Journal of Clinical Neurology

About Journal of Clinical Neurology

Journal of Clinical Neurology — In-Depth Profile

The Journal of Clinical Neurology (JCN) is the official English-language journal of the Korean Neurological Association. It is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal for physicians and researchers in neurology, first published in 2005, and published from Seoul, South Korea. Its short history compared with the century-old neurology titles of Europe and North America is precisely what makes it interesting: in two decades it has grown from a twice-yearly association journal into a bimonthly, internationally indexed open-access title whose papers are read, and cited, well beyond Korea. This profile sets out what the journal is, what it publishes, how its review and licensing work, and how its recorded metrics should — and should not — be read.

Identity first, because the title is easy to confuse. This is the Korean journal at thejcn.com, abbreviated J Clin Neurol, with print ISSN 1738-6586 and electronic ISSN 2005-5013. It is not the Japanese journal Rinsho Shinkeigaku, whose English rendering is also "Clinical Neurology" and which carries entirely different ISSNs, and it is not any of the several commercial titles that pair the words clinical and neurology in a longer name. Every figure in this profile belongs to the Korean title identified by the ISSN pair above.

Key Facts at a Glance

History and Development

The journal's own account of its development is brief and factual. JCN was first published in 2005. It was initially issued twice a year, then four times a year from 2006, and it became a bimonthly journal in 2022. That progression — semiannual, quarterly, bimonthly — tracks a growing submission base and a growing association behind it, and it was accompanied by the infrastructure that makes a journal internationally usable: an English-language full text, a canonical online version (the journal states that the online version is considered the canonical version, because all content, including supplementary data, is there), DOIs under the prefix 10.3988, deposit in PubMed Central, and a presence in the major citation indexes described below.

The journal is the association's journal of record as well as a research outlet. As the official English-language journal of the Korean Neurological Association, it carries the work of Korean neurology to an international readership that a Korean-language title could not reach, and it gives international authors a venue whose readership is anchored by a national specialist society. Its subject keywords in the Directory of Open Access Journals give a compact map of its centre of gravity: stroke, epilepsy, Parkinson's disease, dementia, multiple sclerosis and neurology in general. Around those core themes sits the full breadth of clinical neurology — neuromuscular disease, headache, neuroimmunology, movement disorders beyond Parkinson's disease, cognitive neurology, neurophysiology and the clinical side of neurosurgical and neuroimaging practice — provided the work speaks to practising neurologists and clinical researchers.

Scope: What Belongs in JCN

The journal publishes original clinical and translational research and related topics for physicians and researchers in the field of neurology. In practice that means studies whose questions begin at the bedside, in the clinic or in the patient cohort: the presentation, course, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of neurological disease; clinical trials and observational studies; clinicopathological and imaging correlations with a clinical message; and translational work that connects a laboratory finding to a recognisable clinical problem. Work that is purely basic neuroscience, with no clinical bearing the authors can articulate, is a weaker fit, as is work whose natural audience is a different specialty altogether.

The article types are set out in the journal's instructions. Original Articles report original clinical and translational research; there is no set length limit, but the journal highly recommends no more than 4,000 words excluding the abstract, tables, figure legends and references, with a structured abstract of no more than 250 words under the headings Background and Purpose, Methods, Results and Conclusions, and a combined total of seven figures and tables, with further material welcome as online supplementary data. Reviews are usually solicited by the Editor-in-Chief, go through the same review process as other manuscripts, need an abstract but not the structured original-article format, and are recommended to run to at least 3,000 words on the same exclusions. Letters to the Editor run to no more than 750 words including the title (excluding references, tables and figure legends), allow one figure or table, no subheadings, up to ten references, and a strongly recommended maximum of four authors. Editorials are by invitation of the Editor-in-Chief only, carry no word-count limit and no subheadings, and express the personal views of their authors rather than the opinions of the journal or the association. Submitted manuscripts are subject to peer review with the identities of reviewers and authors kept confidential, and final decisions on publication are made by the Editor-in-Chief — a description that matches the double anonymous review process recorded in the journal's DOAJ entry.

