About Hong Kong Journal of Nephrology

Hong Kong Journal of Nephrology

The Hong Kong Journal of Nephrology was the official peer-reviewed journal of the Hong Kong Society of Nephrology, published by Elsevier from the October 2003 issue, with ISSN 1561-5413 and electronic ISSN 1876-4371. It recorded Hong Kong nephrology research and milestones and promoted the society's activities, was indexed in CAB Abstracts, EMBASE, Scopus and other services through ScienceDirect, and is presented in this profile in the past tense where the record requires it: its ScienceDirect page shows volumes into the late 2010s and no articles currently in press, marking it as a completed chapter of Hong Kong medical publishing rather than a currently active title on the evidence available.

Official Journal of the Hong Kong Society of Nephrology

Elsevier's own description of the journal is direct: the Hong Kong Journal of Nephrology (HKJN) is the official peer-reviewed journal of the Hong Kong Society of Nephrology. The society is the professional body of Hong Kong's kidney specialists, and its journal existed to serve that community — to record Hong Kong nephrology research and milestones and to promote the society's activities, as the candidate record for this profile summarises its role.

A society journal of this kind is both a scientific periodical and a professional chronicle. Its pages carry original research and clinical work, but also the record of a specialty's development in its own city: the growth of dialysis and transplantation services, the training of nephrologists, and the society's scientific meetings and positions.

Publishing History: From Lippincott to Elsevier

The journal's publishing history is unusually well documented in the society's own records. The Hong Kong Society of Nephrology's chairman's report for November 2002 to October 2003 records that, due to a change in its international policy, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins ceased to be the journal's publisher after the April 2003 issue, that publication was delayed as a result of the SARS crisis which then gripped Hong Kong, and that from the October 2003 issue Excerpta Medica — Elsevier — would publish the journal for the society. The same report gives the journal's new editorial email address from July 2003 and notes that in the four issues between 2002 and 2003 the journal published forty-eight articles, including sixteen original articles.

That single paragraph of a society report captures a journal in transition: an international publisher change, a public-health emergency delaying publication, and a small specialty journal maintaining a steady flow of a dozen articles an issue. Elsevier thereafter published the journal on ScienceDirect, where its archive remains.

Bibliographic Record and Indexing

The journal's ISSN is 1561-5413 and its electronic ISSN 1876-4371, with the standard abbreviation Hong Kong J. Nephrol. Elsevier's journal page records its indexing in CAB Abstracts, EMBASE, ScienceDirect, Scopus and SIIC, and names Cheuk-Chun Szeto as editor-in-chief in its listing, with volumes 18–19 shown in the publisher's catalogue record. ScienceDirect presents the journal's volumes as an open archive in its listing, and its articles-in-press page states that the journal currently has no articles in press.

Read together, those records describe a journal whose active life belongs to the 2000s and 2010s. This profile therefore treats the Hong Kong Journal of Nephrology as a historical society journal whose archive persists, and makes no claim of current issue publication that the sources do not support.

Scope: Kidney Medicine in Hong Kong

Nephrology is the medicine of the kidneys: chronic kidney disease, dialysis, transplantation, hypertension and the metabolic disorders that accompany renal failure. A Hong Kong nephrology journal publishes the research and clinical experience of the city's renal units across that field — dialysis practice and outcomes, peritoneal dialysis, in which Hong Kong has been an internationally significant centre, transplantation, diabetic kidney disease in a population where diabetes is a leading cause of renal failure, and the organisation of renal services.

The Hong Kong context matters to the journal's contents. Hong Kong's renal services, delivered largely through the Hospital Authority, and its universities' nephrology divisions — including the division at The Chinese University of Hong Kong associated with the journal's editor-in-chief in the publisher's listing — produced research of international interest, and the society's journal was one of the places that work and the specialty's local record appeared.

The Society Behind the Journal

The Hong Kong Society of Nephrology fosters research among its members, with particular encouragement for younger specialists, as its own communications describe; its members benefit through the society from corporate membership links to the International Society of Nephrology and the International Society for Peritoneal Dialysis. A society with that mission needs a journal, and for the period documented here the Hong Kong Journal of Nephrology filled that role.

The society's records also show the journal's place in its governance: its chairman's report reports on the journal's publisher, its delays and its article counts alongside the society's other business, evidence that the journal was a standing concern of the society's leadership.

Scale

The society's 2002–2003 report gives the journal's contemporary scale: forty-eight articles in four issues, of which sixteen were original articles — the remainder being the reviews, editorials, case material and society content typical of a specialty journal. That is the scale of a city specialty's journal: small beside international nephrology titles, but proportionate to the community of Hong Kong nephrologists it served, and sufficient to maintain a continuous published record of the specialty.

ScienceDirect's presentation of its volumes — volume 11, for example, appearing in 2009 with its second issue running from pages 39 to 69 — shows the same pattern in the archive: slim issues, steadily accumulated into a run of volumes.

Relationship to Other Nephrology Journals

The Hong Kong Journal of Nephrology should not be confused with the international nephrology literature published from Hong Kong's universities in journals such as Kidney International or Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, nor with Nephrology, the journal of the Asian Pacific Society of Nephrology. It was the Hong Kong society's own title, and its value lay in its local professional function as much as in its research contents.

Within Hong Kong medical publishing it belonged to the family of society and college journals — like the Hong Kong Journal of Ophthalmology for eye specialists — through which each specialty maintained its own record. Its Elsevier publication and Scopus indexing gave that local record an international bibliographic presence.

Access and the Surviving Archive

The journal's contents are accessed through ScienceDirect, where Elsevier maintains its volumes and where its copyright line in the journal's pages is held in the name of the Hong Kong Society of Nephrology. The candidate record for this profile gives the journal's ScienceDirect articles-in-press address as its website, a fitting marker of its present state: an archive held by its former publisher, with no articles in press.

For researchers, the archive remains citable and searchable through Scopus and ScienceDirect under ISSN 1561-5413, and Hong Kong nephrology work of its period can still be traced through it.

Why the Journal Is Included

Directories of periodicals record completed journals as well as current ones, and the Hong Kong Journal of Nephrology is a documented, ISSN-registered, internationally published society journal with a traceable history — a publisher change in 2003 recorded by its own society, an Elsevier archive, and a defined community. It is included in this directory, in appropriately historical terms, as Hong Kong's nephrology journal of its era.