About Journal of Disaster and Emergency Medicine

Journal of Disaster and Emergency Medicine

Overview and identity

The Journal of Disaster and Emergency Medicine, abbreviated JDEM, is an English-language, open access, international academic journal based in Beijing, China, focusing on emergency and disaster medicine, and published by KeAi Communications with Elsevier publishing services. It is owned by Rongtong Healthcare Journal Publishing (Beijing) Co., Ltd., which retains copyright of the overall compiled journal and the compiled issues, while authors retain copyright in their individual articles. Rooted in the global medical rescue demands created by emergency incidents, the journal publishes research findings covering emergency medical technologies, emergency medical equipment and engineering, health emergency management, special medical rescue for nuclear, biological and chemical incidents, first aid and emergency medicine, critical care, trauma and public health. Adhering to a high-standard, international editorial mission, it advocates open collaboration and strives to build an academic exchange platform bridging basic research, clinical practice and health policies. The journal is published twice a year.

The journal's editorial contact links it directly to China's academic disaster-medicine community: the contact named in its open access information is Yan Zhou, reachable at a Tianjin University address, at the School of Disaster and Emergency Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine of Tianjin University in Tianjin. That school is an attested centre for the field; its researchers publish, for example, on the mechanisms of post-cardiac-arrest syndrome from the school's Tianjin base at postcode 300072, alongside the university's Wenzhou Safety (Emergency) Institute. A journal whose editorial office sits inside a dedicated university school of disaster and emergency medicine is therefore anchored in a teaching and research institution built for exactly its subject.

A necessary distinction: not the Polish journal

Readers searching for this title should note a genuine namesake. The Disaster and Emergency Medicine Journal published by Via Medica in Poland, with print ISSN 2451-4691 and electronic ISSN 2543-5957 and a Research Unit of the Polish Society of Disaster Medicine among its contributors, is a separate, longer-established European journal with a differently ordered title. The Journal of Disaster and Emergency Medicine described here is the Chinese, KeAi-published title, owned in Beijing by Rongtong Healthcare Journal Publishing, edited in association with Tianjin University's disaster-medicine school, and published in English as an open access journal. WorldNM records the two as distinct outlets, and authors should verify the publisher and ownership, KeAi and Rongtong Healthcare Journal Publishing (Beijing) Co., Ltd., before submitting to JDEM, since the similarity of the titles makes confusion easy and consequential.

Publisher and publishing model

KeAi Communications, the journal's publishing platform, is the Beijing open access joint venture co-founded by China Science Publishing and Media and Elsevier, repurposed in 2013 as an open access journal publishing service provider and now responsible for more than 280 scholarly journals. Peer review for JDEM is under the responsibility of its editorial board, and the journal operates within the standard KeAi and Elsevier author framework: submissions are automatically screened with iThenticate CrossCheck for plagiarism and overlapping text, high-similarity papers are desk-rejected, authors are encouraged to supply ORCID identifiers, and the journal's declarations tool must be used to disclose employment, consultancies, honoraria, patents, grants and any affiliation with the journal itself. For transparency, the guidance adds that for manuscripts submitted after 1 January 2026 authors are requested to disclose any potential conflict of interest, including employment, funding or other relationships within three years of beginning the submitted work, that could inappropriately influence or be perceived to influence it.

The eight areas of the journal

JDEM organises its content into eight main areas. The first, Emergency Medical Technologies, covers the techniques of rescue and resuscitation themselves. The second, Emergency Medical Equipment and Engineering, addresses the devices and engineered systems, from field equipment to hospital emergency technology, on which those techniques depend. The third, Health Emergency Management, covers the organisation, command, logistics and policy of health responses to emergencies. The fourth is special medical rescue for nuclear, biological and chemical incidents, the NBC field, in which medical teams must treat casualties while protecting themselves from radiation, pathogens or chemical agents. The remaining four areas are first aid and emergency medicine, the front door of the system; critical care, for the most severely ill and injured after rescue; trauma, the surgical and clinical management of injury; and public health, the population-level prevention, surveillance and response that frames all the others. Taken together, the eight areas trace a casualty's whole pathway, from incident scene through rescue technology, emergency department and intensive care, inside a management and public-health system, which is precisely the bridge between basic research, clinical practice and health policy that the journal says it wants to build.

