About Annals of Cardiothoracic Surgery

Annals of Cardiothoracic Surgery

The Annals of Cardiothoracic Surgery (ACS) is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to cardiothoracic surgery, launched in May 2012 and published by AME Publishing Company of Hong Kong with support from Wolters Kluwer. It carries the print ISSN 2225-319X and the online ISSN 2304-1021 and is abbreviated Ann Cardiothorac Surg. Its official website is annalscts.com.

ACS differs in design from most surgical journals. It is a topic-focused, multimedia publication: each issue is devoted to a contemporary topic in cardiothoracic surgery, is overseen by a guest editor who is an international authority on the subject, and provides critical analysis and a comprehensive overview rather than a miscellaneous collection of papers. Its founding Editor-in-Chief was Tristan D. Yan, and its inaugural issue was dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of the VATS lobectomy programme. The publisher reports a 2025 impact factor of 4.1, the highest among the AME titles covered in this group after Hepatobiliary Surgery and Nutrition.

Founding and concept

ACS was launched in May 2012 under its founding Editor-in-Chief, Tristan D. Yan, a professor of cardiovascular and thoracic surgery associated with Macquarie University and Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney and with the Collaborative Research (CORE) Group. The inaugural issue was dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of the video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery (VATS) lobectomy programme, an apt founding theme: VATS lobectomy, the minimally invasive removal of a lung lobe through small incisions, was one of the defining technical advances of modern thoracic surgery, and a journal built around expert, technique-rich issues could hardly have chosen a clearer statement of intent.

Early issues followed the same pattern, each capturing a rapidly developing technology or field. An early issue on transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI), with particular emphasis on the transapical approach, was guest edited with Professor Michael Borger of the Leipzig Heart Center, where some 1,500 TAVI cases had been performed. The format — a recognised pioneer as guest editor, a set of commissioned analyses, operative-technique material and systematic reviews — was established from the journal's first year.

Publisher and Hong Kong base

AME Publishing Company was founded in July 2009 by Stephen Wang and is headquartered in Hong Kong, at Flat/RM C, 16F, Kings Wing Plaza 1, No. 3 On Kwan Street, Shatin. It has grown into a publisher of more than 60 peer-reviewed medical journals, most of them in English, together with medical books and e-books, and it maintains additional offices in mainland Chinese cities including Guangzhou, Changsha, Nanjing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Beijing and Hangzhou. Its journals follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which AME titles are members.

ACS shows how far that Hong Kong platform can reach into a Western surgical specialty. Its founding editor was based in Sydney, its guest editors are drawn from leading cardiac and thoracic centres worldwide, and its content is distributed through Wolters Kluwer's Lippincott and Ovid platforms as well as on annalscts.com. The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics and follows COPE guidelines and the ICMJE recommendations, as stated on its mission and scope page.

Mission and scope

The journal's mission and scope statement defines its primary objective as providing critical analysis and a comprehensive overview of contemporary topics within cardiothoracic surgery. It describes itself as an innovative journal with a distinct format that will provide significant contributions to the ongoing understanding of cardiothoracic surgery. This is a review- and synthesis-centred mission: ACS exists less to report isolated new cases than to tell surgeons, authoritatively and in one issue, where a whole topic stands.

Each issue is overseen by a special guest editor who is an international authority on the subject, and topics are explored through categorised sections: Systematic Reviews, Featured Articles, Editorials, Masters of Cardiothoracic Surgery, and Art of Operative Techniques, the last by invitation only. The section names reveal the pedagogy of the journal. Systematic reviews supply the evidence base; Masters of Cardiothoracic Surgery records the judgement of leading operators; and Art of Operative Techniques, supported by video and atlas material, transmits the craft knowledge that text alone cannot carry.

Subject coverage in depth

Within cardiothoracic surgery, ACS issues have covered VATS lobectomy and segmentectomy, transcatheter and transapical aortic valve implantation, aortic dissection and thoracic aortic disease, mitral valve disease and repair, coronary artery bypass grafting including bilateral internal mammary artery grafting, heart failure and ventricular assist devices, oesophageal cancer staging and malignant pleural mesothelioma. Its most cited articles, as tracked by research databases, include the application of the eighth edition AJCC/UICC staging of cancers of the oesophagus and oesophagogastric junction to clinical practice, an epidemiological perspective on malignant pleural mesothelioma, and a meta-analysis comparing bilateral with left internal mammary artery grafting.

