About Libri Oncologici

Libri Oncologici — Croatian Journal of Oncology: Journal Profile

Libri Oncologici, in full Libri Oncologici: Croatian Journal of Oncology — in Croatian, Hrvatski onkološki časopis — is Croatia's specialist journal of oncology, published in Zagreb by the University Hospital for Tumors of the Sestre milosrdnice University Hospital Center. For more than five decades, through a publication history that begins in 1972 and includes gaps in its early years, it has served the Croatian oncology community: the surgeons, medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, pathologists and other specialists who treat cancer in Croatia's hospitals, and who need a journal of their own in which clinical experience, case material and research from Croatian cancer care can be published, read and cited. Its papers appear through Hrčak, the Croatian national portal for scientific journals, which is where its editorial information, reviewer guidance and article archive are presented. The journal's name is Latin — oncological books, or oncological writings — and it announces the journal's character: a learned record of oncology as practised and studied in its home country, written from inside a university tumour hospital.

Identity and Key Facts

• Title: Libri Oncologici
• Full title: Libri Oncologici: Croatian Journal of Oncology
• Croatian title: Hrvatski onkološki časopis
• Print ISSN: 0300-8142
• Electronic ISSN: 2584-3826 — recorded in the journal's OpenAlex source record alongside the print ISSN, and visible in article records that list both ISSNs for the journal
• Country: Croatia
• Place of publication: Zagreb
• Publisher: University Hospital for Tumors, Sestre milosrdnice University Hospital Center, as given in the journal's Hrčak impressum
• Editorial office: University Hospital for Tumors, Sestre milosrdnice University Hospital Center, Ilica 197, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia, as given in the journal's impressum
• Editor-in-Chief: Ivan Milas, University Hospital for Tumors, Sestre milosrdnice University Hospital Center, Zagreb, as named in the journal's impressum
• DOI prefix: 10.20471/lo, visible in the journal's article DOIs, for example 10.20471/lo.2020.48.01.04
• Frequency: 3 issues per year, as recorded on the journal's Hrčak page
• Access and licence: open access — the journal is listed on Hrčak as a diamond journal, its content is freely reachable in full, and its rights statement gives the licence as CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
• Field: oncology — experimental, translational and clinical oncology, in the journal's own description on Hrčak
• Review model: double-blind peer review, as stated in the journal's published guidance for reviewers
• Coverage in directory records: 1972–1978, 1988–1999 and 2001 onward, reflecting the gaps in its early publication history

Founding and History

The journal's publication history, as recorded in the coverage statements carried for this post and in SCImago-derived summaries of its record, begins in 1972. Its early decades were not continuous: the recorded coverage runs from 1972 to 1978, pauses, resumes from 1988 to 1999, pauses again, and then runs continuously from 2001 to the present era. That pattern is worth explaining rather than smoothing over, because a reader who searches a database for the journal's volumes in, say, the early 1980s or in 2000 will find none, and should understand that the gap is in the journal's own publication, in years when Croatian academic publishing was under severe strain — including the war years of the 1990s in the second recorded run — and not a defect of the database. Since 2001 the journal has appeared without that kind of interruption, and the volume numbering tells the modern story plainly: articles in 2019 appear in Volume 47, and articles in 2020 in Volume 48, counting the journal's age from its 1972 foundation across its interrupted early life.

The journal's own historical summary on Hrčak adds the founding detail. It was launched in 1972 by the then Central Institute for Tumors and Similar Diseases in Zagreb, together with the League Against Cancer of the Socialist Republic of Croatia, the Cancer Section of the Croatian Medical Assembly and the chemical and pharmaceutical company PLIVA, and it had a regional significance in that first form. In 1992 the journal changed its rhythm of publication — to three issues a year, its current frequency — and changed its format and its editorial team, and from that year its papers have been published only in English, covering all areas of experimental, translational and clinical oncology. From 1997 the Clinic for Tumors (the University Hospital for Tumors) has been its sole publisher, continuing after 2010 when the clinic became part of the Sestre milosrdnice University Hospital Center. The same Hrčak summary preserves the line of editors-in-chief: Ivo Padovan (1972–73), Predrag Keros (1974–91), Krsto Kolarić (1992–95), Marko Turić (1996–2010), Danko Velimir Vrdoljak (2011–2020) and Ivan Milas, from 2020 — the present editor-in-chief named in the impressum.

