Proceedings of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Medical Sciences

About Proceedings of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Medical Sciences

Proceedings of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Medical Sciences — In-Depth Profile

Proceedings of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Medical Sciences (often shortened to Medical Sciences) is a peer-reviewed medical journal from Lviv, Ukraine, published by Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University as the journal of the Medical Commission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. It carries print ISSN 2708-8634 and electronic ISSN 2708-8642, publishes in Ukrainian and English, and is openly accessible through its official site on the Open Journal Systems platform. The journal is the modern continuation of the oldest Ukrainian medical periodical tradition: its own 125th-anniversary editorial, published in 2023, traces the line of the title back to the Medical Collection founded in Lviv in 1898.

This profile gathers, in one place, what an author, reader or librarian needs: the journal's history and ownership, its exact identifiers, its scope, its editorial arrangements, its peer-review model, its indexing footprint, its attributed citation metrics, its open-access and fee position as recorded by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), how to submit, and answers to the questions researchers ask most often. Every figure is attributed to the source it came from — the journal's official site and its own published editorials, DOAJ, OpenAlex, or SCImago — and anything that could not be verified from a fetched source is stated plainly as such rather than guessed.

History

The journal's story begins in 1898, when Dr Eugen Ozarkevych, founder and editor of the first issue and chair of the Medical Commission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv, launched the Medical Collection (in Ukrainian, Likarskyi Zbirnyk; a German edition appeared as Medizinische Sammelschrift). The journal's own anniversary history describes that first issue as the first collection of purely medical works written in the Russian-Ukrainian language of its day, created to spread knowledge across the branches of medicine, to build Ukrainian medical terminology, and to bring together researchers in fundamental and clinical medicine with practising doctors. Ukrainian professional medical terminology appeared in its pages for the first time.

The tradition also survived in exile. The journal's own historians record that Ukrainian physicians who emigrated to North America founded a Medical Commission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in New York in 1948, under Dr Roman Osinchuk, and in 1950 created the Ukrainian Medical Association of North America, which from 1954 published its own medical journal in the diaspora. The journal's historians describe that diaspora bridge as the symbolic link between Ozarkevych's Lviv initiative and the modern epoch of an independent Ukraine — one reason the title's custodians treat it as national heritage and not merely as a periodical.

The publication line continued, with interruptions forced by war and political change, through the Medical Collection in its new-series form and through Proceedings of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Medical Collection. Medicine and Biology. New Series. After Ukraine's independence the Medical Commission was revived in Lviv — the journal's historians date the revival of the commission and its journal to 1993 — and the title settled into its present form, Proceedings of the Shevchenko Scientific Society. Medical Sciences. Articles have carried Crossref DOIs since 2017, under the prefix 10.25040, and February 2023 marked the 125th anniversary of the founding publication, an occasion the journal marked with a detailed history of its own development. Through every change of title and regime, the journal kept a deliberately multidisciplinary medical course rather than narrowing to a single specialty, a tradition its editors emphasise to this day.

Publisher and Ownership

The publisher of record is Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University in Lviv, Ukraine: DOAJ names the university as publisher, and SCImago gives the same publisher and country. The journal is the organ of the Medical Commission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society — the society founded in the nineteenth century that functions as Ukraine's oldest academy-style learned society — and its editorial base sits within Lviv's medical university community. JournalsWorld's older template record stored the publisher as a numeric code; the named publisher above is the verified one, confirmed in the journal's DOAJ record and in its own pages.

The Shevchenko Scientific Society connection matters for authors because it ties the journal to a national scholarly institution rather than to a commercial publishing house. The society's medical commission supplies the journal's academic identity, the university supplies its publishing infrastructure, and the journal's website is hosted on the university's journal platform, where the full archive — from the revived series through to the current volume — is posted for open reading.

Aims and Scope

Medical Sciences is a general medical journal. Its own description of its remit covers fundamental and clinical medical sciences: current medical problems, and new methods for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease across the specialties. DOAJ classifies the journal under Medicine (LCC class R) and records keywords including medical sciences, clinical research, healthcare issues, molecular medicine and general medicine. SCImago places it in the category Molecular Medicine, which reflects its mix of laboratory and clinical content rather than a narrow molecular remit.

In practice, a submission fits when it reports original clinical or experimental medical research, a clinically grounded review, or work on the organisation and history of medicine and healthcare that speaks to the journal's Ukrainian and international readership. The journal has kept the broad church character of its 1898 ancestor: papers from internal medicine, surgery, physiology, pharmacology, public health and allied clinical fields sit side by side in its issues. Authors with highly specialised work should check recent issues on the official site to confirm the fit before submitting, since a general journal's editors will still expect a clear reason why a broad medical audience should read the paper.

