Journal of Clinical Medicine

About Journal of Clinical Medicine

Journal of Clinical Medicine: A Broad, Open Access Home for Clinical and Pre-Clinical Research

Journal of Clinical Medicine (JCM) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal covering clinical and pre-clinical research across the full breadth of medicine. Published by MDPI from Basel, Switzerland, and identified by the electronic ISSN 2077-0383, the journal is deliberately generalist: rather than serving one specialty, it organises its enormous output into sections and special issues that mirror the subspecialties of modern clinical practice, from cardiology and oncology to clinical pharmacology and epidemiology. The Journals World record for this title begins its publication coverage in 2012, the year MDPI announced the launch of the journal under its first Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Jane Grant-Kels of the University of Connecticut Health Center, whose opening editorial set out the case for a dedicated venue for clinical medicine research.

That breadth is both the journal's defining strength and the thing prospective authors most need to understand. A generalist clinical journal of this scale receives work from almost every medical discipline, so a manuscript succeeds not simply by being technically sound but by speaking clearly to clinicians beyond its own narrow specialty. This profile explains what JCM publishes, how its editorial model works, what its citation record actually shows, what publication costs, and how to judge whether it is the right destination for a given piece of clinical research.

At a Glance

• Full title: Journal of Clinical Medicine
• Common abbreviation: JCM; J. Clin. Med.
• ISSN: 2077-0383 (electronic; the title is an online journal)
• Publisher: MDPI, Basel, Switzerland
• Publishing model: Full open access; articles carry a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence and authors retain copyright
• Frequency: Semimonthly, with articles published continuously as they are accepted
• Article processing charge: CHF 2,600 for accepted papers, as stated on the journal's own APC page at the time of this research
• Editors-in-Chief named by the publisher: Prof. Dr. Emmanuel Andrès and Prof. Dr. Kent Doi
• Scope in one line: All topics related to clinical and pre-clinical practice, across every medical specialty
• Peer review: Single-anonymized, according to the publisher's submission information

Identity, Publisher and a Correction to the Stored Record

The Journals World record originally described this journal as published by “266 (Switzerland)”. That figure is a garbled numeric artifact, not a publisher. The publisher is MDPI, the Basel-based open access publisher, and this is confirmed by the journal's own pages on the MDPI website, by its ISSN, and by OpenAlex, which lists the host organisation for ISSN 2077-0383 as the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute. Switzerland is correct in the stored record; the publisher name behind the number is MDPI. Readers comparing records should treat the numeric string as a data-entry error and the MDPI attribution as the verified identity.

MDPI states its address for the journal's correspondence and reprint purposes as Grosspeteranlage 5, CH-4052 Basel, Switzerland, and the journal's editorial office can be reached through the journal pages on the MDPI site. MDPI is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and its publication ethics statement for this journal describes a rigorous peer-review process supported by strict editorial policies, with submitted manuscripts screened using iThenticate to verify originality. Those commitments are the publisher's own description of its process, and authors should read them alongside the journal's instructions for authors before submitting.

History and Development

JCM is a young journal by the standards of clinical medicine. MDPI announced its launch in the early 2010s, and the Journals World record shows coverage from 2012. The founding editorial framed the journal around health care and clinical practice, the study of direct observation of patients, and general medical research, welcoming theoretical and research papers from clinicians and medical researchers worldwide. The first Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Dr. Jane Grant-Kels, used the opening editorial to argue the specific need for such a venue.

The journal then grew in the pattern typical of MDPI's large open access titles: a single broad title subdivided into an expanding set of sections, each with its own editors, and a very large programme of special issues guest-edited by specialists. Sections named by the publisher include areas such as Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Clinical Medicine, which publishes original research, reviews and perspectives on computational methods in clinical practice, including algorithms for diagnosis and prognosis, predictive and personalised medicine, medical imaging and signal processing, clinical decision support, and digital health. The existence of such sections matters for authors: a manuscript is handled within a recognisable community of editors and reviewers even though the journal's overall scope is the whole of medicine.

Growth also brought scale. OpenAlex, queried directly for ISSN 2077-0383 in October 2026, records the source (OpenAlex source S2737969411) with 53,720 works and 705,215 citations, figures that describe a journal publishing at very high volume for more than a decade. High volume is not itself a quality judgement in either direction. It means the journal's archive is a substantial part of the recent clinical literature, that its special issues shape identifiable research conversations, and that authors should expect an editorial system built for throughput: structured submission checks, section-level handling, and continuous publication rather than a small number of curated issues.