Open Access, Licensing and Charges

JCN is a genuine open-access journal, and its record can be stated precisely because it is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The DOAJ record for ISSN 1738-6586 / 2005-5013, read directly during this research, gives: publisher and institution, the Korean Neurological Association, country KR; language English; licence CC BY-NC 4.0, under which readers may share and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes with attribution; open access recorded in DOAJ as starting in 2011; no article processing charge (the record's APC field is "has_apc: false", and a university journal-publishing guide summarising DOAJ likewise reports that the journal does not charge article processing charges), while the DOAJ record does note that other charges may apply and points authors to the instructions for the detail, so authors should read the current instructions for any page or similar charges rather than assume the total cost is zero in every case. DOAJ also records a publication time of 16 weeks between submission and publication as its journal-level figure, plagiarism screening in place, preservation through PubMed Central, and author copyright recorded as not retained under the journal's stated terms, with the licence terms and deposit policy set out on the journal's own licensing page. Articles themselves carry the familiar open-access statement: an article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence, with the copyright line naming the Korean Neurological Association.

For readers, the practical effect is simple. The full text is free to read on the journal's site and through PubMed Central, where the journal has been present since its early years — the third volume, from 2007, onwards in the PMC archive — and the online version is the version of record, including supplementary data. For authors at institutions with open-access mandates, a CC BY-NC licence satisfies many funder policies but not all: mandates that require a CC BY licence are not met by a non-commercial licence, and an author bound by such a mandate should settle that question with their funder before submitting, not after acceptance.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal states that it is currently indexed, tracked or covered by Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), Scopus, EMBASE, DOAJ, CrossRef, Google Scholar, KoreaMed, Synapse and KoMCI. That list, taken from the journal's own site, is the authoritative indexing claim for this profile, and it places the title in the main international biomedical infrastructure — MEDLINE/PubMed discovery through PubMed, citation tracking through SCIE and Scopus, and Korean biomedical discovery through KoreaMed and KoMCI — as well as in the open-access directory. Indexing status can change, and any author whose institution requires a specific index should confirm the title's presence in that index's live source list at submission time; but the breadth of the list is itself a meaningful signal about the journal's standing, because several of those services apply inclusion criteria that a merely nominal title does not meet.

The Journal in Its Pages: A Sample of What It Carries

Abstract descriptions convey a journal's scope; its actual papers show it. An epidemiology paper in the journal, "Trends of Epilepsy-Related Mortality in South Korea" (Volume 19, 2023, pages 174–178), used national population and cause-of-death data from Statistics Korea covering 1993 to 2019 to show an overall decline in epilepsy-related mortality, a notable burden in children, and a rising tendency in the elderly — the kind of country-scale clinical epidemiology that a national association's journal is uniquely placed to publish, because it can speak for the whole patient population of its specialty at home while addressing readers anywhere who study the same disease. Case-based and clinicopathological work sits beside such studies: a 2017 paper on rituximab treatment for idiopathic hypertrophic pachymeningitis (Volume 13, pages 155–161), written by neurologists at Seoul National University Hospital, is a worked example of the journal's clinical core — a rare condition, a detailed case, a treatment judgement other clinicians can weigh. Its shorter forms are active too: recent volumes carry editorials and letters on subjects as specific as severe and reversible exacerbation of primary dystonia, written to be read quickly and answered in the same forum.

That mixture — national cohort studies, single-centre clinical series, case reports in letter form, reviews and editorials — is characteristic of a mature society journal. It also explains the journal's double audience. Inside Korea, JCN is part of the professional infrastructure: the place where Korean neurology reports itself to itself, in the international language of the field. Outside Korea, it is a window on East Asian neurology — its patient populations, its practice patterns and its research groups — published to international standards of review, licensing and indexing, and free for any clinician with an internet connection to read in full. Authors from outside Korea who publish there reach both audiences at once, which is a rarer combination than the journal's modest age might suggest.

Metrics — What the Direct Records Show

The OpenAlex source record for this journal (S4210173048), resolved through the ISSN endpoint and then read by its exact source ID, records 2,836 works and 30,054 citations, a summary h-index of 74, an i10-index of 707 and a two-year mean citedness of about 3.01, with OpenAlex coverage running from 2005 to the present. Those are OpenAlex figures, attributed to OpenAlex, and they describe the whole corpus that database holds for the title rather than any single year's performance. Set beside the same database's figures for a practitioners' magazine or a ceased historical title, they show a journal whose papers are, on recent average, cited at a rate typical of a solid mid-field clinical specialty title — respectable, and consistent with the journal's SCIE presence, without being the kind of number that should be turned into a promise about any individual manuscript.

