About Annals of Translational Medicine

Annals of Translational Medicine

Overview and identity

Annals of Translational Medicine, abbreviated Ann Transl Med and widely known by its initials ATM, is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access medical journal published by AME Publishing Company of Hong Kong with support from Wolters Kluwer. Its print ISSN is 2305-5839 and its online ISSN is 2305-5847, and its National Library of Medicine catalogue record is 101617978. The journal was launched in April 2013 and is based in Hong Kong, China, with its editorial office operating from the AME address at Flat/Room C, 16/F, Kings Wing Plaza 1, No. 3 On Kwan Street, Shatin.

The journal's stated purpose is to provide multidisciplinary, comprehensive and up-to-date information on translational medicine. Translational medicine is the discipline concerned with moving discoveries from laboratory research into clinical testing, clinical practice and ultimately health policy, and ATM was created specifically as a home for work that crosses those boundaries rather than sitting in a single clinical specialty. That breadth is reflected in its author and reader base, which spans laboratory scientists, clinicians in many specialties, public-health researchers and policy specialists.

History and development

ATM was born, in the journal's own account, as a quarterly journal in the spring of 2013. In 2014 it moved to monthly release, a change that reflected rapid submission growth in its first year. An editorial marking its PubMed indexing recalled that the journal was founded with a view to bridging the existing gaps between clinicians, researchers and health-policy makers, and described its mission in the phrase from bench to bed and bed to bench.

On 5 September 2014 the journal announced that it had been officially covered in PubMed, with indexing in PubMed and PubMed Central recorded from September 2014. It was later included in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE); its author guidelines record SCIE coverage between 2 March 2018 and 14 April 2023. Bibliographic databases also record periods of Scopus coverage, and the journal has been listed in Embase. The scale of publication grew substantially over the decade: independent journal-analytics summaries count thousands of papers published in recent four-year windows, with leading author affiliations including Fudan University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Sun Yat-sen University, illustrating the journal's strong base among Chinese medical universities alongside its international authorship.

Scope: the T0 to T4 continuum

ATM's scope is organised around the translational research phases from T0 to T4. In the framework the journal uses, that continuum runs from basic research and preclinical research through clinical research and clinical-practice research to health-policy research. Few general medical journals state their scope in those terms, and the framing shapes the kinds of manuscripts ATM solicits: a single issue can contain a mechanistic laboratory study, a first-in-human or observational clinical investigation, an implementation study and a policy analysis.

Within that continuum the journal covers aspects including multimodality therapy, epidemiology, biomarkers, imaging, biology, pathology and technical advances related to medicine. Its published research topics, as summarised by journal-analytics services, concentrate in internal medicine, surgery, oncology and cancer research, disease, gastroenterology, endocrinology and cardiology, which is consistent with a general translational remit rather than a single-organ focus.

Article types and editorial practice

ATM publishes original and observational investigations in the broad fields of laboratory, clinical and public-health research, together with reviews, editorials and related scholarly formats described in its guidelines for authors. The guidelines, updated on 15 January 2026 in the version consulted for this profile, state that the journal adheres to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals and to COPE's Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.

For peer review, ATM uses a double-blind process: the journal's reviewer instructions state that reviewers and authors are kept anonymous to one another and that unpublished manuscripts are confidential documents. The journal also states that it features a distinguished editorial board bringing together experienced specialists in translational medicine. Authors preparing manuscripts follow the detailed AME guidelines on reporting checklists, ethics approvals, informed consent and disclosure of conflicts of interest that apply across the publisher's portfolio.

The publisher: AME Publishing Company

AME Publishing Company was founded in July 2009 by Stephen Wang and is headquartered in Hong Kong, with additional offices in Guangzhou, Changsha, Nanjing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Beijing, Taipei and Hangzhou. The company specialises in open-access medical journals and books, publishes more than sixty peer-reviewed journals, and states that its journals follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which AME became a publisher member in July 2021. Since October 2025 AME content has also been distributed through a collaboration with Wolters Kluwer Health, which makes journal content available on the Lippincott and Ovid platforms and broadens the reach of nearly fifty open-access titles.

