About Annals of Esophagus

Annals of Esophagus

Overview and identity

Annals of Esophagus, abbreviated Ann Esophagus and known by the acronym AOE, is an international, peer-reviewed, open access medical journal devoted entirely to the esophagus. It carries ISSN 2616-2784 and is published by AME Publishing Company in Hong Kong, China. The journal was launched in January 2018, and its official website is aoe.amegroups.org. Few medical journals are organised around a single organ, and that singularity is the journal's defining characteristic: every article it publishes, whether basic science or clinical research, must pertain to the esophagus, its diseases, its diagnosis or its treatment. That focus makes Annals of Esophagus a specialist home for esophagologists, thoracic surgeons, gastroenterologists, oncologists and radiologists whose work might otherwise be scattered across general surgery, oncology and gastroenterology titles.

The journal's Hong Kong base reflects the structure of its publisher. AME Publishing Company was founded in July 2009 and is headquartered in Hong Kong, with additional offices in mainland Chinese cities including Guangzhou, Changsha, Nanjing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Beijing and Hangzhou, as well as Taipei. AME publishes more than sixty medical journals, and Annals of Esophagus sits within that portfolio alongside sister titles in thoracic surgery, gastroenterology and oncology. Since a collaboration announced in 2025, AME journals have also received support from Wolters Kluwer, and the content of Annals of Esophagus is made available on Wolters Kluwer Health's Lippincott and Ovid platforms, extending its reach into hospital libraries that subscribe to those services.

History and publication pattern

Annals of Esophagus began publishing in January 2018. For its first two years, from January 2018 to December 2019, it published continuously, releasing articles as they were ready rather than waiting to assemble conventional issues. It then settled into a quarterly publication model, with issues appearing in March, June, September and December. That quarterly rhythm has continued since, giving the journal four regular issues a year. The journal is electronic, and all submissions and review processes are conducted electronically in order to expedite review and publication. Its stated commitment is to minimise the duration of review and publication processes while maintaining their standards, and to keep developing the journal in ways that meet readers' needs.

The journal publishes the practical timelines it works to. In-house review takes one to three weeks, external peer review one to three months, publication ahead of print follows within one month of acceptance once the article processing charge has been received, and formal publication follows within one to three months of acceptance, with original articles listed as a priority. These published service standards are part of the journal's identity as an author-facing open access title competing for good manuscripts in a crowded subspecialty.

Aims and scope: the whole esophagus

The aims and scope of Annals of Esophagus cover basic and clinical research in all fields pertaining to the esophagus. Cancer stands first in its list: esophageal cancers are the centre of gravity of the journal, reflecting the heavy global burden of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma and the active surgical, endoscopic and oncological research communities that work on them. Alongside cancer, the journal explicitly covers Barrett's esophagus, the premalignant condition closely watched by gastroenterologists, and gastroesophageal reflux disease, one of the most common disorders of the organ.

The scope continues through achalasia and other motility territory, hiatal hernias, esophagitis, congenital esophageal disease, esophageal diverticulum, esophageal perforation, benign esophageal neoplasms, and other rare esophageal malignancies. Taken together, the list spans the malignant, premalignant, functional, congenital, traumatic and benign disease of a single organ, from the laboratory bench to the operating theatre and the endoscopy suite. A clinician who treats esophageal perforation, a surgeon who resects esophageal cancer, and a researcher studying the molecular biology of Barrett's esophagus are all, by design, readers of the same journal.

Article types

Annals of Esophagus welcomes several defined article types. It publishes Original Research in both full-length and brief report formats, Review Articles that synthesise a field, Case Reports documenting individual clinical experience, Technical Articles with videos — a format particularly suited to surgical and endoscopic technique, where moving images communicate what prose cannot — and Editorials. The journal's author instructions set out descriptions and length requirements for each type. The mix is deliberately practical: alongside full research papers, the brief report and the video technical article give working clinicians routes to publish compact, technique-focused contributions, while editorials and the journal's interviews with editorial board members provide commentary on the direction of the specialty.

