Klimik Dergisi

About Klimik Dergisi

Klimik Dergisi (Klimik Journal) — Profile and Guide

Klimik Dergisi, presented in English as the Klimik Journal, is the scientific, open access and official publication of the Turkish Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (KLİMİK), Türkiye's national society for specialists in infectious diseases and clinical microbiology. The journal has been published since 1988, making it one of the longest-running specialist medical titles in Türkiye: it appeared three times a year from 1988 to 2021 — in April, August and December — and from 2022 it moved to four issues a year, in March, June, September and December. Its print ISSN is 1301-143X and its online ISSN is 1309-1484; the recommended abbreviation is Klimik Derg., and the title is recorded in the United States National Library of Medicine catalogue under record 9426195. The journal's language of publication is Turkish, and manuscripts written in English by international authors may also be accepted. It charges no publication fee — the society covers all expenses of the journal — and articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). The publishing services are provided by DOC Design and Informatics Co., Ltd. of Istanbul, which SCImago-derived listings likewise record as the journal's publisher, while ownership rests with the society; the editorial office sits in Şişli, Istanbul, and the editor-in-chief is Professor Dr. Alpay Azap.

The Journal and Its Society

Klimik Dergisi is a society journal in the full sense: it is owned on behalf of the Turkish Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, the society meets its costs, and its readership is the society's professional world — specialists and trainees in infectious diseases and clinical microbiology, together with physicians and practitioners whose work touches infection. That setting explains both its longevity and its language. Founded in 1988, it has carried Turkish clinical microbiology through the era of print into open access online publication without changing its title, its ISSN pair or its professional home; the volume sequence and the archive on the journal's site reach back across that whole span, even though commercial databases index only the more recent decades. The society also publishes a second, younger title, Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology, launched in 2019 as an English-language online journal. That companion is a separate publication with its own identity and identifiers, not a continuation or an English edition of Klimik Dergisi: Klimik Dergisi itself continues in Turkish on its own schedule, and the two titles should be cited, and submitted to, independently.

Aims, Scope and Article Types

The journal aims to publish high-quality basic and applied research articles on the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of infectious diseases across the fields of infectious diseases, clinical microbiology, virology, parasitology, immunology and epidemiology. Alongside original research it accepts reviews, editorial opinions, letters to the editor and case reports. The citation record shows what that scope means in practice. OpenAlex's topic profile of the journal's indexed content names its leading clusters as antibiotic resistance in bacteria; hepatitis C virus research; antibiotic use and resistance; hepatitis B virus studies; and bacterial identification and susceptibility testing — a clinically grounded mixture in which antimicrobial resistance and viral hepatitis, two of the heaviest infection burdens in Turkish practice, dominate. Articles visible in the journal's recent archive fit the same pattern: studies of respiratory pathogens responsible for co-infection in COVID-19 patients, evaluations of patients referred to an infectious diseases and clinical microbiology clinic because of high C-reactive protein levels, rational use of molecular methods in the diagnosis of meningitis and encephalitis, and case reports such as a tularemic pneumonia presentation reminding clinicians to consider tularemia in patients from endemic areas who fail to respond to beta-lactam treatment. This is a journal written by practising specialists for practising specialists, and its case reports and clinic-based evaluations are as characteristic of it as its laboratory studies.

Peer Review and Editorial Standards

Klimik Journal describes itself as an international journal run on independent and unbiased peer-review principles, with manuscripts evaluated under a double-blind system in which reviewers and authors are blinded to one another. The editor-in-chief evaluates submissions without bias as to age, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, sexual orientation or political views. The submission pathway is procedural and fully online: manuscripts must be submitted through the journal's online submission system, and all submissions pass a technical compliance check first — language, figures, tables, required documents and references are reviewed, and plagiarism screening is performed — before a manuscript goes forward to the editor-in-chief. The required documents named by the journal are an author contribution form, a copyright transfer form, patient consent for case reports, and ethics committee approval where applicable; authors should assemble these before submitting, because the technical check is a gate, not a formality. The journal states that its editorial and publication processes are shaped in accordance with the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), the Council of Science Editors (CSE), the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the European Association of Science Editors (EASE) and the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and that it conforms to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. No publication fee is charged at any stage, a point the journal states plainly and which follows from the society's funding of the title.

