About Gland Surgery

Gland Surgery

Gland Surgery (GS) is an international, open-access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to diseases of the glands and to gland surgery, launched in May 2012 and published by AME Publishing Company of Hong Kong with support from Wolters Kluwer. It carries the print ISSN 2227-684X and the online ISSN 2227-8575 and is abbreviated Gland Surg. Its official website is gs.amegroups.com.

The journal publishes new findings on the diagnosis, prevention, treatment and prognosis of gland diseases and gland surgery, including the breast, thyroid, adrenal glands and pancreas, spanning biomarkers, imaging, pathology, biology and interventional radiology. It is indexed in PubMed and PubMed Central, Scopus and the Science Citation Index Expanded, and its latest impact factor, for the 2025 citation year, is 1.9, as reported on the publisher's journal page.

History and publication pattern

Gland Surgery was published quarterly from May 2012 to December 2014, bimonthly from January 2015 to December 2020, and monthly thereafter. Its growth in frequency mirrors the expansion of its subject: endocrine and breast surgery grew rapidly in the 2010s with the spread of minimally invasive thyroid and parathyroid surgery, oncoplastic breast surgery and refined management of adrenal and pancreatic tumours, and a monthly schedule from 2021 gave the journal capacity for that literature.

The journal describes itself as proud of the quality and content of what it publishes, enhanced by a hands-on approach from its editorial team, and by an international readership reflected in a prestigious editorial board of experts worldwide. That hands-on editorial character is a recurring claim of the journal, distinguishing its model from high-volume titles where editors handle papers at a distance. Submissions and review are managed through the OJS electronic system, intended to increase efficiency and allow papers to be published within a short turnaround period.

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.

GS is also a member of the Surgery Journal Editors Group (SJEG), the international group of surgery journal editors associated with the American College of Surgeons' member services, and states that it strives for diversity in its peer review process and among its editorial boards and editorial leaders. Membership of that editors' group places a Hong Kong-published title inside the professional governance conversation of surgery publishing, alongside the editors of the major Western surgical journals.

Aims and scope

The journal's scope, as stated by the publisher, is to publish findings on the diagnosis, prevention, treatment and prognosis of gland diseases and gland surgery. The glands principally covered are the breast, thyroid, adrenal glands and pancreas, and the disciplines spanned include biomarkers, imaging, pathology, biology and interventional radiology as well as surgery itself. The journal is therefore organised by organ system rather than by technique: whatever a specialist needs to know about a gland — its tumours, its imaging, its pathology, its medical and surgical management — belongs in GS.

That organ-based definition covers some of the most common surgical conditions in the world. Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in women; thyroid nodules and thyroid cancer are extremely common and rising in detected incidence; adrenal incidentalomas are a routine product of modern cross-sectional imaging; and pancreatic diseases, though less common, are among the most lethal. A journal that unites these subjects serves the endocrine and breast surgeons whose operating lists combine them, a real specialty grouping in many countries.

Subject coverage in depth

In breast disease, the journal covers cancer surgery, reconstruction and oncoplastic approaches, imaging and biomarkers. In thyroid and parathyroid disease it covers nodules, cancer, surgical technique including minimally invasive and remote-access approaches, and the pathology and molecular markers that now guide the extent of surgery. Adrenal coverage includes functioning and non-functioning tumours and laparoscopic adrenalectomy, and pancreatic coverage includes tumours and surgical management within hepatopancreatobiliary practice.

The inclusion of biomarkers, imaging, pathology, biology and interventional radiology in the stated scope is significant. Modern gland surgery is decided before the operation, by imaging, cytology, molecular testing and multidisciplinary discussion, and increasingly it competes or combines with non-operative interventions such as ablation. GS publishes across that decision pathway, so its readers can follow a condition from detection and diagnosis through treatment selection to prognosis, rather than reading only the operative step.