Two features of the modern journal mark its coming of age. The first is its presence on Hrčak, the portal of Croatian scientific and professional journals maintained for the Croatian academic community, where its archive, its impressum and its guidance for authors and reviewers are presented in a standard, stable form — the same infrastructure through which most Croatian journals are now read. The second is its electronic ISSN, 2584-3826, registered alongside the original print ISSN 0300-8142 as the journal's online life developed, and its article DOIs under the prefix 10.20471/lo, which give its papers permanent, resolvable addresses in the international citation system. OpenAlex's source record for the journal shows publication years running from 1972 through 2025 with a further run of 2026-dated material already registered at checking time, and counts the journal as open access in its modern form — a hospital journal, founded in print in the 1970s, that now delivers its contents openly online.

Scope and Subject Coverage

Libri Oncologici is an oncology journal in the full clinical sense. Its subject is cancer: how cancers arise and are classified, how they are diagnosed and staged, and above all how they are treated — by surgery, by systemic drug therapy, by radiotherapy and by the combinations of these that modern oncology uses — together with the outcomes, complications and quality-of-life questions that follow treatment. The reviewer guidance the journal publishes gives a practical window on the range of material it handles, because it lists the manuscript categories a reviewer may be asked to assign: original scientific paper, preliminary communication, review, professional paper, conference paper, case report and study design. A journal whose categories run from original research to case reports and professional papers is a journal that serves a whole clinical community, not only its researchers.

The citation-side evidence agrees. OpenAlex's topic profile for the journal, from its source record fetched for this profile, ranks its strongest topics as breast cancer treatment studies, breast lesions and carcinomas, endometrial and cervical cancer treatments, colorectal cancer surgical treatments, ovarian cancer diagnosis and treatment, and cancer immunotherapy and biomarkers. Read as a map, that is the caseload of a national tumour hospital: breast and gynaecological cancers, colorectal surgery, and the systemic therapies — increasingly including immunotherapy — that run across all solid tumours. Croatian oncology's own concerns appear in the journal as well, in papers on the incidence and mortality of cancers in Croatia, on national screening and prevention experience such as the Osijek programme for control of colon cancer described in its pages, and on the organisation of cancer care in the Croatian health system. Authors should test a prospective manuscript against that pattern: clinical oncology research, treatment series and outcomes from practice, instructive cases, reviews that organise a treatment field, and national cancer-control experience are the journal's natural material.

Editorial Leadership and Publisher

The journal's impressum, published through Hrčak, names its publisher as the University Hospital for Tumors of the Sestre milosrdnice University Hospital Center in Zagreb — one of Croatia's principal hospital centres — and gives the editorial office address as the University Hospital for Tumors, Ilica 197, 10 000 Zagreb, with the journal's published contact telephone number and its editorial e-mail address, libri.oncologici@kbcsm.hr. A journal published by a tumour hospital, from a tumour hospital's address, is edited where its subject is practised, and the editorial team named in the impressum reflects that. The editor-in-chief is Ivan Milas of the University Hospital for Tumors. The editors named with him are Lidija Beketić Orešković, of the School of Medicine of the University of Zagreb and the University Hospital for Tumors; Antonio Juretić, of the School of Medicine of the University of Zagreb; and Božena Šarčević of the University of Zagreb. The associate editors are Iva Kirac, Mladen Stanec, Robert Šeparović and Martina Mikulandra, all of the University Hospital for Tumors. Editorial teams change over time, and authors should confirm the current team in the impressum itself; the team is reproduced here as the journal publishes it, to show that the journal's leadership is drawn from the hospital and the medical school whose clinical work fills its pages.

