The Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences

About The Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences

The Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences: A Full Profile

The Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences (often shortened to KJMS) is the official peer-reviewed, open-access medical journal of Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan. Launched in 1985, it was created to promote clinical and scientific research in the medical sciences in Taiwan and to disseminate that research to the international community. It is published monthly by Wiley, which took over publication from Elsevier on 1 January 2019. Its bibliographic identity is anchored by two ISSNs: 1607-551X for the print edition and 2410-8650 for the online edition. The standard abbreviation is Kaohsiung J. Med. Sci. This profile explains what the journal publishes, who it serves, how it is indexed, how its metrics should and should not be read, and how an author should judge fit before submitting.

At a Glance

• Full title: The Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences
• Abbreviation: Kaohsiung J. Med. Sci.
• ISSN: 1607-551X (print); 2410-8650 (online)
• Owner / sponsoring institution: Kaohsiung Medical University (KMU), Taiwan
• Current publisher: Wiley (since 1 January 2019; previously Elsevier)
• Frequency: Monthly — twelve issues per year
• Access model: Open access
• Launched: 1985
• Language: English
• Field: General medicine and related disciplines

Identity and Bibliographic Record

Identity matters with this journal because its name appears in two forms. The definite article is part of the registered title used on this JournalsWorld record — The Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences — while the publisher, the university and most indexing services list it without the article, as Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences. These are not two journals. They are one journal, one ISSN pair and one publication history, and citations, library records and author CVs may use either form. A second JournalsWorld record under the shorter title exists and is discussed in the verification note at the end of this profile; readers should treat the ISSN pair, not the presence or absence of the word “The”, as the decisive identifier.

The print ISSN 1607-551X is the long-standing identifier that appears in the journal’s own author information pack issued by Kaohsiung Medical University. The online ISSN 2410-8650 is the identifier Wiley uses for the digital edition; the Wiley journal address itself is built on that number. When a database shows only one of the two numbers, that is a display choice, not evidence of a different title. Before citing the journal in a grant application, promotion file or systematic review, match at least one ISSN and the sponsoring university. If those two agree, the record is this journal, whatever title form is displayed.

History: From a University Journal in 1985 to an International Monthly

Kaohsiung Medical University, originally known as Kaohsiung Medical College, was formally established in 1954. The university describes itself as the first private medical university in Taiwan, and it grew into a leading centre for physicians and medical specialists in the south of the island, with particular strength in basic medical science and clinical research. The journal followed three decades later, in 1985, as the university’s own channel for making Taiwanese clinical and scientific work visible beyond campus and beyond Taiwan.

That origin explains two durable features of the journal. First, it has always been a general medical journal rather than a narrow specialty title: a university journal must serve surgeons, internists, basic scientists and public-health researchers at the same time. Second, it has always looked outward. The stated founding purpose was not only to promote research at home but to disseminate it internationally, which is why the journal publishes in English and pursued inclusion in the major international indexes early and persistently.

The most important modern change was the publisher transfer. For many years the journal was published monthly by Elsevier, distributed through ScienceDirect and sold, in a legacy listing that still circulates online, through the Elsevier shop. Elsevier itself records that, as of 1 January 2019, the journal transferred to Wiley. Authors who find older instructions, older article templates or an Elsevier submission route should treat them as superseded: the current publisher is Wiley, the current online home is on Wiley Online Library under the online ISSN, and current author guidance is the Wiley guidance for this title. Confusing the two eras is the single most common practical mistake in older secondary listings for this journal, several of which still describe Elsevier as publisher years after the transfer.

