal research and TRIPOD for prediction model development and validation. A statement naming the checklist followed must appear at the end of the Introduction and in the footnote. Only a systematic review with meta-analysis is categorised as an Original Article; a systematic review without meta-analysis is categorised as a Review Article. Authors must also provide an author-contributions section, a data-sharing statement where the article includes data that are not publicly available, and an ethical statement in both the methods and the footnote where human or animal subjects are involved. Participant selection, eligibility criteria and the source population must be described, sex and gender terminology used correctly, and the journal encourages use of the SAGER guidelines. Research Resource Identifiers are requested for antibodies, cell lines, model organisms and software, as the journal participates in the Research Resource Identification Initiative.

The guidelines state that the journal adheres to the ICMJE Recommendations, to the COPE Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors, and to WAME policy. Those are not decorative references: they are the standards an author can cite if a question arises about authorship, conflicts of interest, duplicate submission, image integrity or corrections, and they are the standards the editorial office will apply. Manuscripts that do not follow the author instructions are returned to the corresponding author for technical revision at preliminary review, so careful formatting and a complete checklist are the fastest route to peer review rather than an optional extra.

Peer review, charges and licensing

DOAJ records the review process for HBSN as double anonymous peer review, links to the journal’s peer-review process and editorial team pages, and records an article processing charge with a maximum of USD 1,900 together with a waiver policy and no other charges. It records the licence as CC BY-NC-ND. That licence permits sharing with attribution for non-commercial purposes without derivatives; it does not permit commercial reuse or adapted versions without separate permission, which matters for anyone wanting to translate an article, adapt a figure for a commercial product or republish an adapted version. The entire submission and review process is managed through an electronic submission system, and articles are published both in print and online, according to the guidelines.

Authors should confirm the current charge on the journal’s own article-processing-charges page before submitting, because the DOAJ figure is a recorded maximum at the time of its record and charges change. They should also consider whether a CC BY-NC-ND licence satisfies their funder. Some funders and institutions require CC BY for the articles they finance; if that requirement applies, it must be resolved with the editorial office before publication, not afterwards. Where a detail of the current charge, waiver eligibility or licence offer could not be verified from the journal’s own pages at the time of writing, this profile treats it as not publicly disclosed in a verified form rather than estimating it.

How this journal differs from similar titles

HBSN is easily confused with other hepatobiliary titles. The Annals of Hepato-Biliary-Pancreatic Surgery is published by the Korean Association of Hepato-Biliary-Pancreatic Surgery, has different ISSNs, and is a separate journal with its own metrics. HPB, the official journal of international hepatopancreato-biliary associations, is another distinct title. The Chinese Journal of Hepatobiliary Surgery is a Chinese-language national title. None of their impact factors, quartiles or editorial boards belong to HBSN. Identification should always be by ISSN 2304-3881 and 2304-389X and by the AME Publishing Company imprint.

Within the AME list, HBSN also sits among many sister journals. The publisher reported in an earlier announcement that it published more than forty English-language medical journals across oncology, pulmonology, cardiothoracic disease, urology and other fields, with a number indexed in PubMed. Publishing in one AME journal confers no standing in another, and each title’s indexing must be checked separately; in that earlier announcement only three AME journals, including HBSN, were named as indexed by SCIE.

Who should submit, and how to judge fit

The ideal submission answers a question that a hepatopancreatobiliary surgeon, a transplant surgeon, a hepatologist, an oncologist treating liver, biliary or pancreatic cancer, or a clinician managing nutrition in those patients would recognise as theirs. Strong fits include well-reported comparative surgical series, transplant outcome studies, translational work with a clear clinical line, rigorous reviews that discuss the strengths and limitations of the evidence, and nutrition studies tied to liver disease or to major HPB surgery. Weak fits include nutrition work with no HPB connection, general gastroenterology with no surgical or liver focus, and case material that does not meet the journal’s short-format requirements. Given the journal’s announced impact factor and first-quartile standing in surgery in recent JCR reporting, competition is real: a manuscript should be prepared to the standard of the reporting checklist for its design, with complete outcome reporting and honest discussion of limitations, rather than submitted speculatively and repaired later.

Readers, in turn, should use the journal as a source of specialist, peer-reviewed, openly accessible evidence, while remembering that an open-access licence and a high journal impact factor do not certify an individual study. Check the article type, the reporting checklist named, the sample and the follow-up, and whether the conclusion follows from the comparison actually made. For clinical decisions, a single article in any journal should be read alongside guidelines and systematic evidence.

Verification checklist

• Confirm the ISSNs: print 2304-3881, online 2304-389X, and the abbreviation Hepatobiliary Surg Nutr.
• Confirm the publisher: AME Publishing Company, with Wolters Kluwer support stated by the journal, and the editor-in-chief page for Yilei Mao of PUMC Hospital.
• Confirm indexing from the journal’s own guidelines: PubMed and PubMed Central, DOAJ, and SCIE; DOAJ listing was verified directly through the DOAJ API for this profile.
• Quote any impact factor with its JCR year: the journal announces 8.1 for the 2025 JCR and announced 7.8 for the 2024 citation year.
• Check the current article processing charge before submitting: DOAJ records a maximum of USD 1,900 and a waiver policy.
• Check the licence, CC BY-NC-ND in DOAJ, against any funder licence requirement.
• Treat OpenAlex totals as database readings: the direct source fetch used here returned 1,809 works, 14,454 citations and an h-index of 52, and its 1997 first year is an ingestion artefact against a verified December 2012 launch.

Frequently asked questions

Is HepatoBiliary Surgery and Nutrition open access?

Yes. The journal describes itself as an open-access, peer-reviewed, bi-monthly journal, it is listed in DOAJ, and DOAJ records its licence as CC BY-NC-ND. It charges an article processing charge, recorded in DOAJ at a maximum of USD 1,900 with a waiver policy, so open access for readers does not mean free publication for authors.

When was it founded?

December 2012, according to the journal’s own guidelines, its launch editorial and its indexing announcements. It was indexed in PubMed and PubMed Central in 2014 and announced its inclusion in the Science Citation Index Expanded in June 2017.

What is its impact factor?

The journal announces 8.1 in the 2025 Journal Citation Reports and announced 7.8 for the 2024 citation year. Always cite the JCR year with the figure, and obtain the authoritative value from Journal Citation Reports for formal evaluations.

What does it publish besides surgery?

Transplantation, targeted drugs, cancer immunity, genomics, gut microbiota, metabolism, NASH and NAFLD, nutrition and dietetics, imaging, biology and pathology, and related contributions from public health, human genetics, basic sciences, education, sociology and nursing, as set out in its author guidelines.

What must an original article include?

A structured abstract of 200 to 450 words, three to five keywords, a main text in Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion and Conclusions form, a highlight box, author contributions, a data-sharing statement where applicable, an ethical statement where human or animal subjects are involved, and the completed EQUATOR reporting checklist for the study design, named in the Introduction and the footnote.

Sources and method

This profile is based on the record held on this site (title, slug and ISSNs 2304-3881 and 2304-389X, publisher AME Publishing Company), on the journal’s own Guidelines for Authors, home page, editor-in-chief page and SCIE indexing announcement on its AME site, on its launch editorial as reproduced in PubMed Central, on a direct DOAJ search API query for ISSN 2304-3881, and on direct OpenAlex source retrievals by ISSN and by source identifier. Figures attributed to the journal or to Journal Citation Reports are labelled as such, and database figures are labelled as OpenAlex readings. No clinical claim about any treatment is made in this profile, and no field has been invented: details that could not be verified are described as not publicly disclosed in verified form.