About AME Surgical Journal

AME Surgical Journal

Overview and identity

AME Surgical Journal is an open-access, peer-reviewed electronic journal of surgery published from Hong Kong by AME Publishing Company. It is abbreviated ASJ and AME Surg J, carries ISSN 2788-578X, and is hosted at asj.amegroups.org. The journal describes its aim as providing an international platform for surgeons of various specialties to share, learn and discuss the latest advances and state-of-the-art research in surgery, promoting research and practice within its specialties for the ultimate goal of benefiting patients worldwide. Its publisher describes it as one of AME's flagship journals, alongside more than sixty sister titles.

The journal is distributed with Wolters Kluwer support: Wolters Kluwer's Ovid catalogue lists AME Surgical Journal with AME Publishing Company as publisher, ISSN 2788-578X, surgery as its specialty and a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 0.7. It is one of the three AME-branded flagship titles of its publisher, together with AME Medical Journal for general medicine and AME Case Reports for clinical cases, covering the publisher's declared focuses of medicine, cases and surgery.

Launch in 2021 and move to bimonthly publication

The journal was launched in 2021. Its own announcements record that it was published quarterly from January 2021, while its ESCI announcement describes it as launched in June 2021, the difference reflecting the first issue's preparation and appearance within its launch year. What is consistent across its record is the launch year, 2021, and its volume numbering from volume 1 in that year. The journal's archive confirms the run: its archive page lists volumes from 2021 onward, reaching volume 6 in 2026.

Growth came quickly. The journal announced that, beginning in January 2023, it would become a bimonthly publication, with regular publication months of February, April, June, August, October and December. Submissions are managed through an online OJS-based system intended to provide efficient handling and rapid turnaround. A move from quarterly to bimonthly publication within two years of launch indicates a submission flow sufficient to fill six issues a year, and the journal has maintained that schedule since.

Output in the first years

The journal quantified its early output in its March 2024 indexing announcement. By the end of 2023 it had published a total of 122 articles, of which 48 percent were review articles, 27 percent case reports and 7 percent original articles, with the remainder in other article types such as surgical techniques and editorials. That composition, heavy in reviews and case reports, is typical of a young surgical journal building its archive through commissioned and clinically oriented content alongside original research.

Later annual reports continue the record. The 2024 annual report recorded 27 articles published in 2024 and an editorial board of 70 members from 15 countries as of 31 December 2024, with 28,697 visitors and 84,456 pageviews that year, the largest share from the United States, followed by India, the United Kingdom and China. The 2025 annual report recorded 54 articles in 2025, including case reports, review articles, original articles and surgical technique papers, with corresponding authors from 16 countries, and 47,405 visitors with 149,128 pageviews, again led by the United States, followed by China, India, the United Kingdom and Singapore. These self-published but specific and checkable figures give the journal a documented readership and authorship well beyond its Hong Kong base.

Scope across surgical specialties

The journal's scope covers the breadth of operative medicine. As listed by the journal and by Wolters Kluwer, it includes cardiac surgery, vascular surgery, lung and thoracic surgery, oesophageal surgery, gastric surgery, colorectal surgery, hepatobiliary surgery, breast surgery, neurosurgery, urological surgery, paediatric surgery, transplantation and anaesthesiology. That list spans the major surgical specialties, from cardiothoracic and gastrointestinal surgery to neurosurgery and transplant surgery, together with the anaesthesiology on which operative practice depends.

A distinctive feature of the journal within its scope is its emphasis on visual material. ASJ features advanced visual materials such as surgical videos, which are also archived and highlighted in ASVIDE, the AME Surgical Video Database owned by AME Publishing Company. Surgery is an inherently visual and technical discipline, in which operative technique is often communicated better by video than by text alone, and the journal's integration with a dedicated surgical video database is a genuine editorial distinction, not merely a formatting choice.

Indexing: ESCI and Scopus in 2024

The journal's indexing milestones both fell in 2024, its fourth year. On 20 March 2024 a confirmation letter reached the editorial office recording that the journal had met the criteria for the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in the Web of Science Core Collection. Articles published in ASJ from 2021 onward, beginning with volume 1, are included in ESCI, giving the journal retrospective coverage of its entire run.

