Korean Journal of Veterinary Research

About Korean Journal of Veterinary Research

Korean Journal of Veterinary Research — the journal of the Korean Society of Veterinary Science since 1961

The Korean Journal of Veterinary Research, cited as Korean J Vet Res and known in Korean as 대한수의학회지, is the official journal of the Korean Society of Veterinary Science (KSVS), South Korea's national veterinary science society. It is one of the longest-running veterinary journals in Korea: the society states that the journal was launched in 1961, and its archive runs in an unbroken sequence of quarterly volumes from that year to the present, reaching the mid-sixties by volume number in the mid-2020s. The JournalsWorld record for this post carries the journal's current identifiers — print ISSN 2466-1384 and online ISSN 2466-1392 — and those are the ISSNs under which Korea Science, the national scholarly platform operated with KISTI, also lists the title today.

That combination — a society journal, a 1961 foundation, a quarterly rhythm and a place inside Korea's national citation infrastructure — makes the Korean Journal of Veterinary Research a central record of how veterinary science in Korea has developed: from the livestock and public-health questions of a largely agricultural country in the 1960s, through the growth of university veterinary colleges, to the companion-animal, infectious-disease and One Health concerns of the present. Its own stated aim has stayed stable across that span: the promotion of animal health and welfare by disseminating new knowledge, techniques and regulation, so that readers can better understand and apply veterinary science. This profile sets out what the journal is, what it publishes, how it is indexed, what its citation record looks like from named sources, and how an author actually submits to it.

Journal at a glance

History and identity

A veterinary journal launched in 1961 belongs to a particular moment in Korean science. Veterinary medicine in the Korea of that era was dominated by livestock production, epidemic control in farm animals and veterinary public health, and the journal's earliest surviving content reflects exactly that world: the archive's first volume includes, for example, a multi-year serological survey of brucellosis reactors among imported and domestic cattle, goats and swine conducted through the National Institute for Veterinary Research in the late 1950s. Papers of that kind — field epidemiology, infectious disease in production animals, food-animal health — formed the journal's foundation, and they remain part of its identity even as the field around it has widened.

Over the following decades the journal grew with the profession it serves. Korean veterinary education expanded, research-active veterinary colleges multiplied, and the questions arriving at the journal broadened from farm-animal disease toward laboratory animal science, wildlife, companion-animal medicine and veterinary education itself. The journal's bibliographic identity changed along the way: its OpenAlex source record carries a list of four ISSNs for the single title, with 1225-0198 as the linking ISSN and 2234-134X alongside the current 2466-1384 and 2466-1392 pair — the paper trail of a journal that has been re-registered over its long life while remaining, throughout, the same society publication. Authors citing older volumes should therefore not be surprised to meet earlier ISSNs on title pages from previous decades; they belong to this journal's own history, not to a different publication.

Today the journal presents itself as an international journal, published in English or Korean and distributed worldwide by the society. The bilingual policy is a deliberate bridge: Korean-language publication keeps the journal usable by practitioners and officials working inside Korea's veterinary services, while English-language publication — increasingly the norm — makes Korean veterinary research readable, citable and discoverable abroad. Full-text PDF files are openly reachable through the journal's website, which also serves as the archive of record for its back volumes.

Scope and subjects

The journal's own aims-and-scope statement covers, in its words, all the scientific and technological aspects of veterinary sciences in general. It names anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, microbiology, pathology, public health, parasitology, infectious diseases, clinical sciences, and alternative biomedical and veterinary educational fields. That is a full-spectrum veterinary remit: basic sciences that underpin the discipline, the infectious-disease and pathology core that has defined it since 1961, the clinical sciences that serve practising veterinarians, and the public-health territory — zoonoses, food safety, disease regulation — where veterinary work meets human medicine and government policy.

Two phrases in the journal's aim deserve a closer reading. The first is its emphasis on techniques and regulation alongside new knowledge. This is a journal that expects to publish work of direct use to the veterinary system — diagnostic methods, control programmes, survey results that inform policy — and not only laboratory discovery. The second is its stated audience logic: any author affiliated with a biomedical institution may submit manuscripts. The door is not restricted to society members, to Korean institutions, or to veterinary schools alone; biomedical researchers whose work falls inside the scope are welcome, which is consistent with the journal's international self-description. Prospective authors should nonetheless read recent issues — all openly readable — to judge how their manuscript sits among what the journal actually publishes, because a broad written scope is always narrowed in practice by the community that submits, referees and reads.