Peer review and editorial standards

The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follows COPE's guidelines together with the ICMJE recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing and publication of scholarly work in medical journals. Manuscripts submitted must be the original work of their authors and must not have been published previously or be under consideration elsewhere. Across the AME portfolio, journals use double-blind peer review, in which the identities of reviewer and author are kept from each other throughout the process; handling editors pass manuscripts to the editors-in-chief, who route them to associate editors or board members with related expertise, and final decisions rest with the editorial office on the recommendation of those editors and reviewers. Complaints and appeals at Annals of Esophagus are handled in accordance with COPE's recommendations, with reconsideration of a rejected manuscript available at the editors' discretion when authors write to the editorial office with their manuscript identification number and a detailed case.

Open access, copyright and licensing

All content in Annals of Esophagus is published open access under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Articles are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read, download, copy and distribute as the licence defines. The licence permits third parties to copy and distribute an article provided the use is not commercial, the article is not changed or edited in any way, and appropriate credit is given with a link to the formal publication through its DOI and a link to the licence, without implying endorsement by the licensor. No derivatives — no remixes, transformations or builds upon the material — may be distributed.

For open access publishing the journal uses an exclusive licensing agreement: authors transfer copyright to AME Publishing Company while retaining the right to share their article in the same way permitted to third parties under the user licence, together with certain scholarly usage rights. The journal also works with authors whose research is supported by funding bodies with open access mandates so that they can meet their funders' public access requirements, and it claims no copyright in works of the United States government. Enquiries about commercial use or adaptation go to the publisher's permissions address, and reprint orders to its sales address.

Indexing, archiving and metrics

Annals of Esophagus is indexed and covered by Web of Science's Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), by Scopus, by Google Scholar and by Ovid, and its digital preservation is handled through Portico. Admission to the Emerging Sources Citation Index placed the young journal inside the Web of Science Core Collection ecosystem, and it has since received Journal Citation Reports impact factors: the journal reported a first impact factor of 0.6 for the year 2024 and a latest impact factor of 0.7 for the year 2025. Its 2025 CiteScore, announced by the journal, was 1.4, ranking it 352nd of 597 journals in the Surgery category and 126th of 176 in Gastroenterology. The journal also publishes an annual report; its 2025 annual report recorded that the journal had been indexed by Web of Science and that website pageviews and visitors had increased. In Scopus-based rankings the journal sits in the third quartile for both Gastroenterology and Surgery.

Editorial office and publisher

The editorial office of Annals of Esophagus is the journal's point of contact for authors and readers. Its corresponding editor is Kathy Zhao, reachable at aoe@amegroups.com, with a Guangzhou telephone contact published by the journal. Copyright enquiries go to permissions@amegroups.com and commercial sales, reprints and advertising to sales@amegroups.com. The publisher, AME Publishing Company, gives its Hong Kong branch office address as Flat/RM C, 16F, Kings Wing Plaza 1, No. 3 On Kwan Street, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong, China. The journal's interviews with its own board members — for example its published conversation with Dr Ken Kato, chief of the Department of Head and Neck and Esophageal Medical Oncology at the National Cancer Center Hospital in Tokyo and a director of the Japan Esophageal Society and the International Society for Diseases of the Esophagus — illustrate the international, clinically senior network the journal draws on for its editorial work.

Place in esophageal publishing

Annals of Esophagus occupies a narrow but coherent niche. General gastroenterology and surgery journals publish esophageal research among much else; this journal publishes nothing else. Its quarterly issues assemble, in one open access place, cancer research, reflux and Barrett's surveillance work, motility and hernia studies, congenital and traumatic case experience, and video-documented technique. For authors, it offers defined article types, published turnaround standards and indexing in ESCI and Scopus within a few years of launch. For readers, it offers a single-organ literature that can be followed whole. That combination — a 2018 launch, an organ-specific scope, AME's Hong Kong publishing base with Wolters Kluwer distribution support, and full open access under CC BY-NC-ND — is the complete identity of Annals of Esophagus.