About Annals of Thyroid

Annals of Thyroid

Overview and identity

Annals of Thyroid, abbreviated AOT and cited as Ann Thyroid, is an open-access, international, peer-reviewed electronic journal published by AME Publishing Company of Hong Kong, with distribution support from Wolters Kluwer through its Lippincott and Ovid platforms. It carries ISSN 2522-6681 and is catalogued by the United States National Library of Medicine under NLM catalog number 101719038. It is published online at aot.amegroups.org and is openly distributed worldwide. Bibliographic listings count 119 papers published in the journal.

The journal is devoted to a single organ and its diseases: the thyroid. It publishes original articles, editorials, case reports and reviews on all aspects of the thyroid, and it should not be confused with Thyroid, the long-established Mary Ann Liebert journal that serves as the official journal of the American Thyroid Association. Annals of Thyroid is the Hong Kong-published, AME title in the thyroid field, with its own ISSN, editor and editorial programme.

Scope: the whole of thyroid medicine

The journal's scope, as stated in its own Wolters Kluwer listing, runs across the full breadth of thyroidology. It includes thyrotoxicosis, thyroid hormone resistance and hypothyroidism; thyroid status testing; autoimmune thyroid disease; dysthyroid orbitopathy, also known as Graves' ophthalmopathy; nodular thyroid disease; thyroid surgery; and thyroid imaging. It extends to paediatric and neonatal thyroid disorders, the genetics of thyroid disease, thyroid disease in pregnancy, and iodine deficiency.

Beyond those clinical subjects, the scope reaches into the underlying science: goitre with hypothyroidism and neurological dysfunction, the cell biology of the thyrocyte, the nuclear and extranuclear actions of thyroid hormones, brain-pituitary-thyroid regulation, and animal models of thyroid disease. The journal's own author instructions summarise the same remit more briefly, as original research articles and reviews on all aspects of the thyroid, covering hyperthyroid and hypothyroid states and other thyroid problems including thyroid cancer, with original articles treated as the most important category and processed for rapid review by members of the editorial board.

Editor-in-chief Wen Tian

The editor-in-chief of Annals of Thyroid is Wen Tian, a chief physician and professor, and a tutor of master's candidates, in the Department of General Surgery of the Chinese People's Liberation Army General Hospital in Beijing. The journal's own biographical notice describes him as an academic leader in thyroid surgery and in hernia and abdominal wall surgery in China, serving as chairman of the Chinese Research Hospital Association Thyroid Disease Committee and chairman of the Chinese Thyroid Association, and as a board member of the Asian Association of Endocrine Surgeons. He is also recorded as a member of the editorial boards of eight core Chinese journals, including the Chinese Journal of Surgery and the Chinese Journal of Digestive Surgery.

Tian's editorial presence is visible in the journal's content. In April 2022 the journal published an interview with him, conducted by its editorial office after a national thyroid meeting, on the inheritance and exploration of the standardised management of thyroid diseases, in which he discussed the interpretation and promotion of Chinese expert consensus guidelines on the diagnosis and treatment of thyroid diseases, especially difficult and complex cases, and his keynote interpretation of the Chinese Expert Consensus on Postoperative Management of Differentiated Thyroid Cancer, 2020 edition. The journal's corresponding editor is recorded as Suki Tang. Its annual reports are issued in the editor-in-chief's name jointly with the editorial office, as with the 2021 annual report that opened with greetings from Dr Wen Tian.

Scopus indexing and the 2021 annual report

Annals of Thyroid was indexed in Scopus in June 2021, a milestone the journal recorded in its 2021 annual report. The same report documented the journal's growing readership, recording 47,773 pageviews during 2021 from Google Analytics data, described as a steadily increased number of visitors. The annual report format itself is a standing feature of the journal: it uses the report to account publicly for its indexing progress, traffic and editorial activity each year.