The Sponsoring University

Kaohsiung Medical University is more than a name on the masthead. As the journal’s official publication, KJMS reflects the university’s research profile: a comprehensive medical university in Kaohsiung, in southern Taiwan, training physicians and health professionals and conducting research that ranges from molecular and cellular work to hospital-based clinical studies. The journal’s own description stresses that the university put sustained attention on both basic medical science and clinical medical research, laying the foundation for its position as a leading medical institution in southern Taiwan. For readers, that means the journal’s article mix routinely pairs laboratory mechanisms with bedside questions, rather than treating them as separate literatures. For authors outside Taiwan, it means the journal is institutionally anchored but not institutionally closed: its founding mission explicitly includes the international community, and its contents have long included work from outside the university and outside Taiwan.

Aims and Scope

The journal’s stated aim is to publish original research and review papers in all fields of medicine and related disciplines that are of topical interest to the medical profession. Three elements of that sentence deserve attention. “All fields of medicine” confirms the general-medicine breadth. “And related disciplines” extends the welcome to work that sits at medicine’s borders — biomedical science, pharmacology, public health, epidemiology, diagnostics and interdisciplinary studies that connect laboratory findings to clinical practice. “Topical interest to the medical profession” is the editorial filter: the journal favours work a practising or research clinician would recognise as relevant now, over work whose interest is purely archival or narrowly technical without a medical application.

In practice, the published scope clusters into recognisable areas. Molecular and cellular studies explore mechanisms of disease, including gene regulation, signalling pathways and the roles of non-coding RNAs in cancer and other pathologies. Clinical medicine and therapeutics cover treatment regimens, patient management and outcome studies, including work based on clinical trials and real-world data. Public health and epidemiology address disease patterns, prevention and health policy, including communicable and chronic disease. Diagnostics research develops and evaluates imaging, biomarker and molecular methods for earlier and more accurate detection. A submission does not need to use these labels, but it should be possible to say, in one sentence, which clinical or scientific conversation the paper joins. If that sentence cannot be written, the paper is probably too far from the journal’s readership, however sound it may be.

Article Types

The journal welcomes several distinct formats, and choosing the right one is part of a successful submission. Original articles report full studies with methods, results and interpretation. Review papers synthesise a field for the general medical reader. Perspectives present argued viewpoints on topical questions. Short communications report concise findings that merit rapid, brief publication. Correspondence and letters to the editor respond to published work or raise brief points of professional interest. Each format carries different expectations for length, structure and evidence. A dataset that supports a solid short communication will rarely sustain a full original article, and stretching it invites rejection for thinness rather than for error. Conversely, burying a complete study in a letter wastes its evidence. Authors should read recent examples of the intended format in the journal itself before drafting, because format conventions — how abstracts are structured, how references are numbered — are visible there in a way no summary can fully convey. References in this journal are cited in the text by sequential numbers in square brackets, a small but telling detail that signals the expected manuscript style.

Peer Review and Editorial Standards

KJMS is a peer-reviewed journal, and secondary listings that record its editorial process describe double-anonymous review — reviewers and authors not identified to each other. Whatever the current operational detail, authors should prepare a manuscript that can survive anonymous expert scrutiny: a clear question, methods reported completely enough to be judged and, where relevant, repeated, results presented without selective emphasis, and conclusions that stay inside the evidence. Clinical work must show its ethical basis, including institutional approval and patient consent where the study design requires them, because a general medical journal read by practising clinicians cannot publish human research whose ethical reporting is incomplete. Animal and laboratory work should likewise report approvals and standards. These are not decorative requirements. In a monthly journal with broad scope, editors rely on complete reporting to route papers to the right reviewers and to decide quickly whether a submission belongs in the journal at all.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal’s indexing is extensive and is central to its value for authors whose institutions count indexed publications. The publisher’s aims-and-scope information and the journal’s own author pack list, between them: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) within Web of Science; MEDLINE and PubMed; Scopus; Embase; the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ); CAB Abstracts and Global Health; CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service); BIOBASE; SIIC databases; and Nutrition Abstracts and Reviews. Older listings also mention Index Medicus, GeoAbstracts and BIOSIS, reflecting the journal’s long indexing history under earlier names of those services.

