Oncology in Clinical Practice

About Oncology in Clinical Practice

Oncology in Clinical Practice — Journal Profile

Oncology in Clinical Practice (OCP) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of clinical oncology and translational cancer science, published in Poland by Via Medica. Its recorded identifiers are print ISSN 2450-1654 and electronic ISSN 2450-6478 — the pair carried on this Journals World record, printed on the journal's own articles, recorded in its listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and used by OpenAlex and SCImago for the same title. The journal is the official journal of the Polish Society of Clinical Oncology, and it works under the patronage of leading Polish oncology institutions and scientific societies, among them the Melanoma Academy, the Maria Skłodowska-Curie National Research Institute of Oncology, the Polish Lung Cancer Group, the Polish Oncology Society, the Polish Society of Pathologists and the Polish Society of Radiation Oncology. In collaboration with the Polish Society of Psychooncology it also publishes research on psychooncology, supportive care and the psychosocial dimensions of cancer treatment.

That combination of a national society base and an international, English-language readership defines the journal. Oncology in Clinical Practice exists for the working oncologist as much as for the researcher: it publishes original research articles, systematic and narrative reviews, case reports and letters to the Editor, and it has a long tradition of carrying Polish national diagnostic and therapeutic recommendations — the society guidelines through which new evidence is turned into everyday clinical routine in Polish cancer centres. Its current Editor-in-Chief, named on the journal's own site, is Prof. Maciej Krzakowski, MD, PhD.

Identity and history

The journal's archive on the Via Medica platform begins with Volume 1, Number 1 in 2005, and the journal has been published by Via Medica of Gdańsk throughout its life. For much of that history it appeared under its Polish title, Onkologia w Praktyce Klinicznej — the form in which its articles were cited for many years, for example in the Polish Lymphoma Research Group recommendations published in 2010 — with English as the language of its international edition. The bilingual heritage is still visible in the journal's rules: all submissions must be written in English, and manuscripts in Polish are considered only with the prior approval of the Editor-in-Chief. Print ISSN 2450-1654 was already being printed on the journal's articles by 2016, and the electronic ISSN 2450-6478 identifies the online edition.

For most of its life the journal appeared in six issues a year. The editors' own closing summary of the 2022 volume records that all six issues of that volume appeared on time — no later than the last day of every second month — and that the volume contained 11 research papers, 18 reviews and 7 case reports, together with three new society guidelines, on thoracic neoplasms, on skin carcinomas and on melanoma, and a stream of early online-first publications running alongside the compiled issues. The journal now operates, in its own description, under a Continuous Publishing model, under which accepted articles are disseminated as they are ready rather than held for a compiled issue, while the volume structure is retained for citation. On 5 January 2024 the journal was entered in the official register of journals published by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education with 100 points awarded — the ministerial score that governs how publications in the journal count in Polish academic evaluation. Its content is digitally preserved in Portico, the dark-archive service that protects the scholarly record against loss of the publisher's platform.

Publisher and setting

Via Medica is one of Poland's largest medical publishers, based in Gdańsk, and its journal platform hosts a wide portfolio of Polish society journals in cardiology, diabetology, neurology, pulmonology and other clinical fields, alongside the sister oncology title Nowotwory — Journal of Oncology. Oncology in Clinical Practice sits inside that ecosystem as the clinical-oncology flagship of the Polish Society of Clinical Oncology: the society's journal, carrying the society's guidelines, under the patronage of the national oncology institute and the specialty societies listed above. The journal's editorial office can be reached at the address the publisher gives for the title, ocp.journals@viamedica.pl, and questions about special issues are directed to the publisher's special-sections address, ssn@viamedica.pl.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal states its scope plainly: high-impact research in clinical oncology and translational cancer science. Its own about page groups the territory into five streams:

• systemic anticancer therapy and targeted treatments;
• immunotherapy and precision oncology;
• radiotherapy and multimodal cancer management;
• molecular oncology and translational research;
• oncologic pathology and biomarker-driven diagnostics.

To that list the journal's psychooncology collaboration adds a sixth stream — supportive care, quality of life and the psychosocial dimensions of cancer treatment — and its guideline tradition adds a seventh, cross-cutting one: national recommendations and consensus documents that translate trial evidence into Polish practice. The DOAJ record's keywords for the journal — oncology, cancer, neoplastic disease, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, radiation oncology — describe the same ground from the cataloguer's side. OpenAlex's topic analysis of the journal's indexed output, at the time of checking, showed the heaviest concentrations in lung cancer treatment and mutations, cancer immunotherapy and biomarkers, breast cancer treatment studies and lung cancer diagnosis and treatment — a profile consistent with the stated scope, with thoracic oncology, the home ground of the Polish Lung Cancer Group, especially prominent.