Citation metrics derived from the Scopus data place the journal at the modest end of its field, as expected for a young single-organ title. SCImago records an SJR of 0.211 and an h-index of 7. The journal announced a 2024 CiteScore of 0.6, with category rankings of 121 out of 130 in endocrinology, 23 out of 23 in endocrine and autonomic systems, and 214 out of 247 in endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism. SciJournal's database, which lists the journal's active years as 2019 to 2025 across subject areas spanning biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, medicine and neuroscience, records a 2025 impact metric of 0.84. The journal reports these figures itself, without inflating them, and they document a small journal fully inside the standard evaluation systems.

Transparent peer review

Annals of Thyroid adopted transparent peer review as an option for all manuscripts submitted from 19 March 2020. The journal announced the change as a commitment to openness and accountability, intended to increase the level of transparency throughout its peer review process. Under the arrangement, the transparent process was offered as an option attached to submissions rather than imposed on every author, a staged adoption that the journal documented on its own site.

The journal's peer review is conducted electronically. Its author instructions record that all submission and reviewing are conducted electronically so that rapid review is assured, that case reports implying new findings with significant clinical impact are carefully processed for possible publication, and that editorials are written by recognised leaders in the field and are generally solicited by the editors. Review articles are described in the same instructions as timely, in-depth treatments of an issue, generally solicited by the editors, with defined limits on length, references and figures.

Ethics and COPE membership

In July 2021 Annals of Thyroid became a member journal of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The journal's announcement explains the mechanism precisely: from July 2021 AME Publishing Company was formally recognised as a publisher member of COPE, and more than 60 AME-published journals, Annals of Thyroid among them, became COPE member journals as part of the publisher's commitment to best practice in scholarly publishing. The journal also follows the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

These memberships are recorded here because they are documented facts of this journal's own announcements, with dates, rather than general claims about its publisher. Between March 2020 and July 2021 the journal thus added, in sequence, an optional transparent peer review process, Scopus indexing and COPE membership, the three steps that mark its transition from a new electronic title to an indexed journal operating under the standard ethics framework of medical publishing.

Content and community features

The journal's contents mix research with the apparatus of a professional community. Alongside original articles, reviews and case reports, it publishes annual reports, editorials and interviews with specialists, including an interview with thyroid surgeon Hui Sun of Jilin University recorded in its journal information, and the 2022 interview with its own editor-in-chief on standardised thyroid disease management. Its review content addresses live surgical questions, such as a review on up-to-date evidence for transoral thyroidectomy and how to overcome its obstacles, commissioned for a series on recent challenges in the management of thyroid tumours.

That mixture reflects the journal's readership: thyroid surgeons, endocrinologists, imaging specialists and researchers in thyroid cell biology, for whom a single-organ journal collects material that would otherwise be divided among surgery, endocrinology, radiology and basic-science titles. The 119 papers counted in bibliographic listings represent a compact archive, built electronically and openly, rather than a large subscription journal's backfile.

Publishing model

Annals of Thyroid is an electronic, open-access journal: there is no print edition, articles are published online and openly distributed worldwide, and its content is additionally carried on Wolters Kluwer's Ovid platform under the AME and Wolters Kluwer distribution arrangement. Its manuscript categories follow the standard reporting framework of medical journals, with its author instructions referring manuscript preparation to the CONSORT statement and the associated reporting guidance for clinical studies.

The journal's author instructions also set out its submission categories in detail, from original articles and reviews to editorial commentaries, clinical trial notes, cancer genetics reports, epidemiology notes and technical notes, an unusually granular category list that reflects the range of material a single-organ journal receives, from laboratory genetics to surgical technique. All of it is handled through the journal's electronic submission and review system.

Assessment

Annals of Thyroid's verified record is that of a small, single-organ electronic journal with a clearly documented development path. Published from Hong Kong by AME Publishing Company under ISSN 2522-6681, edited by Wen Tian of the Chinese PLA General Hospital, it has published 119 papers counted in bibliographic listings, entered Scopus in June 2021, adopted optional transparent peer review from March 2020, joined COPE in July 2021, and recorded a 2024 CiteScore of 0.6 with an SJR of 0.211. Its scope is genuinely whole-organ, from thyrotoxicosis and autoimmune disease to thyroid surgery, imaging, pregnancy, iodine deficiency and the cell biology of the thyrocyte. For a directory of specialist media, it is a clear example of the single-organ journal model in contemporary Chinese medical publishing.