Each index serves a different reader. MEDLINE and PubMed make the journal visible to clinicians searching the biomedical literature at the point of care and to systematic reviewers, for whom PubMed coverage is often a search requirement. SCIE inclusion places articles in the Web of Science citation network used by many universities for evaluation. Scopus coverage feeds SCImago rankings and many national assessment systems. DOAJ inclusion certifies the journal as a genuine open-access title in the directory that librarians and funders consult to distinguish legitimate open access from imitation. An author should still verify current status in the specific index their institution requires, on the day of submission, because index lists change; but the breadth above is the documented position and it is unusually complete for a university journal.

Metrics: How to Read Them Honestly

Because this journal has been indexed for decades, many numbers circulate for it, and they do not all agree — because they measure different years and different databases. SCImago, drawing on Scopus, has classified the journal in Medicine (miscellaneous), with a best quartile of Q2 in recent listings. Citation databases have reported h-index values in the fifties, and Journal Impact Factor values around three, varying by year. Authors will encounter figures such as an h-index of 57 and an impact factor of 3.1 in this site’s companion record for the journal, and different values — for example an h-index in the low fifties and a slightly different SJR — in other listings compiled for other years. None of these discrepancies indicates an error in the journal itself. They indicate that metrics are dated snapshots.

The correct way to use them is threefold. First, always attach a year and a source to any metric you quote: “Q2 in SCImago, for the year consulted” is a claim that can be checked; “a Q2 journal” without a year is marketing. Second, compare within general medicine, not across all science: a general medical monthly competes with thousands of titles, and a Q2 position there represents substantial visibility. Third, never let a journal-level average substitute for article-level judgement. The impact factor describes citations to the journal’s recent articles on average; it says nothing guaranteed about any single paper, whose reach will depend on its topic, timing and quality. Researchers choosing this journal should value the combination — open access, MEDLINE and SCIE indexing, a monthly schedule and a forty-year history — above any single decimal.

Open Access and What It Means for Authors

KJMS is an open-access journal: published articles are freely readable, which removes the paywall between Taiwanese and international research and the clinicians, patients and policy readers who may benefit from it. Its licences have been recorded as Creative Commons licences, including CC BY and CC BY-NC-ND options in directory data. Open access at a university journal of this standing should not be confused with light review. The journal’s presence in DOAJ, MEDLINE and SCIE is precisely the set of signals that separates established open-access titles from venues that merely charge fees. Authors should nevertheless confirm, on the Wiley journal page at the time of submission, the current licence choices, any article publication charge that applies to their article type, and any waiver or institutional agreement that may cover it, because those operational details are set by the publisher and can change between submission cycles. A specific charge figure quoted by a third-party listing should never be treated as authoritative against the publisher’s own page.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Not

The strongest fit is a complete, well-reported study or review in any area of medicine or a closely related discipline, written in clear English, with a question of current interest to clinicians or medical scientists, from authors who want open-access visibility in the main biomedical indexes without narrowing to a specialty audience. Work from Taiwan and the wider region has a natural home here, given the journal’s mission, but the readership and authorship are international. Less suitable are: highly specialised papers whose entire audience reads one specialty journal; preliminary or fragmentary results that cannot yet support a full article or an honest short communication; case material without the consent and reporting completeness clinical publishing requires; and manuscripts formatted for a different journal’s style, submitted unchanged. Editors of general journals can identify a recycled submission quickly, and the resulting delay costs more than reformatting would have.

Timing is a practical consideration. A monthly journal offers twelve submission opportunities a year and a steady publication rhythm, which suits work tied to academic calendars, grant reporting periods and promotion timelines. Authors working to a fixed deadline should still allow for peer review and revision; monthly frequency describes issue cadence, not a promise of rapid acceptance, and no responsible listing for this journal publishes a guaranteed decision time.