Aims and Scope in Detail

The publisher's own aims statement describes JCM as an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal on clinical and pre-clinical research. It publishes Research Papers, Reviews, Editorials, Communications and other article types, and its stated aim is to encourage scientists to publish experimental and theoretical results in as much detail as possible, with full experimental details provided so that results can be reproduced. That emphasis on complete methods reporting is a practical instruction to authors: under-described methods are a weakness in this journal's own terms, not merely a stylistic preference.

One feature the publisher singles out is unusual and worth understanding. JCM explicitly accepts studies showing meaningful but negative results, on the reasoning that most negative data never reach the public domain even when a study was well designed, and that other researchers then repeat experiments already carried out. For clinicians with a carefully conducted trial or cohort study whose primary outcome was negative, this stated policy is a genuine distinguishing feature, provided the study is meaningful and well designed; it is not an invitation to submit underpowered or inconclusive work dressed up as a negative result.

The subject list published by the journal covers cardiology; gastroenterology and hepatopancreatobiliary medicine; clinical neurology; oncology; orthopedics; endocrinology and metabolism; nephrology and urology; epidemiology and public health; stomatology; pulmonology; ophthalmology; obstetrics and gynecology; immunology; hematology; clinical psychology and psychiatry; otolaryngology; dermatology; and clinical pharmacology. In practice, the journal's sections extend further into areas such as intensive care, anaesthesiology, surgery, infectious disease, geriatrics and translational medicine, reflecting how clinical research is actually organised. A useful way to read this list is as a map of the editorial communities inside the journal: your paper will be judged by people in one of these communities, so its introduction should explain why the work matters to that community and, ideally, to clinicians outside it.

What the Journal Publishes, Article by Article

Original research papers form the core: clinical trials, observational and cohort studies, diagnostic accuracy work, prognostic modelling, and pre-clinical studies with a clear clinical connection. Because the journal insists on reproducible detail, research articles are expected to report their design, setting, participants, interventions or exposures, outcomes and statistical methods completely enough for another group to repeat the work. Reporting checklists that are standard in clinical research — the relevant CONSORT, STROBE, PRISMA or CARE style guidance for the design in question — are the natural companion to that requirement, and editors can reasonably ask where a checklist item has gone if it is missing.

Reviews are a large part of the journal's identity. Narrative and systematic reviews that synthesise a fast-moving clinical area for practising clinicians perform an obvious service in a generalist title, and the journal's special issue programme generates many of them. A review submitted here should do more than summarise: it should organise a field, identify where evidence conflicts, and state what a clinician should do differently, or what a researcher should test next. Editorials and Communications provide shorter formats for argument and for concise findings, and the journal also runs conference-linked collections and special issues arising from its own online conferences on clinical medicine, which authors will encounter when browsing current calls.

Editorial Leadership and How Decisions Are Made

The publisher currently presents Prof. Dr. Emmanuel Andrès and Prof. Dr. Kent Doi as Editors-in-Chief in its journal material. Day-to-day handling, however, sits with section editors and, for special issues, guest editors, who manage peer review within their areas. MDPI describes its review model for this journal as single-anonymized: reviewers know the authors' identities, authors do not know the reviewers'. Manuscripts that pass an initial editorial pre-check are sent for review; accepted papers are published continuously and then collected into the journal's semimonthly issues and its special issue pages.

Two practical consequences follow. First, the fit conversation happens early: a paper that the handling editor cannot place within a section or special issue community starts at a disadvantage, so the cover letter and abstract should name the clinical problem, not just the technique. Second, special issue invitations should be evaluated like any other publishing decision. Check who the guest editors are, whether the topic genuinely matches your work, and whether the timeline suits you, rather than treating an invitation as an endorsement of the manuscript itself.

Indexing, Archiving and the Citation Record

The publisher states that all full texts are archived in PubMed Central and that the journal is indexed in SCIE (the Science Citation Index Expanded within Web of Science), Scopus and PubMed, among other databases, and it has also announced indexing in the Reaxys database. Those are publisher claims about its own journal; they are consistent with the journal's visibility in those services, but authors with a funder or institutional requirement tied to a specific index should confirm the current status in the index itself before submitting, because index coverage can change.

For citation performance, this profile relies on figures obtained directly from OpenAlex for ISSN 2077-0383 (source S2737969411) in October 2026: 53,720 works, 705,215 citations, an OpenAlex h-index of 188, an i10-index of 19,566, and a two-year mean citedness of about 3.93. These are OpenAlex's own calculations over its corpus, not Clarivate's Journal Impact Factor, and the two should never be quoted interchangeably. They show a journal whose papers are cited at a solid average rate for general clinical medicine and whose sheer output produces a large absolute citation footprint. The Journals World record previously carried an h-index of 155 and an impact factor figure of 3.3; those values come from a different source and date, which is precisely why this profile attributes every number to its source instead of merging them into a single unsourced score. A DOAJ search carried out for this profile returned no record for this ISSN, so no Directory of Open Access Journals listing is claimed here; the journal's open access status itself is established by the publisher and its CC BY licensing, not by that directory.