No Journal Impact Factor value is asserted here. Impact Factor values for this title circulate widely on aggregator sites, attached to years and categories that do not always agree with each other, and no value was verified from Clarivate's own record during this research. The same caution applies to quartile labels found on summary sites: the Journals World record stored for this entry carries the category "Not Yet Ranked", and the journal's earlier template entry on this site quoted an h-index figure that differs from the direct OpenAlex reading above. Readers who need the current Impact Factor or quartile for an official purpose should take it from Journal Citation Reports or the Scopus source record for ISSN 1738-6586 at the moment they need it. What can be said without a number is the direction of travel the verifiable records support: a journal founded in 2005, now bimonthly, fully open access, deposited in PMC, and holding a two-decade citation record in OpenAlex with an h-index in the seventies.

Publishing in JCN in Practice

An author preparing a submission should work from the journal's instructions rather than from any summary, including this one. The points that most often decide whether a paper proceeds smoothly are visible already in the published guidance. Fit the article type honestly: a single interesting case belongs in the letters format with its tight limits, not stretched into an original article. Write the structured abstract to its four headings and its 250-word ceiling. Keep the main text near the recommended 4,000 words, plan the seven figures and tables as the paper's evidence core, and move additional material into supplementary data, which the online canonical version carries. Follow the journal's ethical policy — DOAJ records plagiarism screening, and the instructions set out the journal's ethics requirements, including the expectations that apply to human and animal research, consent and disclosure that are standard for a clinical journal of this standing. Expect double anonymous review, prepare the manuscript so that it does not identify its authors in the text, and expect the Editor-in-Chief to make the final decision.

Timing expectations should be modest and evidence-based. DOAJ's journal-level figure is an average of about 16 weeks between submission and publication; individual papers vary with review and revision, and the journal's move to six issues a year in 2022 gives accepted work more frequent slots than the old quarterly pattern did. Because there is no article processing charge recorded, and because the licence is CC BY-NC, the journal is an unusually accessible route into an SCIE-indexed neurology title for authors without a publication fund — one reason it draws submissions well beyond its home country.

Relationship to Other Records, and a Note on This Entry

Journals World holds a second record for this same journal under the slug journal-of-clinical-neurology-korea (post 12512). Fetched directly and checked twice, that record is a thin template entry of about 274 words whose own top matter gives exactly this journal's ISSN pair, 1738-6586 and 2005-5013. It is therefore a duplicate record for the same title — the "(Korea)" in its display name is a disambiguator, not a different journal — and it is flagged here for the site's merge process. Its stored publisher field is garbled, reading as a bare number followed by "(South Korea)", and should not be relied on; the publisher is the Korean Neurological Association. This profile appears on the present record (post 345491), whose top matter gives the same ISSN pair and links the journal's official site, thejcn.com. For completeness: a different deep record on this site titled Clinical Neurology (post 31716) is the Japanese journal Rinsho Shinkeigaku (ISSN 0009-918X / 1882-0654); it shares no ISSN with this journal and is not a duplicate of it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of the Journal of Clinical Neurology?
Print ISSN 1738-6586 and electronic ISSN 2005-5013.

Who publishes the Journal of Clinical Neurology?
The Korean Neurological Association, in South Korea. It is the association's official English-language journal.

When was the journal founded, and how often does it appear?
First published in 2005; twice yearly at first, quarterly from 2006, and bimonthly since 2022, with issues dated the first day of January, March, May, July, September and November.

Is the Journal of Clinical Neurology open access?
Yes. It is listed in DOAJ, publishes under CC BY-NC 4.0, and DOAJ records no article processing charge, while noting that other charges may apply under the journal's instructions.

Where is the journal indexed?
The journal lists SCIE, PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus, EMBASE, DOAJ, CrossRef, Google Scholar, KoreaMed, Synapse and KoMCI.

What article types does JCN publish?
Original Articles, Reviews (usually solicited), Letters to the Editor and Editorials (by invitation only), under double anonymous peer review with final decisions by the Editor-in-Chief.

Sources and Verification

This profile rests on the journal's own site — its "about" account of its history, frequency, canonical online version and indexing, and its instructions for authors for article types, lengths and review — on its DOAJ record read directly through the DOAJ search API for ISSN 1738-6586 (licence, charges, review process, publication time, preservation and subject keywords), and on its OpenAlex source record S4210173048, resolved by ISSN and read by exact source ID, for the bibliometric figures quoted. The duplicate-record notes rest on direct fetches of the Journals World records named, repeated at different points during the work. No Impact Factor is stated because none was verified from its provider's own record.