Preparing a Submission: A Practical Checklist

Before submitting, confirm the journal’s identity by ISSN on the Wiley page; read the current author guidelines there rather than any archived Elsevier-era pack; choose the article type deliberately; structure the abstract and references as recent KJMS articles do, with numbered references in square brackets in the text; report ethics approvals, consent, funding and conflicts of interest in full; check that figures and tables are interpretable without the text; and ask a colleague outside the immediate team to read for clarity, because a general journal’s reviewers will include experts adjacent to, not only inside, the paper’s subfield. Finally, verify indexing claims in the exact database your institution counts, and keep a dated record of that check with your submission file. These steps sound elementary, and they are — most avoidable rejections and most post-acceptance complications trace back to one of them being skipped.

The Journal as a Reading Resource

For readers rather than authors, KJMS functions as a monthly survey of medical research with a strong East Asian base and international contributions. Clinicians can use its reviews and perspectives to follow areas outside their specialty; researchers can use its original articles to see how questions are being framed in neighbouring fields; systematic reviewers will find it within standard PubMed and Scopus searches rather than needing to hand-search it. Its open-access status makes it usable in teaching without licence barriers, and its four decades of back content — spanning the Elsevier and Wiley eras — provide a useful longitudinal view of how Taiwanese medical research internationalised. When citing older material, note the publisher of the era in which the article appeared if a citation style requires it, but cite the journal by its continuing title and ISSN, which did not change with the publisher.

Strengths and Limitations

The journal’s strengths are continuity, breadth and certification: published since 1985, sponsored by an established medical university, openly accessible, monthly, and indexed across Web of Science, Scopus, MEDLINE and DOAJ. Its limitations follow from the same breadth. A general journal cannot offer the concentrated specialty audience of a narrow title, and its prestige metrics, while solid for general medicine, will not match those of the small set of elite general medical weeklies. Authors must weigh reach and certification against audience concentration for their particular paper. That is a judgement about the paper, not a defect in the journal.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of The Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences? 1607-551X for print and 2410-8650 for the online edition.

Who owns and who publishes the journal? It is the official journal of Kaohsiung Medical University, Taiwan. Wiley has published it since 1 January 2019; before that transfer it was published by Elsevier.

Is the journal open access? Yes. It is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and described by its publisher and university as a peer-reviewed open-access publication.

When was the journal founded? It was launched in 1985 to promote clinical and scientific research in the medical sciences in Taiwan and to disseminate that research internationally.

How often does it appear? Monthly, twelve issues per year.

Where is it indexed? Documented listings include SCIE, MEDLINE/PubMed, Scopus, Embase, DOAJ, CAB Abstracts, Global Health, CAS and SIIC, among others. Verify the specific index you need at submission time.

What article types does it accept? Original articles, reviews, perspectives, short communications, correspondence and letters to the editor.

Is “Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences” a different journal? No. It is the same journal listed without the initial “The”. Match the ISSN pair and Kaohsiung Medical University to confirm identity.

Verification Note and Record Conflicts

Two conflicts in the surrounding records deserve plain statement. First, this site carries a second, thin record for the same journal under the title without “The” (Kaohsiung Journal of Medical Sciences), showing the identical ISSN pair 1607-551X and 2410-8650. That record is a duplicate in bibliographic terms, although it remains a separate directory post; its structured data additionally describes the publisher in an outdated form associated with the pre-Wiley era, which illustrates why publisher information must be taken from the current Wiley listing rather than from older directory data. Second, the present record’s structured publisher field says simply “Wiley”, which is correct for the current era but incomplete without the context that Kaohsiung Medical University owns the title and that Elsevier published it before 2019. No APC figure is stated in this profile as a verified fact, because the sources consulted disagreed in presentation and the authoritative figure is the one on the publisher’s page at submission time.

Profile compiled from the journal’s own university and publisher descriptions, its author information pack, and major indexing and directory listings. Metrics are year-dependent snapshots; verify current values in the source database before relying on them.