The multimedia character of the journal is integral to this coverage. Surgical technique cannot be fully communicated in prose, and ACS publishes operative video alongside its articles: a representative example is its surgical atlas of thoracoscopic lobectomy and segmentectomy, presenting the posterior approach to thoracoscopic resection with accompanying video. For trainee and practising surgeons, such material functions as a form of remote apprenticeship, and it differentiates ACS from text-only competitors.

Editorial model

Editorial authority in ACS is deliberately distributed. The Editor-in-Chief and editorial office set the programme of topics, but each issue is overseen by its own guest editor, an international authority on that issue's subject, who assembles the contributors. This model allows the journal to publish issues led by the very surgeons who pioneered a technique — as with the Leipzig-led TAVI issue — and it keeps the journal's expertise current in a specialty where authority is concentrated in high-volume centres.

Founding editor Tristan D. Yan's own contributions illustrate the model from within: he authored the journal's surgical atlas material on thoracoscopic lobectomy and segmentectomy and wrote on transapical aortic valve implantation as a paradigm for innovation and collaboration in modern cardiac surgery. Correspondence for the journal has been handled through annalscts.com addresses, and the editorial office at AME manages commissioning, peer review, production and the journal's video content.

Publication pattern and article types

ACS follows a bimonthly publication mode, six issues a year, as stated in its mission and scope information. Because each issue is thematic, the journal's annual output is best understood as six monographs rather than six miscellanies. Its article types follow its section structure: systematic reviews, featured articles, editorials, Masters of Cardiothoracic Surgery pieces and invited Art of Operative Techniques articles, with video content integrated into the online edition.

Peer review applies across these categories, with the exception that operative-technique contributions are invited, reflecting the reality that the surgeons best qualified to demonstrate a technique are known to the field. The journal is peer reviewed and open access, so its issues can be read in full by any surgeon or trainee with an internet connection — an important property for educational content, whose value depends on reaching learners outside subscribing institutions.

Indexing and journal metrics

ACS is indexed in PubMed and PubMed Central from June 2013, in Scopus, and in the Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded from May 2018, as recorded in the publisher's journal description. The publisher's page reports a 2025 impact factor of 4.1. SCImago data place it among cardiothoracic surgery titles with a Journal Rank around 0.866 in recent listings. For a review-centred specialist journal founded in 2012, an impact factor above 4 is a strong citation performance, reflecting the high citability of its systematic reviews and staging and guideline-type articles.

Indexing in SCIE and PubMed Central also validates the journal's unusual format externally. Databases apply criteria on peer review, regularity and editorial quality regardless of a journal's internal design, and ACS's admission to SCIE in 2018 confirmed that a guest-edited, topic-focused, multimedia journal can meet the same standards as a conventional research journal. Its articles are consequently visible in the same searches and citation analyses as those of the established society titles in cardiac and thoracic surgery.

Readership and authorship

The journal's readers are cardiothoracic surgeons, trainees in cardiac and thoracic surgery, and related specialists including cardiologists, anaesthetists and intensivists who share in the care of cardiothoracic patients. Its issues are used both as current-awareness reading and as teaching material: a guest-edited issue on a single topic, with reviews, master-surgeon perspectives and operative video, is a ready-made curriculum unit for a training programme or journal club.

Authorship is by invitation more often than in most journals, drawn from the leading centres for each topic, which gives ACS an author base of unusual seniority. At the same time its systematic reviews are produced by collaborative research groups, including the Sydney-based CORE Group associated with its founding editor, which built a reputation for meta-analyses in cardiothoracic surgery. The result is a journal whose contents represent, issue by issue, a deliberate selection of the field's recognised authorities.

Place in cardiothoracic surgery publishing

Cardiothoracic surgery has venerable society journals, including titles published since the 1960s. ACS, founded in 2012, could not reproduce their archives or their society memberships, so it differentiated on format: thematic issues, guest editorship by pioneers, systematic reviews, master-surgeon features and operative video, all open access. That format anticipated the direction of surgical publishing generally, towards curated, multimedia, education-oriented content, and ACS was among the earlier journals built entirely around it.

The Annals of Cardiothoracic Surgery continues bimonthly from Hong Kong, published by AME Publishing Company with Wolters Kluwer support, indexed in PubMed Central, Scopus and SCIE, and reporting a 2025 impact factor of 4.1. From its founding VATS anniversary issue onwards, it has provided cardiothoracic surgeons with something distinct in their literature: not another stream of miscellaneous papers, but a sequence of authoritative, guest-edited accounts of the topics that define contemporary practice.