One source consulted for this profile must be corrected explicitly, because it is the kind of error that propagates. OpenAlex's source record for the journal gives an implausible host organisation name for this Zagreb tumour-hospital title. That aggregator field does not match the journal's own impressum, and this profile follows the impressum: the publisher is the University Hospital for Tumors, Sestre milosrdnice University Hospital Center. The episode is a useful reminder, built into this profile's method, that aggregator metadata for small national journals can contain mismatched organisation records, and that a journal's own published impressum outranks them.

Peer Review and Article Types

The journal publishes its peer-review arrangements openly. Its guidance for reviewers, presented through Hrčak, states that Libri Oncologici is a scientific journal with a double-blind review process, meaning that both reviewer and author identities are concealed from each other throughout the review. The same guidance shows what reviewers are asked to judge: whether the paper meets the journal's submission criteria of length, scope and presentation; whether the manuscript is technically sound and its data support its conclusions; whether any statistical analysis has been performed appropriately and rigorously; whether the paper adheres to the field's standards for data availability; and whether it is presented intelligibly in standard English. Reviewers then recommend one of four outcomes — accepted, accepted with minor revision, accepted with major revision, or rejected — and assign the manuscript to one of the categories listed in the scope section above. For an author, that published rubric is practical intelligence: a submission that is in scope, honestly categorised, statistically careful and clearly written in English is built to pass the journal's own stated tests.

Metrics and Standing

OpenAlex's source record S4210214016, resolved from the journal's ISSN and fetched in full for this profile, counts 280 works for the journal with 122 citations at checking time, 263 of the works recorded as open access, an h-index of 5, an i10-index of 0 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.14. Those figures are attributed here to OpenAlex as a dated snapshot. The stored directory summary on this post recorded an h-index of 5, which in this case agrees with the OpenAlex figure, while databases that draw on Scopus have historically reported a lower count for the title — small journals sit near the floor of several metrics at once, and their numbers differ by source more than large journals' do. SCImago-derived summaries consulted for this profile report a SCImago Journal Rank of about 0.113 for the journal, place it in the Q4 band for Oncology, and give its publisher as the University Hospital for Tumors, which matches the impressum. No Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate is claimed for the title in the sources consulted, and none is asserted here; such a metric, for this journal, is recorded as not publicly disclosed in those sources.

The fairest summary of the journal's standing is the one its own history supports. It is the national specialist journal of a small country's oncology community, published by that community's tumour hospital, cited modestly in the international literature and read chiefly by the clinicians it exists to serve. Judged as an international research journal it is small; judged as the scholarly record of Croatian oncology — the place where Croatian cancer experience, from incidence studies to treatment series from Zagreb's clinics, enters the permanent literature — it has no substitute, and its continuous publication since 2001, its open online presence and its DOI-registered articles give that record a durability its interrupted print decades could not.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal's discoverability rests on three verified pillars. First, Hrčak, the Croatian national journal portal, presents the journal, its impressum and its archive, and is the route by which Croatian academic readers and libraries reach it. Second, its articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.20471/lo and its modern record is ingested by OpenAlex, whose source record — with the journal recorded as open access and most of its works openly available — places its papers in the open bibliometric ecosystem that universities and funders increasingly search. Third, the journal has a long-standing presence in the Scopus-based SCImago record, as the SCImago-derived figures quoted above indicate, with the coverage history that record reports. Any further database listings are not enumerated here, because they could not be verified directly from the databases concerned for this profile and a responsible profile claims only the listings it has actually seen evidenced; authors with an institutional requirement for a specific listing should check that database's current source list under the journal's title and both of its ISSNs.

Fees

The journal's rights statement on its Hrčak page is explicit on charges: authors do not pay for the submission of their papers, and they do not pay for publication if the paper is accepted. The same statement describes Libri Oncologici as an open access journal whose content is freely reachable in full, and Hrčak lists it as a diamond journal — the term for a journal that charges neither readers nor authors, with its costs carried by its publishing institution. Readers may copy and distribute the material, and build on it, provided they cite the original appropriately, under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence the journal states. For authors, that removes the financial question entirely: the only costs of publishing here are the ordinary costs of preparing the work itself.