Indexing — The Journal's Own List

The journal's aims and scope page lists its indexing directly: TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM TR Index, Web of Science — Emerging Sources Citation Index, EMBASE, Scopus, CINAHL, Gale/Cengage Learning, EBSCO, HINARI, Cabell's Journalytics and ProQuest. That is the publisher's own statement of coverage, reproduced here with that attribution; indexing in the commercial services can change, and any author whose promotion or funding depends on a specific service should confirm current coverage in that service's own source list at submission time. Two clarifications are worth adding. First, the journal's statement that it conforms to the transparency principles published at doaj.org is a statement about editorial practice, not a directory listing: a search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by both ISSNs returned no record for this title at the time this profile was researched. Second, the JournalsWorld template previously attached to this post gave the journal's publication coverage as 2010–2025, which is a database coverage window — it matches the start of the journal's Scopus-era record — and not the journal's life, which began in 1988. The same template stored the publisher as the bare number "6662", a garbled value; the correct attribution is ownership by the Turkish Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases with publishing services by DOC Design and Informatics Co., Ltd.

Metrics — And Why They Differ by Source

This journal is a clean illustration of why a single h-index should never be quoted without its database. A direct fetch of the journal's OpenAlex source record (S4306517465, resolved through its ISSNs and carrying the combined display name "Klimik Dergisi/Klimik Journal") lists 901 works and 1,883 citations, with an h-index of 15, an i10-index of 31 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.33, and marks the journal as open access. A SCImago-derived listing gives a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.148, a best quartile of Q4 across its categories of Infectious Diseases and Microbiology (medical), and an h-index of 11, with coverage from 2010 — figures drawn from Scopus data at the time that listing was compiled. A journal-metrics aggregator presenting Journal Citation Reports data lists a Journal Impact Factor rising from 0.206 in 2019 to 0.320 in 2024 and 0.430 in 2025, with an h-index of 13 — the figure the older JournalsWorld template carried. None of these numbers is fabricated; they differ because the databases count different article sets over different windows with different rules, and because a Turkish-language society journal is systematically undercounted by services whose coverage starts in 2010 and whose citing literature is English-dominant. The defensible way to cite this journal's standing is therefore: indexed in Scopus and the Emerging Sources Citation Index per the journal's own list; Q4 in its SCImago categories per SCImago-derived listings; OpenAlex h-index 15 across 901 indexed works; and a Journal Impact Factor below 0.5 in the aggregator's JCR presentation — each figure with its source attached.

Submitting to Klimik Dergisi

Authors should submit through the journal's online submission system at klimikdergisi.org and prepare for the technical compliance stage: correct language and formatting, complete figures and tables, references in order, and the required forms — author contribution, copyright transfer, patient consent for case reports, and ethics committee approval — ready at first submission. Manuscripts are in Turkish as the default; international authors may submit in English, and should say so plainly in the covering correspondence. Fit is judged against the declared scope: diagnosis, treatment and prevention in infectious diseases and clinical microbiology, including virology, parasitology, immunology and epidemiology, in the form of original research, reviews, editorial opinion, letters or case reports. The economics are simple and author-friendly — no publication fee, open access publication, CC BY-NC 4.0 licensing, and a society that pays the journal's costs — which makes the title a rational home for Turkish clinical infection work that deserves a permanent, citable, indexed record without a charge barrier. Authors should nonetheless check two things independently before submitting: the journal's current presence in any specific index their institution requires, verified in that index itself; and the distinction between this journal and the society's English-language companion title, since choosing between a Turkish-language society readership and an English-language international one is the first strategic decision a KLİMİK-community author now has to make.

The Archive in Practice

The journal's recent volumes show a working clinical journal rather than a theoretical one. In Volume 37 (2024), Salar-Gül and colleagues investigated the respiratory pathogens responsible for co-infection in COVID-19 patients (Klimik Dergisi 37(2): 91–96), a study that sits squarely in the journal's virology and clinical microbiology remit and that later authors cite when working on mixed viral infection in hospitalised patients. The same volume carried an evaluation, by Koşar and colleagues, of patients consulted to a university hospital's infectious diseases and clinical microbiology clinic because of high C-reactive protein levels (37(1): 50–53) — the kind of consultation-practice audit that only a society journal rooted in daily hospital work tends to publish, and that speaks directly to how infection services are actually used. A 2023 article by Şahin and Uğur addressed the rational use of molecular methods in the diagnosis of meningitis and encephalitis (36(4): 251–255), part of a steady stream of diagnostic-method guidance. Case reporting remains a living genre here: a 2019 report of tularemic pneumonia (Klimik Dergisi 32(2): 210–212, DOI 10.5152/kd.2019.46) used a single patient — unresponsive to beta-lactam therapy — to remind clinicians across Türkiye that tularemia belongs in the differential diagnosis of pneumonia in endemic areas. The DOI stem visible in that citation, 10.5152/kd, is the journal's own article identifier pattern, and the bilingual presentation of these records — Turkish article titles with English renditions in the citing literature — reflects the journal's working compromise between its national readership and international discoverability.