Editorial Leadership and Governance

Editorial responsibility rests with the Medical Commission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society working through Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University. The journal's anniversary editorials and its historical articles are written from within that editorial community — the 125th-anniversary history, for example, was authored by Oksana Zayachkivska with Vasyl Lonchyna — and the journal's correspondence and editorial office are in Lviv. The named editor-in-chief for the current volume could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile, so authors should confirm the current masthead on the official site, where the editorial board is posted, before addressing correspondence.

Governance follows the standard Ukrainian academic-journal model: an editor-in-chief and editorial board drawn from the medical university and the society's membership, subject editors for the clinical and fundamental fields the journal covers, and external reviewers drawn from the wider medical community. The journal is a bilingual title, publishing in Ukrainian and English, which shapes its board and reviewer pool: manuscripts may arrive in either language, and the journal's English-language presence is a deliberate part of its post-2017 development, aimed at the international readership its editors cite in their anniversary accounts.

Peer Review Process

Submissions are handled through the journal's Open Journal Systems site, where authors register, upload manuscripts and track editorial decisions. The journal presents itself as peer-reviewed, and its papers pass through editorial screening followed by review by subject specialists before acceptance. Precise service standards — median days to first decision, acceptance rate — are not published figures that could be verified for this profile, and authors should treat any third-party site quoting such numbers with caution.

What authors can verify directly from the journal's own platform is the shape of the process: submission through the OJS portal, an editorial check for scope and completeness, external review, revision, and production with Crossref DOI registration for accepted papers. Because the journal publishes in two languages, authors should follow the author instructions on the site for the language of their manuscript, its abstracting requirements in the second language, and its reference style, and should expect the editorial office to enforce those requirements before a paper goes to reviewers.

Indexing and Abstracting

The journal's own anniversary editorial states that Medical Sciences is indexed in Scopus, Index Copernicus, DOAJ and Google Scholar, and describes the title as an open-access journal read in 155 countries. Its DOAJ listing was verified directly for this profile: DOAJ holds a record for the journal under ISSN 2708-8634, naming Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University as publisher, Ukraine as country, English and Ukrainian as languages, and a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. OpenAlex likewise marks the source as open access and as present in DOAJ. SCImago includes the journal in its rankings under Ukraine, in the Molecular Medicine category.

Indexing claims should always be re-checked at the point of submission, because database coverage changes; but the verifiable position at the time of writing is a journal with a confirmed DOAJ record, a Scopus presence asserted by its own editors, and full-text visibility through Google Scholar and its own open archive.

Impact Metrics (Attributed)

OpenAlex, resolving the source through its ISSN endpoint (source S4210186770), recorded 572 works and 635 citations for the journal at the time of checking, with an h-index of 9 and a two-year mean citedness of about 1.10. OpenAlex groups this source with the legacy ISSN 1563-3950 of the predecessor series, so its work counts reach back beyond the current title's 2019 start; treat them as series-level figures, not as counts for the current title alone. SCImago, whose coverage of the current title runs from 2019, places the journal in the fourth quartile (Q4) of its Molecular Medicine category, with an SJR of roughly 0.13 in recent editions. JournalsWorld's earlier template record quoted an h-index of 7, a SCImago-derived figure; the difference from the OpenAlex value is a difference of database and date, not an error to be averaged away.

The journal has no Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate that could be verified for this profile, and any website assigning it one should be distrusted. For evaluation purposes the honest summary is: a small, nationally rooted medical journal with a long history, modest but real citation visibility concentrated in Ukrainian and Eastern European medicine, and metrics that should be read as those of a general national title rather than of an international specialty journal.

Open Access, Licensing and Fees

The journal is open access: articles are freely readable on its official site, and its DOAJ record gives its licence as CC BY, the most permissive Creative Commons licence, allowing reuse with attribution. Its editors describe the journal as an open-access title read internationally, and OpenAlex independently flags the source as open access.

On fees, the DOAJ record reports that the journal has article processing charges, with a maximum figure of EUR 420 recorded in the record and a link to the journal's own publication-fees page. Authors should read that fees page on the official site before submitting, because the DOAJ figure is a recorded maximum at the time the record was checked, not a quote: the amount actually payable, any waivers, and any separate charges can only be confirmed against the journal's current schedule. No other fee information is asserted here, because none could be verified from a fetched source.