How to Submit

Authors submit through the journal's own channels as presented on Hrčak, where the journal's pages carry its instructions and its editorial contact information. Preparation should follow the tests the journal itself publishes. Choose the manuscript category honestly from the journal's list — original scientific paper, preliminary communication, review, professional paper, conference paper, case report or study design — because reviewers are asked to confirm it. Write in clear, standard English, which the reviewer rubric expressly examines. Make sure the statistics are appropriate and rigorously presented, and that the data-availability position meets the standards of the field, for the same reason. Expect double-blind review, so the manuscript itself should be prepared without identifying material of the kind that would defeat anonymised assessment, following the journal's instructions on its portal pages. Clinical material must of course satisfy the ethical requirements that apply to patient data and case reporting in Croatian and European practice; where a specific journal-issued ethics form is required, the editorial office named in the impressum is the authority, and its current instructions should be followed over any general summary, including this one.

Similar Journals

Readers comparing national and regional oncology titles may also consider: Acta Clinica Croatica, the journal of the same Sestre milosrdnice University Hospital Center in Zagreb, a broader clinical title from the journal's own hospital family; Cancer Research, Statistics, and Treatment, Wolters Kluwer Medknow's open access oncology journal from India, as another nationally rooted oncology title with a clinical and statistical emphasis; JAMA Oncology, the American Medical Association's international oncology journal, at the opposite end of the scale for authors seeking the largest research audience; and the Annals of Oncology and other large European society titles for continent-wide clinical research. Within Croatia there is no second specialist oncology journal playing Libri Oncologici's role, which is precisely why its archive matters to its community.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the journal's full title? Libri Oncologici: Croatian Journal of Oncology — in Croatian, Hrvatski onkološki časopis.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 0300-8142, which is the identifier stored on this post, and electronic ISSN 2584-3826, recorded with it in the journal's OpenAlex source record and in its article records.

Who publishes it? The University Hospital for Tumors, Sestre milosrdnice University Hospital Center, Zagreb, according to the journal's own Hrčak impressum. An aggregator host-organisation field that suggests otherwise is an error, as explained in this profile.

Who is the editor-in-chief? Ivan Milas, of the University Hospital for Tumors, named in the journal's impressum.

When did it begin? Its recorded coverage begins in 1972, with gaps in 1979–1987 and 2000 in the coverage statements consulted, and continuous publication from 2001.

How is it peer reviewed? By double-blind review, according to the journal's published guidance for reviewers, which also lists the manuscript categories and the review criteria reproduced in this profile.

What citation figures does OpenAlex give? At checking time, 280 works, 122 citations and an h-index of 5, from OpenAlex source S4210214016.

Does it charge authors? No. The journal's Hrčak rights statement says authors pay neither for submission nor for publication on acceptance, and the journal is listed as a diamond open access journal under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Where is the editorial office? University Hospital for Tumors, Sestre milosrdnice University Hospital Center, Ilica 197, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia, per the journal's impressum.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is built from the journal's own published material presented through Hrčak — its journal page (status as an active diamond journal, both ISSNs, DOI, frequency of three issues a year, founding and editor history, and a rights statement recording open access under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 with no charges to authors for submission or publication), its impressum (publisher, editorial office, editor-in-chief and editorial team) and its guidance for reviewers (double-blind process, review criteria and manuscript categories), as retrieved for this profile — from the OpenAlex source record S4210214016 resolved from the journal's ISSN and fetched in full (ISSN pair, work and citation counts, topic profile), from article records listing both ISSNs and the journal's DOI pattern, and from SCImago-derived summaries for the ranking and coverage figures attributed to them in the text. The twin-check carried out for this post found no other JournalsWorld post carrying its ISSN. Details that could not be verified are described as not published, not publicly disclosed or could not be verified, rather than reconstructed.