Governance and Editorial Office

The journal's masthead, as published on its own site, makes the ownership structure explicit. The journal is owned on behalf of the Turkish Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases — the ownership line names Prof. Gökhan Aygün as owner on the society's behalf — and the society covers all expenses of the journal, which is the financial basis for its no-fee policy. The editor-in-chief is Prof. Dr. Alpay Azap, and the editorial office address is given as Meşrutiyet Mahallesi, Rumeli Caddesi, İpek Apartmanı No. 70 D. 7, Şişli, Istanbul. The publisher of record, DOC Design and Informatics Co., Ltd., is based in Maltepe, Istanbul, and is named on the journal's site with its own publisher representative; the same company appears as publisher in SCImago-derived listings, which is a useful cross-check that the society's stated arrangement and the bibliographic record agree. For authors, the practical meaning of this structure is that editorial decisions belong to the society's journal and its editor-in-chief, while production and platform services belong to the publishing company — correspondence about a manuscript's scientific handling goes to the editorial office, and the journal directs applications for print permissions and advertising to that same office.

How to Cite and Identify the Journal

Cite the journal as Klimik Dergisi — abbreviation Klimik Derg. — with print ISSN 1301-143X and online ISSN 1309-1484, and prefer the online ISSN when the version consulted is the web edition. Three identification traps recur with this title and are worth avoiding. First, the combined display name "Klimik Dergisi/Klimik Journal" used by some databases is a cataloguing convenience for the journal's bilingual presentation, not a separate journal and not evidence of two titles to merge. Second, the society's English-language journal Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology, launched in 2019, is a distinct publication: an article in it is not an English version of a Klimik Dergisi article, and neither journal's metrics should be quoted for the other. Third, the journal's age is part of its identity: citations to volumes from the 1990s and 2000s are citations to this same journal under this same title and ISSN pair, even though the commercial indexes that most search tools query only reach back to about 2010 — an absence from a database's coverage window is not an absence from the journal's archive.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Klimik Dergisi? Print ISSN 1301-143X and online ISSN 1309-1484.

Who publishes Klimik Dergisi? It is the official journal of the Turkish Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (KLİMİK), which owns it and covers its expenses; publishing services are provided by DOC Design and Informatics Co., Ltd., Istanbul.

Since when has it been published? Since 1988 — three issues a year until 2021, and four issues a year from 2022.

Does it charge a publication fee? No. The journal states that no publication fee is charged.

What language does it publish in? Turkish, with English manuscripts from international authors also accepted.

Who is the editor-in-chief? Prof. Dr. Alpay Azap, per the journal's own site.

Is it the same journal as Infectious Diseases and Clinical Microbiology? No. That is the society's separate English-language journal, launched in 2019; Klimik Dergisi continues independently in Turkish with its own ISSNs.

Why do databases give it different h-index values? Because each database counts a different set of articles over a different period: OpenAlex's record, which spans its full indexed set, gives 15; a metrics aggregator's Journal Citation Reports presentation gives 13; and a SCImago-derived listing gives 11. All three are source-specific, and the difference is a coverage effect — much of the journal's pre-2010 Turkish-language archive sits outside the commercial coverage windows — rather than a disagreement about the journal itself.

What is the TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM TR Index, and why does the journal list it first? It is Türkiye's national journal index, maintained under TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM, and for a Turkish society journal it is the home index: inclusion there signals that the title meets the national criteria applied to Turkish scholarly periodicals and that its articles are retrievable through the national system its core readership uses. The journal's own indexing list places it alongside the international services — Scopus, the Emerging Sources Citation Index, EMBASE and others — because the journal's authors are evaluated in both the national and the international systems, and the profile above reports both on the same attributed basis.