A practical consequence of the general scope is that editors read for breadth as well as rigour. A technically sound paper on a narrow question may still be returned if its framing speaks only to a handful of subspecialists. Authors improve their chances by stating early — in the abstract and introduction — what a clinician or researcher outside the immediate specialty gains from the work, by writing the discussion for that wider reader, and by keeping terminology consistent with the Ukrainian medical vocabulary the journal itself helped to build, which remains a point of editorial pride in Lviv.

How to Submit

Submit through the journal's official website on the Lviv medical university journal platform (the OJS installation whose public face is mspsss.org.ua). Register an author account, follow the submission steps, and upload the manuscript in the format the author instructions require, with abstracts in the journal's two languages as directed. Before submitting: confirm the current editorial board and fees page; prepare the manuscript to the journal's template and reference style; make sure ethics approvals and patient-consent statements required for clinical work are documented in the text; and check that the paper speaks to a general medical readership, since scope fit is the first editorial test at a multidisciplinary title.

Correspondence belongs with the editorial office in Lviv through the contact routes given on the journal site. Authors outside Ukraine should write in English; the journal handles bilingual correspondence as part of its normal operation.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Look Elsewhere

This journal suits researchers — especially those in Ukraine and the wider Eastern European medical community — who want a peer-reviewed, open-access, Scopus- and DOAJ-visible home for general clinical or fundamental medical research, with the credibility of a title whose lineage runs back to 1898 and whose publisher is a national medical university. It is a natural venue for work of regional clinical relevance, for Ukrainian-language medical scholarship with an English face, and for historical and organisational studies of medicine.

It is a weaker fit for authors who need a high-impact-factor specialty journal for promotion rules keyed to Clarivate quartiles, or whose work addresses only a narrow subspecialty audience that a general journal cannot deliver. Such authors should compare the neighbouring titles below before deciding.

Reading the Archive

The archive on the official site runs from the revived series to the current volume, with recent volumes appearing in two issues a year; the 2023 volume, numbered 71 in the historical sequence, carried the anniversary history quoted throughout this profile. Browsing recent issues is the fastest way to judge the journal's present-day mix: original clinical studies, reviews, and the historical and organisational papers that reflect its society roots. Every recent article carries a DOI under the 10.25040 prefix, which makes the modern archive straightforward to cite and to trace through Crossref and OpenAlex.

Similar Journals

Authors considering this title often also weigh other Ukrainian general and clinical medical journals with open archives, among them Medical Science of Ukraine (Медична наука України), the Lviv Clinical Bulletin (Львівський клінічний вісник), and the Ukrainian Medical Journal. Within the Shevchenko Scientific Society family itself, the society's other series — for example the Precarpathian Bulletin titles in the humanities and social sciences — are sister publications rather than medical alternatives. Each comparator has its own ISSN, quartile position and fee schedule, which should be checked on its own record before any submission decision.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 2708-8634 and electronic ISSN 2708-8642, confirmed in the journal's own anniversary editorial and in its DOAJ record. OpenAlex also associates the legacy ISSN 1563-3950 of the predecessor series with the same source record.

Who publishes the journal? Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University, as the journal of the Medical Commission of the Shevchenko Scientific Society, in Lviv, Ukraine.

Is the journal open access? Yes. Articles are free to read on the official site, and DOAJ records the licence as CC BY.

Does it charge authors? DOAJ records article processing charges with a maximum of EUR 420 and links to the journal's own publication-fees page; confirm the current amount on that page before submitting.

Is it indexed in Scopus and DOAJ? The journal's editors state Scopus indexing, and its DOAJ listing was verified directly for this profile. Recheck both at submission time.

What are its citation metrics? OpenAlex recorded 572 works, 635 citations and an h-index of 9 at checking; SCImago places it in Q4 for Molecular Medicine. No Clarivate Journal Impact Factor could be verified.

How old is the journal? Its line runs from the Medical Collection of 1898 — 125 years in 2023 — through predecessor series to the current title, whose modern coverage under the present ISSNs begins in 2019.

Sources consulted for this profile: the journal's official website and its published 125th-anniversary history (2023), the DOAJ record for ISSN 2708-8634 / 2708-8642, the OpenAlex source record S4210186770 resolved through the ISSN endpoint, and SCImago data for the title. Metrics are attributed to their providers and were checked at the time of writing; verify current values on the official site before relying on them.