Why NBC rescue and emergency engineering are in scope

Two features of the scope deserve emphasis because they distinguish JDEM from a general emergency-medicine journal. The explicit inclusion of nuclear, biological and chemical special medical rescue recognises that some of the most demanding medical responses involve contaminated or infectious environments in which ordinary clinical routines fail, and that the knowledge for those responses is held by specialist military, civil-defence and academic teams who need a civilian academic venue. The equally explicit inclusion of emergency medical equipment and engineering recognises that disaster medicine advances through hardware as well as protocols: stretchers, field hospitals, monitoring devices, protective systems and rescue engineering all require evaluation and publication if lessons from one incident are to improve the response to the next. A journal that accepts an engineering evaluation of rescue equipment beside a clinical trauma study and a management analysis of the same class of incident offers its field something a purely clinical title cannot.

Article types and limits

The journal publishes seven article types with stated limits. Original Articles may run to 7,000 words, with a structured abstract of up to 350 words and up to ten tables and figures combined; clinical studies require trial registration, and the applicable reporting checklists, STROBE, CONSORT, PRISMA, ARRIVE or CARE, must be followed. Short Communications are limited to 2,000 words with no more than two tables or figures, for rapid communication of novel findings or devices, a format well suited to new rescue equipment. Review Articles may run to 9,000 words and include narrative reviews and comprehensive overviews of established topics. Case Reports are limited to 2,500 words, require the CARE checklist, and must provide mechanistic or translational insight rather than mere description. Editorials are limited to 1,500 words and appear by invitation or linked to accepted content. Commentaries, also limited to 1,500 words, carry expert opinion, contextual analysis or responses to published articles. Letters to the Editor are limited to 1,000 words for concise commentary on recently published articles or emerging topics. Authorship follows the standard criteria: substantial contribution to conception and design or to acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data, drafting or critical revision, and final approval, with all authors accountable for the integrity of the work and a single corresponding author appointed to communicate with the journal.

Peer review process

JDEM follows a double anonymized review process, in which reviewers and authors are anonymised to each other, a stricter model than the single-anonymized process used by many sister KeAi titles. A submission is first assessed by the editors for suitability; if suitable, it is typically sent to a minimum of two reviewers for independent expert assessment of scientific quality, and the editors' decision is final. The workflow is published in six steps: editorial office review, with desk rejection for work that is out of scope, ethically conflicted, highly similar to existing text, lacking originality or flawed in design; assignment by the Editor-in-Chief, who invites reviewers directly or delegates invitation to an editorial board member; feedback to authors after at least two reviews, based on the reviewers' comments and the editor's own assessment; a final collaborative decision by the assigned editor and Editor-in-Chief on any revised manuscript; confidential handling by a different team member for submissions from the Editor-in-Chief, associate editors, guest editors, board members and authors with conflicts involving them; and reassignment of special-issue submissions to another board editor wherever a guest editor has a conflict with the authors. Editors are likewise excluded from decisions on their own papers, those of family members or colleagues, and those touching their own interests.

Open access, charges and schedule

The journal is a peer-reviewed, fully open access journal: every article is universally and freely accessible via the internet in perpetuity, in an easily readable format immediately after publication, and free for everyone to read, download, copy and distribute. Articles are published under the author's choice of Creative Commons licence, CC BY, permitting copying, adaptation and commercial use with credit, a licence link and an indication of changes, or CC BY-NC-ND, permitting non-commercial copying and distribution without alteration. The standard article publishing charge is USD 1,000 plus taxes, payable by authors or on their behalf by a funder or institution, but all charges for articles submitted before 31 December 2027 are fully waived. KeAi Communications and Rongtong Healthcare Journal Publishing (Beijing) Co., Ltd. are granted non-exclusive publishing and distribution rights. The journal is published twice a year, a semiannual schedule that suits considered, incident-derived scholarship over rapid news-style publication.

Readership and place in the field

JDEM serves emergency physicians and first-aid practitioners, disaster-medicine specialists and rescue teams, critical care and trauma clinicians, biomedical and rescue-equipment engineers, health emergency managers and public-health officials, and the policymakers whose plans those groups must execute. Its contribution is structural: it gathers technology, engineering, management, specialist NBC rescue and clinical medicine, which are usually published in separate literatures, into one semiannual, open access venue attached to a dedicated university school of disaster and emergency medicine. For WorldNM's directory, the Journal of Disaster and Emergency Medicine is recorded at its Beijing ownership base, with its Tianjin University editorial contact and its official KeAi journal page as its website, and is distinguished in the directory from the similarly named Polish journal of Via Medica.