Publishing Model, Licence and Costs

Every article in JCM is published in full open access. The publisher's copyright statement for the journal says articles are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence and that copyright is retained by the authors. The article processing charge stated on the journal's APC page is CHF 2,600, payable on acceptance after peer review, with invoices issued only by MDPI itself; the publisher warns authors that it does not authorise third parties to collect the charge. Discounts may apply through MDPI's Institutional Open Access Program for participating institutions and for members of affiliated societies. Because charges change, confirm the current APC on the journal page at submission rather than relying on any secondary listing, including this profile.

Open access at this journal therefore means a real budget decision. Grant-funded clinical groups routinely build the APC into dissemination costs, and the publisher notes that many funders and universities explicitly cover such charges. Unfunded authors should check institutional agreements before submitting, not after acceptance, and should be wary of any intermediary offering to arrange publication or payment on the journal's behalf.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Look Elsewhere

JCM fits authors who want a broad clinical readership, an open access licence with retained copyright, and a section or special issue community that matches their topic. It suits translational and clinical studies whose interest crosses specialty boundaries, well-conducted studies with negative results that the journal explicitly welcomes, and reviews written for practising clinicians. Its scale and continuous publication model also suit authors working to a deadline, although no responsible profile can promise a decision timeline the publisher has not stated for your manuscript.

Authors should look elsewhere when the work's natural audience is a single specialty community that judges itself by its own flagship journals, when an institution requires a specific index status that cannot currently be verified, or when the APC cannot be funded and no institutional agreement applies. Highly specialised surgical technique papers, for example, may earn more from a specialty title's readership than from a generalist audience, while a small single-centre case series with limited generalisability will struggle anywhere, including here.

Preparing a Strong Submission

Start from the journal's own reproducibility demand: report the study completely. Give the design in the first paragraph of the methods, define outcomes before describing results, and make the statistical analysis reproducible from the text. State ethics approval and consent arrangements clearly, register trials where registration applies, and include the reporting checklist for your design. In the introduction, spend your first page on the clinical problem and the decision your results inform; in a generalist journal, editors and reviewers from adjacent fields must be able to see why the paper matters.

For reviews, define the question, the search and selection approach where the review is systematic, and the clinical bottom line. For studies with negative results, the journal's stated policy helps you only if the design was strong enough that the negative finding is informative: show the power or precision of the estimate, report the confidence interval, and explain what the result rules out. Throughout, write for the section community you are targeting, cite that community's recent work in this journal where it is genuinely relevant, and choose the section or special issue deliberately at submission rather than leaving the placement to chance.

Reading and Using the Journal as a Clinician or Researcher

For readers, JCM's value is breadth with structure. Browsing by section gives a specialty-filtered view; browsing special issues gives a topic deep-dive assembled by guest editors; and the PubMed Central archive makes the full text freely readable, which matters for clinicians without institutional subscriptions. Appraise individual papers on their own methods, as with any high-volume journal: the open access licence guarantees access, not conclusions. Check the article type, the section, the peer-review history information the publisher displays, and whether a paper sits in a special issue whose theme explains its framing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Journal of Clinical Medicine open access? Yes. The publisher states that all articles are published in full open access under a CC BY licence, with copyright retained by authors, funded by an article processing charge of CHF 2,600 at the time of this research.

What does JCM publish? Research papers, reviews, editorials, communications and related article types across clinical and pre-clinical medicine, organised into specialty sections and special issues.

Does it accept negative results? Yes, explicitly, where the results are meaningful and the study well designed; the publisher presents this as a distinctive feature of the journal.

How is it indexed? The publisher states archiving in PubMed Central and indexing in SCIE, Scopus and PubMed, among others. Verify any index status you depend on in the index itself. No DOAJ listing is claimed in this profile, because a DOAJ search for the ISSN returned no record during this research.

What are its citation indicators? From a direct OpenAlex query in October 2026: 53,720 works, 705,215 citations, h-index 188, and a two-year mean citedness of about 3.93. These are OpenAlex figures, not a Journal Impact Factor.

Who publishes it? MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. The numeric publisher string in older directory records is a data artifact and should be disregarded.

Verification Notes

This profile is anchored to the Journals World record for ISSN 2077-0383 and was checked against the journal's own MDPI pages (aims and scope, article processing charge, editorial information), the publisher's launch announcement, and a direct OpenAlex source query. Where sources disagreed on metrics, figures are attributed to the source that produced them. Details such as charges, editors and index coverage change over time; the journal's own pages are the authoritative source at the moment of submission.