AME's own history is intertwined with ATM's generation of journals. Founder Stephen Wang has recounted that AME's first titles were the Journal of Thoracic Disease in December 2009 and the Journal of Gastrointestinal Oncology in September 2010, and that early angel investment came from DXY, the Chinese online healthcare platform, in early 2011, followed by a US$4 million Series A round announced on 23 August 2016. ATM, launched in 2013, belongs to the second wave of AME titles that expanded the portfolio from thoracic and gastrointestinal subjects into general and cross-cutting fields.

Indexing, metrics and discoverability

Indexing in PubMed and PubMed Central since September 2014 means that ATM articles are freely discoverable through the United States National Library of Medicine's search systems and that full texts are deposited in the PubMed Central open archive, where individual articles carry PMCID identifiers. That deposit is a major channel through which the journal's content reaches clinicians who do not subscribe to commercial databases.

Journal-analytics services that track ATM report an h-index in the mid-thirties range in recent SCImago-based summaries and classify the journal in the Medicine, Research and Experimental category, where one analytics summary placed it in the second quartile. A Web of Science-based impact figure of 3.616 for 2021 is cited by the OOIR journal-ranking service. Because metrics change annually and coverage status has varied over time, readers should consult the current Journal Citation Reports and the journal's own website for the latest figures rather than relying on any single year's number.

Position among AME titles

Within the AME portfolio ATM occupies a distinctive place as the publisher's general translational title and, in the words of its directory record, one of the highest-volume titles in the portfolio. Where most AME journals are defined by an organ system or a specialty — lung cancer, cardiothoracic surgery, urology, hepatobiliary surgery — ATM is defined by a method: translation. That makes it a natural destination for interdisciplinary manuscripts that would fit awkwardly in a specialty journal, including studies that combine biomarker discovery with early clinical validation.

The journal's longevity also matters. Launched in 2013, it has published continuously for more than a decade, surviving the transition from quarterly to monthly publication, gaining and later concluding a period of SCIE coverage, and maintaining PubMed Central deposit throughout. For authors, that record signals an established editorial operation; for readers, it means a deep back archive of translational studies that remains freely accessible.

Access, licensing and how to use the journal

ATM is an open-access journal: articles are published online and are free to read, and the full texts indexed in PubMed Central can be downloaded without a subscription. The journal's website at atm.amegroups.com, now also presented under the amegroups.org domain, serves as the central hub for current issues, guidelines for authors, reviewer instructions and announcements, and the publisher notes that the site is linked to national mirror and partner sites that expand distribution inside China.

Researchers using ATM should cite it by its standard abbreviation, Ann Transl Med, and can identify articles by their DOIs, which use the AME prefix 10.21037 and the journal code atm. Clinicians searching the journal are best served by PubMed, where the journal's coverage from 2014 onward is complete, while readers interested in the journal's current aims, editorial board and submission requirements should consult the About and Guidelines pages on the official site, which the publisher updates periodically, most recently for authors in January 2026.

Why the journal matters

The gap ATM was founded to address is real and persistent: most medical journals serve either laboratory science or clinical practice, and findings often stall between the two. A journal that explicitly organises its scope from T0 basic science to T4 health policy gives authors a venue in which the translational pathway itself is the subject, and gives readers a single place to follow a discovery from mechanism to population impact.

For Hong Kong and for China more broadly, ATM is also part of the story of English-language medical publishing based in the region. Published from Hong Kong by a company founded there in 2009, written predominantly in English, indexed in the major international databases and distributed globally through Wolters Kluwer's platforms, it exemplifies the model that AME applied across dozens of specialty titles in the 2010s — and as a high-volume general title, it remains one of the clearest examples of that model in operation.