About Frontiers of Oral and Maxillofacial Medicine

Frontiers of Oral and Maxillofacial Medicine

Frontiers of Oral and Maxillofacial Medicine (abbreviated FOMM; cited as Front Oral Maxillofac Med; ISSN 2664-777X) is an open-access, peer-reviewed electronic journal launched in May 2019 and published by AME Publishing Company of Hong Kong, with support from Wolters Kluwer, whose Lippincott and Ovid platforms carry its content. It is the official publication of Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, one of China's leading centres for oral and maxillofacial surgery. The journal realised a long-held ambition of Professor Weiliu Qiu, hailed as the father of plastic surgery in China, who served as its honorary editor-in-chief. Its official website is fomm.amegroups.org.

Founding and the welcome editorial

The journal's first article was its welcome editorial: Jia-Wei Zheng, "Welcome to the Frontiers of Oral and Maxillofacial Medicine", published as Front Oral Maxillofac Med 2019;1:1 (doi: 10.21037/fomm.2019.05.01). The manuscript was received on 15 March 2019, accepted on 8 May 2019 and published on 28 May 2019, and Zheng declared in its conflict-of-interest statement that he served as the journal's unpaid editor-in-chief. Zheng, of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the College of Stomatology, Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, presented FOMM as a peer-reviewed academic journal intended to provide a forum for clinical researchers, basic scientists, clinicians and others to publish reviews and original articles, backed by an editorial membership drawn from biomedical research and from clinical practice in the specialty. The journal had been in preparation for over a year and a half before its launch.

Weiliu Qiu and the journal's founding ambition

The journal's creation fulfilled a personal ambition of one of the founders of its specialty in China. Weiliu Qiu (1932–2024) was, in the words of the memorial published after his death on 24 May 2024, one of the founders and pioneers of oral and maxillofacial surgery in China, hailed as "the father of plastic surgery in China", and the first member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in the field of stomatology. He was an honorary professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a tenured professor at the Ninth People's Hospital, and a former president of the hospital and director of its College of Stomatology. The memorial records that, with a long-time dream of publishing an English journal of oral and maxillofacial surgery, Qiu realised that dream in May 2019 by supporting the launch of Frontiers of Oral and Maxillofacial Medicine and serving as its honorary editor-in-chief. He later held the same honorary role at the sister journal launched by the same team in 2022. A profile published in FOMM itself in 2019, "Prof. Weiliu Qiu: be a 'bowing' doctor", introduced him to the new journal's readers as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a professor and doctoral tutor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The host hospital: Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital

FOMM is the official publication of Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine. According to the journal's own account, the hospital was formerly called Bethel Hospital and was established in 1920. It has been built into a comprehensive medical institution featuring stomatology, plastic surgery and orthopaedics, conducting teaching and research while providing medical treatment. The journal's description records that the hospital possesses 1,800 beds and 32 chairs for stomatological treatment, and has four academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering: Professor Zhang Di-sheng, Professor Qiu Wei-liu, Professor Dai Ker-rong and Professor Zhang Zhi-yuan. The hospital is an education base for the School of Stomatology of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and for the School of Jiuyuan Clinical Medicine, and the journal states that over the past decade it has made achievements in clinic, education and scientific research that earned it a reputation at home and abroad. That institutional base — a hospital whose identity is bound up with dentistry and facial surgery — is the foundation on which the journal's specialty focus rests.

Scope across oral and maxillofacial disease

The journal aims to serve as an international and professional platform for healthcare professionals to share their research, knowledge and experience. It publishes articles across all relevant fields of oral and maxillofacial diseases, including but not restricted to dental problems, head and neck lesions, and otolaryngologic and ophthalmologic disorders — a scope that follows the anatomical reality of its specialty, in which disease of the mouth, jaws and face borders directly on the ear, nose, throat and eye. Work on the specialty's history also appears in its pages: a 2022 article in the journal traced the history of innovations in oral and maxillofacial surgery, the specialty it describes as born of surgeons trained in both medicine and dentistry.

Article types, including the iMDT Corner

FOMM welcomes submissions of the Original Article, Review Article, Editorial, Editorial Commentaries, Surgical Technique, Case Report, Clinical Guideline and Letters to the Editor. Its most distinctive format is the iMDT Corner, a report built around an International Multidisciplinary Team discussion — a format that reflects how complex oral and maxillofacial cases, from major tumours to reconstructive surgery, are actually decided in centres such as its host hospital. All submissions are reviewed by the editor-in-chief and the editorial team as well as invited referees, and the entire submission process is managed through the OJS electronic system, intended to provide an efficient process and a rapid turnaround of papers submitted for publication.

Publication schedule and turnaround

The journal was published continuously from May 2019 to December 2020 and now follows a quarterly publication model, with issues in March, June, September and December. Its published turnaround expectations are an in-house review of one to three weeks, external peer review of one to three months, publication ahead of print within one month after acceptance once the article processing charge is received, and formal publication within one to three months after acceptance, with original articles listed as priority. The corresponding editor listed by the journal is Annabel Liao, reachable at fomm@amegroups.com.

Indexing and impact factor

FOMM is indexed and covered by Web of Science's Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) and by Scopus, as well as Google Scholar and Ovid, and its digital preservation is handled through Portico. The journal records that it received its latest impact factor of 1.1 for the year 2025. For an English-language specialty journal founded only in 2019 by a single, albeit leading, Chinese hospital, ESCI selection and a Journal Citation Reports impact factor mark its entry into the standard discovery and evaluation systems used internationally in dentistry and surgery.

Editorial standards and open access

The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follows COPE's guidelines and the ICMJE recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing and publication of scholarly work in medical journals. Manuscripts must be the original work of the authors and must not have been published previously or be under consideration elsewhere. All content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), immediately and permanently free to read, download, copy and distribute on those terms; under its exclusive licensing agreement authors transfer copyright to AME Publishing Company while retaining the right to share their article as third parties may, together with certain scholarly usage rights.

A sister title from the same hospital team

In March 2022 the same Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital circle launched a second journal with AME, the Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Anesthesia, again with Qiu as honorary editor-in-chief alongside Hong Jiang and Ming Xia. The pairing is instructive: FOMM covers the diseases and surgery of the oral and maxillofacial region broadly, while the younger title covers the anaesthesia that makes that surgery possible. FOMM remains the senior and general title of the two — the English-language journal of record for its host hospital's defining specialty, launched in 2019 as the fulfilment of its honorary editor's long-standing wish to give Chinese oral and maxillofacial surgery an English journal of its own.