Editorial leadership

The journal's editorial leadership, as announced by its editorial office, has included Professor Emad Kandil and Professor Xi-ru Li as Editors-in-Chief, joined from October 2022 by Professor Chen-ping Zhang as co-Editor-in-Chief. Zhang is a specialist in surgical treatment of oral and maxillofacial head and neck neoplasms, especially functional mandible reconstruction, and is Professor in the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial – Head and Neck Oncology at Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, as well as a council member of the International Academy of Oral Oncology.

His appointment illustrates the breadth of the gland-surgery concept as the journal practises it, extending into head and neck surgical oncology, and it added a Shanghai-based surgical leader alongside the journal's existing editors. The editorial office presents such appointments as building on the work of the current editors to take the journal to new heights, and the multi-editor structure reflects the range of organs and techniques the journal must judge.

Publication model and peer review

GS is published monthly, open access, with the entire submission and review process managed through the OJS electronic system. It publishes original research, reviews and other article types set out in its author instructions, and its pages record the standard AME arrangements: authors transfer copyright to AME Publishing Company while retaining the right to share their article as permitted to third parties under the relevant user licence, together with certain scholarly usage rights.

The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics and follows COPE's guidelines and the ICMJE recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing and publication of scholarly work in medical journals. For surgical research, where case series and retrospective comparisons predominate and randomised trials are difficult, those reporting and ethics standards are a principal safeguard of quality, and the journal's additional membership of the Surgery Journal Editors Group commits it to shared standards with peer surgical journals.

Indexing and journal metrics

Gland Surgery has been indexed in PubMed and PubMed Central from June 2014 and in the Science Citation Index Expanded from December 2018; it is also covered by Scopus. Its latest impact factor, for the 2025 citation year, is 1.9, as reported on the publisher's about page. SCImago classifies the journal in the second quartile for surgery, with a SCImago Journal Rank reported around 0.492 and Scopus coverage recorded from 2016 in ranking databases.

An impact factor of 1.9 in surgery — a field whose journals generally have lower citation densities than molecular medicine — together with second-quartile SCImago placement, represents a respectable established position. More importantly for authors, inclusion in PubMed Central and SCIE means GS articles are fully discoverable and citable within the standard systems, and its monthly frequency offers timely appearance for operative and clinical studies.

Readership and authorship

Readers of GS are breast and endocrine surgeons, head and neck surgical oncologists, hepatopancreatobiliary surgeons, and the radiologists, pathologists and endocrinologists who work with them in multidisciplinary teams. Trainees in these specialties use its reviews to learn the management of gland diseases, and its open-access availability means that material is reachable by surgeons in hospitals without extensive subscriptions, which is particularly relevant for common conditions such as breast cancer and thyroid disease.

Authorship is international, supported, the journal notes, by an editorial board of numerous experts worldwide and reflected in an international readership. Chinese surgical groups form a substantial part of that authorship, consistent with the journal's Hong Kong base and its Shanghai editorial leadership, and the journal offers them an English-language, SCIE-indexed specialty home. International authors in turn gain access to that large Asian surgical readership.

Place in surgical publishing

General surgery journals cover gland surgery among everything else, while single-organ journals cover the breast or the thyroid alone. Gland Surgery occupies the intermediate, specialty-defining position: the journal of the endocrine and breast surgical community as a whole, organised around glands as its unifying concept and extending from biomarkers and imaging to operative treatment and prognosis. Its membership of the Surgery Journal Editors Group and its monthly, SCIE-indexed operation mark it as an established participant in surgical publishing rather than a peripheral one.

Gland Surgery has been published continuously since May 2012, progressing from quarterly to monthly publication, entering PubMed Central in 2014 and SCIE in 2018, and reporting a 2025 impact factor of 1.9. For surgeons whose practice is defined by the breast, thyroid, adrenal and pancreas, it provides a dedicated, open-access record of how those organs' diseases are diagnosed and treated, published from Hong Kong for an international specialty.