Publishing pattern and editorial information

The Korean Journal of Veterinary Research is published four times a year, on a fixed calendar the journal itself states: 28 February, 30 May, 31 August and 30 November. A fixed, public schedule of that kind is a small but real sign of editorial stability — this is a society operation that has kept a quarterly rhythm across more than six decades of volumes. Copyright in the journal is reserved by the Korean Society of Veterinary Science, as the journal states, and the society carries responsibility for the title as its publisher of record.

The journal describes itself as peer reviewed, and submissions are handled through an online manuscript system — the Korea Science journal page links authors to the Manuscript Central site for KJVR — rather than by email. Authors should use the journal's own author pages for the current instructions on manuscript preparation, article categories, and any requirements the society sets, because those pages, and not any third-party summary, govern a submission. Details such as the current editor-in-chief, the editorial board's composition and the journal's fee position could not be verified from the sources checked for this profile in a form safe to print, so they are stated here as could not be verified rather than guessed: check the journal's own site for the masthead and for any charge that might apply before submitting. That caution is normal practice for society journals, whose boards rotate and whose policies are updated on their own pages first.

Indexing and abstracting

Indexing is where this journal's standing is easiest to verify, because the journal publishes its own coverage list and it is long. The Korean Journal of Veterinary Research states that it is covered by Scopus and by the Korea Citation Index (KCI), and by a deep bench of agricultural and veterinary abstracting services: AGRIS, Animal Breeding Abstracts, Animal Production Database, Animal Science Database, CAB Abstracts and the CAB Abstracts Archive, CAB Direct, Dairy Science Abstracts, Global Health, Index Veterinarius, Nutrition Abstracts and Reviews, Pig News and Information, Poultry Abstracts, Protozoological Abstracts, Review of Medical and Veterinary Entomology, Review of Medical and Veterinary Mycology, Veterinary Bulletin, VetMed Resource and the Veterinary Science Database. For a veterinary title, that CAB and veterinary-database coverage is arguably as important as the headline Scopus listing, because it is where practising researchers in animal science actually search. OpenAlex independently lists the title among KCI-registered sources, which corroborates the Korean national-index side of the journal's own claim.

A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by each of the journal's current ISSNs, made at the time of checking for this profile, returned no record. That result is reported as a search fact, not as a permanent judgement; directory listings change, and any author whose institution specifically requires a DOAJ-listed venue should re-check the directory at the moment of submission.

Metrics from named sources

OpenAlex, resolving this journal through its ISSN endpoint at the time of checking (source S4210170489), recorded 1,294 works and 1,987 citations for the title, an h-index of 15, an i10-index of 34, and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.34, with 618 of its works openly accessible in the OpenAlex graph. Those figures carry two caveats that this profile states rather than hides. First, OpenAlex's coverage of this journal begins in 2011 in its record, so the counts describe roughly the journal's most recent decade and a half, not its full run since 1961; the true historical archive is far larger than the indexed slice. Second, the older JournalsWorld template text for this record quoted an h-index of 11 — a different count, from a different source, at a different date. Neither figure is a Journal Impact Factor, and no Clarivate impact factor for this title could be verified from the sources checked; authors who need one should consult Journal Citation Reports directly. What the verifiable figures do show is a steadily cited society journal: an h-index in the mid-teens on a fifteen-year indexed window is the profile of a title whose papers are used by a working research community, particularly within Korean and regional veterinary science, rather than a title carried by a handful of hit papers.

Read alongside its indexing, the sensible summary is this: the Korean Journal of Veterinary Research is a Scopus- and KCI-covered quarterly with deep specialist abstracting, a six-decade archive, and a modest but real citation footprint concentrated in veterinary and animal science. Authors choose it for audience and fit — Korean and international veterinary researchers, the CAB-indexed animal-science readership, and a society readership built since 1961 — rather than for headline metrics.

How to submit

Submission runs through the online manuscript system linked from the journal's website and its Korea Science page (Manuscript Central for KJVR). Manuscripts may be written in English or Korean. Before submitting, authors should read the journal's current instructions for authors on kjvr.org, confirm the article category their work belongs to, prepare the manuscript and its figures and tables to the journal's format, and be ready to confirm that the work is original and not under consideration elsewhere. Because the journal's fee position could not be verified for this profile, authors should check the journal's own pages for any submission or publication charge currently in force, and should direct questions to the society's editorial office through the contact routes on the official site. Given the journal's quarterly calendar, authors working to a thesis, appointment or grant deadline should also allow realistic time for peer review and for the interval between acceptance and the next scheduled issue date.