Article types and readership

The journal publishes original research articles, systematic reviews, narrative reviews, case reports and letters to the Editor, and it gives a prominent place to society guidelines and recommendations. Its readership is the multidisciplinary oncology team: medical oncologists, radiation oncologists, oncohaematologists, pathologists, surgeons working in cancer care, and the supportive-care and psychooncology communities. Because the journal is fully open access, that readership extends beyond subscribers: a clinician in a smaller centre, a guideline writer in another country, or a patient advocate reading the primary literature can reach every article without a paywall, and the continuous-publishing model is designed to shorten the distance between acceptance and that wider reading public.

Metrics and indexing — what is verified

Each figure below is attributed to the source that publishes it, as checked for this profile in October 2026.

• SCImago / Scopus: in SCImago's ranking of Polish oncology journals, Oncology in Clinical Practice stands with an SJR of 0.177, quartile Q4 in Oncology, and an h-index of 9; the same table records 53 documents in 2025 and 159 documents across the most recent three years, with 75 citations to the three-year set. The Journals World record's stored h-index of 9 agrees with this SCImago figure.
• OpenAlex: the source resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint for 2450-1654 (source S2737348819) records 935 works and 1,149 citations, with a summary h-index of 13 and an i10-index of 18, as at checking time. OpenAlex counts differ from Scopus counts because its corpus and its deduplication of the journal's Polish- and English-language records differ; the two sets of figures are not interchangeable.
• DOAJ: the journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals under print ISSN 2450-1654 and e-ISSN 2450-6478, with Via Medica as publisher in Poland and English as the language of publication.
• Polish ministerial register: 100 points, entered on 5 January 2024, per the journal's own about page.

The journal has no Journal Impact Factor figure quoted in this profile, because no such figure could be verified from an official Clarivate source during this research; readers who need it should consult Journal Citation Reports directly. Citation metrics for a journal of this size move slowly and should be read as signs of a stable, society-anchored readership rather than as a league-table position.

Open access, fees and licensing

Oncology in Clinical Practice is a fully open access journal. Its DOAJ record states that it levies no article processing charge and no other charges: authors pay nothing to publish, and readers pay nothing to read. That is the classic society-journal model, in which the costs of publication are carried by the publisher and the society ecosystem rather than transferred to authors — a model that matters in clinical oncology, where many valuable papers, from case reports to national guideline updates, are written by clinicians without grant funding for publication fees. Deposit and self-archiving are governed by the policy the journal posts on its own site, to which its DOAJ record points; the journal's full text is preserved in Portico for the long term.

How to submit

Manuscripts are submitted through the Via Medica journal platform, on the journal's own submission pages. The practical rules stated by the journal are simple and worth following exactly: write in English (Polish-language manuscripts only by prior agreement with the Editor-in-Chief); fit the paper to one of the journal's article types — original research, systematic or narrative review, case report, or letter; and, for work in psychooncology and supportive care, choose the dedicated section the journal maintains with the Polish Society of Psychooncology when submitting. Authors preparing a guideline or consensus document should note the journal's established role as the carrier of Polish Society of Clinical Oncology recommendations, and discuss the manuscript with the editorial office in advance. Special-issue proposals go to the publisher at the address given above.

Similar journals

Authors weighing this journal against neighbouring titles usually compare it with other European society and regional oncology journals: Nowotwory — Journal of Oncology, Via Medica's sister title and the journal of the Polish Oncology Society; Reports of Practical Oncology and Radiotherapy, the Polish radiation-oncology journal that stands at the head of SCImago's Polish oncology table; Współczesna Onkologia — Contemporary Oncology, Termedia's English-language Polish oncology title; Acta Haematologica Polonica, also from Via Medica, for oncohaematology; and, further afield, the European Journal of Cancer and ESMO Open for authors whose work is aimed at the widest European audience rather than at the Polish and Central European clinical community this journal serves best.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Oncology in Clinical Practice? Print ISSN 2450-1654 and electronic ISSN 2450-6478, as recorded by DOAJ, the journal itself and this directory.

Who publishes Oncology in Clinical Practice? Via Medica of Gdańsk, Poland. The journal is the official journal of the Polish Society of Clinical Oncology.

Is Oncology in Clinical Practice open access? Yes — fully open access, preserved in Portico, and listed in DOAJ.

Does it charge an article processing charge? No. Its DOAJ record states that it has no APC and no other author charges.

Who is the Editor-in-Chief? Prof. Maciej Krzakowski, MD, PhD, per the journal's own about page at the time of checking.

What kinds of papers does it publish? Original research, systematic and narrative reviews, case reports, letters to the Editor, society guidelines and recommendations, and psychooncology and supportive-care research in a dedicated section.