On 12 November 2024 the journal received confirmation from Elsevier that it had been accepted for inclusion in Scopus. Achieving both Web of Science and Scopus indexing within a single year, and within four years of launch, is the standard external validation for a new journal, since both databases apply editorial-quality and publishing-regularity criteria. The journal subsequently reported a 2025 impact factor of 0.7 and a 2025 CiteScore of 0.6, ranking 447 out of 597 journals in the Scopus surgery category. SCImago listings record an SJR in the third quartile for surgery. These are entry-level metrics for a young title, but they are real, externally computed figures.

Official journal of the Jiangsu Research Hospital Association

On 24 May 2024 the journal became the official journal of the Jiangsu Research Hospital Association. The association is described by the journal as an academic, non-profit organisation initiated by Professor Ling Lu, vice president of Xuzhou Medical University and editor-in-chief of ASJ, together with other experts in the field. Society or association affiliation matters for a young journal: it supplies a scholarly community, a flow of manuscripts and meeting content, and an institutional identity beyond its commercial publisher.

Professor Ling Lu's dual role, as the association's initiator and the journal's editor-in-chief, together with annual reports issued in the names of Ling Lu and co-editors including Mark J. Lambrechts and Christos Tolias, gives the journal identifiable editorial leadership. The 2024 and 2025 annual reports were issued as greetings from those editors and the editorial office, following the AME practice of publishing a yearly account of articles, board composition, authorship geography and readership statistics.

Editorial and publishing practice

The journal operates as an electronic-only, open-access title: articles are published online, free to readers, after peer review, and are discoverable through the journal site, the Ovid platform, Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science. In October 2025 Wolters Kluwer Health announced a new collaboration with AME Publishing Company broadening access to nearly fifty open-access AME titles and more than five thousand articles; ASJ, already listed in Wolters Kluwer's Ovid catalogue, sits within that distribution relationship.

Peer review and production follow the publisher's house model, with electronic submission, editorial-office management and online-first availability within the bimonthly issue structure. The journal publishes a mixture of original articles, reviews, case reports, surgical technique papers and editorial commentary, as its 2023 article-type breakdown and its 2025 annual report both document. Its transparent annual reporting, covering submissions' geography, article counts and web traffic, gives readers and prospective authors an unusually concrete picture of a small journal's scale.

Readership and authorship

The journal's intended readers are surgeons and surgical researchers across the specialties it covers, together with anaesthetists, surgical trainees and clinicians in related fields. Its measured readership, on its own analytics reports, is led by the United States and includes large audiences in China, India, the United Kingdom and Singapore. Its authorship is similarly international, with corresponding authors from 16 countries recorded in 2025 and an editorial board of 70 members from 15 countries recorded in 2024.

That international profile distinguishes ASJ from a national surgical bulletin. Although it is published from Hong Kong and holds an official-journal relationship with a Jiangsu association, its contents, board and readership are multinational, reflecting both the publisher's Hong Kong base and the global authorship that open-access electronic publishing attracts.

Assessment

On its verifiable record, AME Surgical Journal is a young but fully documented surgical journal. It has a clear launch in 2021, quarterly then bimonthly publication, a counted archive of 122 articles by the end of 2023 and 54 articles in 2025 alone, ESCI indexing from March 2024 covering its whole run, Scopus acceptance in November 2024, a 2025 impact factor of 0.7 and CiteScore of 0.6, an official-journal relationship with the Jiangsu Research Hospital Association from May 2024, and a video archive through ASVIDE. That record is more than sufficient to support a full profile, and none of it depends on the journal's aims-and-scope statement alone.

For users of this directory, the essential facts are these. AME Surgical Journal, ASJ, AME Surg J, ISSN 2788-578X, is an open-access, peer-reviewed electronic surgery journal launched in 2021, bimonthly from January 2023, published in Hong Kong by AME Publishing Company with Wolters Kluwer Ovid distribution, indexed in Web of Science ESCI and Scopus, official journal of the Jiangsu Research Hospital Association, and available at asj.amegroups.org.