The archive as a record of Korean veterinary science

One asset this journal holds that no metric captures is its archive itself. Sixty-plus years of quarterly volumes, kept openly readable through the journal's website and mirrored in Korea's national scholarly infrastructure, amount to a longitudinal record of animal disease and veterinary practice on the Korean peninsula. A researcher tracing how brucellosis, foot-and-mouth disease, avian influenza or African swine fever were studied, surveyed and controlled in Korea across different decades can follow those questions through this journal's pages in a way that no single recent database can reproduce. The same depth serves veterinary education: the journal's stated scope includes veterinary educational fields, and its back file gives teachers a Korean-language and English-language literature rooted in Korean animal populations, Korean husbandry conditions and Korean regulation, rather than imported examples that students must translate mentally into local conditions. Historians of science, meanwhile, can watch a discipline professionalise in real time — in the changing balance between livestock and companion-animal work, in the arrival of new diagnostic technologies, and in the gradual shift of the journal's own pages from Korean toward English as its community internationalised.

That archival value also imposes a responsibility that the society has, on the visible evidence, taken seriously: the volumes are complete, sequentially numbered and reachable, with full-text PDFs open on the web. When a journal's earliest papers concern disease surveys from the 1950s and its current papers concern the molecular epidemiology of the 2020s, the continuity itself becomes a research instrument. It is also why accurate bibliographic housekeeping matters for this title — the several ISSNs in its history, noted above, are the joints in that long record, and keeping them linked, as the OpenAlex source record does, is what stops the archive from fragmenting into apparently separate journals.

Who reads it, and what a good submission looks like

The readership implied by the journal's indexing and scope is layered. At the centre are Korean veterinary researchers and the society's own membership, for whom the journal is a house publication and a career record. Around them sit the animal-science and veterinary communities who find its papers through Scopus and the CAB family of databases — readers who may never visit the journal's website but who cite its infectious-disease, pharmacology and public-health work from abroad. A third layer is institutional: government veterinary services, diagnostic laboratories and veterinary colleges in Korea, for whom the journal's survey and regulation-oriented papers carry practical weight. A strong submission speaks to at least the first two of those layers at once: it states a question of genuine veterinary significance, it reports methods and data completely enough to be reused — a point on which survey and epidemiology papers in this journal are historically strong — and it writes its significance for animal health or welfare explicitly, in the terms the journal's own aim sets out. Papers that are technically sound but silent about why the work matters to the animals, herds, practices or policies it touches are usually the ones that sit least comfortably in these pages.

Similar journals

Within Korea, authors in veterinary science weigh this title against the other society journals of the Korean veterinary landscape — including the Journal of Veterinary Clinics, the clinical journal of the Korean Society of Veterinary Clinics, whose centre of gravity is diagnosis, treatment and case-based clinical work rather than the full basic-to-clinical spectrum covered here — and against international veterinary journals published in English, which offer wider global visibility at the price of fiercer competition and, often, publication charges. The Korean Journal of Veterinary Research occupies the classic national-society position in that company: the broadest remit in its home system, the longest history, national-index standing through KCI, international indexing through Scopus, and a bilingual door that lets Korean practitioners and international researchers meet in the same pages. A research group with a solid infectious-disease survey, a pharmacology study, a pathology series or a veterinary public-health analysis rooted in Korean or regional animal populations will usually find this journal the natural first address; a purely clinical case series may fit its clinical sister title better, and the scopes of the two journals are written to make that judgement possible.

Frequently asked questions

When was the Korean Journal of Veterinary Research founded? The journal states that it was launched in 1961, and its quarterly volumes run continuously from that year.

Who publishes it? The Korean Society of Veterinary Science, which distributes it worldwide and holds its copyright.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 2466-1384 and online ISSN 2466-1392. Earlier ISSNs, including 1225-0198, appear in its history and on older volumes.

How often does it appear? Four times a year — 28 February, 30 May, 31 August and 30 November, as the journal states.

What subjects does it cover? The full veterinary spectrum it names: anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, microbiology, pathology, public health, parasitology, infectious diseases, clinical sciences, and alternative biomedical and veterinary educational fields.

Where is it indexed? The journal's own coverage list includes Scopus, KCI, AGRIS, CAB Abstracts and a long list of veterinary and animal-science abstracting services, including Index Veterinarius, Veterinary Bulletin and VetMed Resource.

What do its citation figures look like? OpenAlex recorded 1,294 works, 1,987 citations and an h-index of 15 at the time of checking, over an indexed window beginning in 2011 — a partial window on a journal founded in 1961.

Can authors outside Korea submit? The journal describes itself as international and states that any author affiliated with a biomedical institution may submit, in English or Korean.

Profile prepared for JournalsWorld from the journal's official website, its Korea Science journal pages, and its OpenAlex source record resolved by ISSN, all checked in October 2026. Figures are attributed to their sources as at checking time.