What is its SCImago standing? SJR 0.177, Q4 in Oncology, h-index 9, per SCImago's Polish oncology ranking as checked for this profile.

Since when has it been published? The archive on the publisher's platform begins with Volume 1, Number 1 in 2005; it published six issues a year for most of its history and now works under a continuous-publishing model.

Sources consulted for this profile, October 2026: the journal's own about page and archive on the Via Medica platform; the DOAJ record for ISSN 2450-1654 / 2450-6478; the OpenAlex source resolved through its ISSN endpoint; SCImago's journal rankings for oncology in Poland.

The guideline tradition

One feature sets this journal apart from most regional oncology titles: it is a working instrument of Polish cancer care, not only a repository for it. The Polish Society of Clinical Oncology and the country's specialty groups use its pages to publish the diagnostic and therapeutic recommendations by which Polish centres actually practise. The 2022 volume alone, as the editors' closing summary records, carried new recommendations on thoracic neoplasms, on skin carcinomas and on melanoma — three of the highest-burden areas of Polish oncology — and earlier volumes carried widely used guidance such as the Polish Lymphoma Research Group's recommendations on the treatment of primary cutaneous lymphoma, published in these pages in 2010. Papers of this kind are read differently from ordinary research articles: they are cited in hospital protocols, in teaching and in reimbursement discussions, and they give the journal a clinical readership well beyond the circle of its research authors. For an author, the practical consequence is that a well-built review or consensus paper in this journal can shape practice, not merely record it.

What the journal publishes, stream by stream

The five scope streams named on the journal's about page map onto the real workflow of a modern cancer centre. Systemic therapy and targeted treatment papers address drug treatment as it is actually sequenced and combined in clinic. Immunotherapy and precision-oncology papers cover checkpoint inhibition, biomarker-guided prescribing and the molecular testing that supports it. The radiotherapy stream, backed by the Polish Society of Radiation Oncology's patronage, covers radiation technique and multimodal combinations of surgery, radiation and systemic treatment. Molecular oncology and translational work connect laboratory findings to the clinic, and the pathology stream — under the patronage of the Polish Society of Pathologists — covers the diagnostic tissue and biomarker work on which treatment decisions rest. Around those streams sit the case reports for which a practice journal is the natural home: the unusual presentation, the rare toxicity, the treatment dilemma that a trial never enrolled. OpenAlex's topic profile of the journal's output, dominated by lung and breast cancer treatment studies and by immunotherapy and biomarker work, shows the published record matching the declared scope closely.

Continuous publishing and the volume system

The journal's move to continuous publishing deserves a word of explanation, because it changes how its papers should be cited and read. Under the older rhythm, an accepted paper waited for one of the year's six compiled issues; the editors' 2022 summary could therefore celebrate a volume whose six issues each appeared by the last day of every second month. Under the continuous model, the accepted, copy-edited paper is published online as soon as it is ready and is then gathered into the current volume, so the volume grows article by article through the year. Readers gain speed; authors gain an earlier citable version of record; and the archive retains the volume-and-issue structure that Polish academic evaluation and the ministerial register rely on. The online-first panel that the journal ran alongside its issues in earlier years was the bridge between the two systems.

Standing in Polish academic evaluation

The ministerial score of 100 points, confirmed when the journal entered the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education register on 5 January 2024, is the figure that matters most to its home authors. In the Polish system, ministerial points attach to the venue of publication and feed directly into the evaluation of researchers and institutions, so a 100-point society journal in one's own specialty is a rational first address for Polish clinical oncology work — senior enough to count, close enough to the community to be read by the people who will use the findings. The SCImago figures quoted above (SJR 0.177, Q4, h-index 9) place the journal in the fourth quartile internationally, which is the honest context for that national standing: this is a journal whose influence is primarily national and regional, exercised through guidelines, society readership and open access availability rather than through high international citation counts. Both facts can be true at once, and authors choosing a venue should weigh the one that matches their paper's purpose.

Preparing a manuscript for this journal

The journal's stated requirements are few and firm. The manuscript must be in English; a Polish-language submission is possible only by prior arrangement with the Editor-in-Chief, whose office can be contacted at ocp.journals@viamedica.pl. The paper should be framed for one of the journal's article types from the outset — original research, systematic review, narrative review, case report or letter — because the expectations for structure and length differ by type. Work on psychooncology, supportive care and the psychosocial dimensions of treatment should be directed to the dedicated section run with the Polish Society of Psychooncology. Guideline and consensus manuscripts sit at the centre of the journal's mission and are best discussed with the editorial office before submission. As with every Via Medica title, submission runs through the publisher's online journal system, and the version of record is the one published on that platform and preserved in Portico.