About Hong Kong Journal of Emergency Medicine

Hong Kong Journal of Emergency Medicine

The Hong Kong Journal of Emergency Medicine, usually abbreviated HKJEM, is an open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal based in Hong Kong, China. It shares research on clinical practice, research, education and administrative perspectives in critical care in the hospital and pre-hospital settings. Wiley, its current publisher, describes it as devoted to improving the quality of patient care regionally by disseminating acute and emergency medicine knowledge from any location where the conclusions are of general interest. That combination — a Hong Kong home, an Asia-Pacific outlook and an international readership — has defined the journal for more than three decades, from its first issue in July 1994 to its move to Wiley in 2024.

Origins and the first issue in 1994

The first issue of the Hong Kong Journal of Emergency Medicine was published in July 1994. That date was recalled by its editors in a 2023 editorial, “Towards the third decade of Hong Kong Journal of Emergency Medicine,” published in volume 30, issue 6, which noted that in 2024 the journal would celebrate its 30th anniversary. The same editorial observed that for almost 30 years HKJEM had been a free platform for knowledge dissemination and an advocate of high-quality research originating from the local and international emergency medicine community. A journal founded in 1994 therefore belongs to the formative period of emergency medicine as an organised specialty in Hong Kong, and its longevity is itself part of its record: few specialty titles in the region can trace a continuous presence from the mid-1990s through the SAGE years and into the current Wiley era.

The early journal also appears in reference listings of international emergency medicine journals from the late 1990s, where it was described as the official journal of the Hong Kong Society of Emergency Medicine, published in English, with each issue containing editorials, original research, case reports and review articles. That early mix of article types, and the decision to publish in English, helped the title address readers well beyond Hong Kong from the start.

Hong Kong emergency medicine behind the journal

HKJEM cannot be separated from the professional bodies that built emergency medicine in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong Society for Emergency Medicine & Surgery (HKSEMS) records that, after the first accident and emergency consultant was appointed in 1981, a group of dedicated A&E doctors joined together to form the Society in 1985. Thereafter the Society organised training activities and published a series of A&E reference manuals and the Hong Kong Journal of Emergency Medicine, work that helped establish the specialty status of emergency medicine in Hong Kong.

The Hong Kong College of Emergency Medicine (HKCEM) followed. The College records its incorporation on 13 February 1996, originally under the name the Hong Kong College of Emergency Physicians Limited, and its admission on 16 January 1997 as the 15th constituent college of the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine, after the name Hong Kong College of Emergency Medicine had been adopted. The Hong Kong Society of Critical Care Medicine summarises the College, established in 1996, as a body that advances education and research in emergency medicine, sets standards of training, administers examinations for the award of Fellowship of the College, sets and monitors standards of care, and provides expert guidance and advice on policy on matters relating to emergency medicine. HKJEM is the publishing expression of that educational and research mission.

Official and supporting organisations

HKJEM is an official publication of several Hong Kong bodies, not of a single society. The Hong Kong Society of Critical Care Medicine states that HKJEM, an open access journal, is an official publication of HKCEM, the Hong Kong College of Emergency Nursing (HKCEN), the Hong Kong Emergency Nurses Association (HKENA), HKSEMS and the Hong Kong Society of Critical Care Medicine (HKSCCM), and that the journal is now also the official journal of HKSCCM. Its supporting organisations are listed, in alphabetical order, as the China Hong Kong Ambulance Service Institute, HKCEN, HKENA, HKSEMS and HKSCCM.

The breadth of that backing was underlined in the journal’s 2024 Wiley editorial, “A new page for the Hong Kong Journal of Emergency Medicine.” The editorial said the journal was honoured to have HKCEN, HKENA and HKSCCM as supporting organisations, and that together with HKCEM and HKSEMS it hoped to bring acute and emergency care practitioners together and extend the spectrum of publication from emergency department-focused work to prehospital and critical care research. In other words, the journal’s ownership structure deliberately spans emergency physicians, emergency nurses and critical care practitioners, as well as prehospital care.

Scope: emergency and acute care, in and before the hospital

Wiley summarises the scope plainly: HKJEM is an emergency medicine journal sharing research on clinical practice, research, education and administrative perspectives in critical care at the hospital and pre-hospital setting. The earlier SAGE description was similar, calling it a peer-reviewed journal focusing on all aspects of clinical practice and emergency medicine research in the hospital and pre-hospital setting, published on behalf of HKCEM and HKSEMS. Work on subjects such as trauma care and prehospital trauma diversion, resuscitation and emergency department practice has appeared in its pages, consistent with that broad clinical remit.

Two features of the scope deserve emphasis. First, the setting is the whole acute-care pathway: care before arrival at hospital, care in the emergency department and critical care beyond it. That is why the supporting family widened to include critical care and prehospital organisations. Second, the geography is open. Wiley says the journal disseminates knowledge “from any location where the conclusions are of general interest” and stresses facilitating global collaboration on acute and emergency medicine knowledge to improve outcomes for patients. A Hong Kong journal, in this model, is a regional base for an international conversation, not a purely local bulletin. The 2023 editorial made a related point in historical terms, noting that the journal had witnessed the tremendous development of emergency medicine in the Asia-Pacific region.

What the journal publishes

For most of its history the journal published original research articles, review articles, case reports and educational information related to clinical practice and emergency medicine research, as the SAGE-era description recorded by Informit put it. Editorials have also been a regular feature, used among other things to mark anniversaries and to announce major changes in the journal’s direction, as both the 2023 “third decade” editorial and the 2024 “new page” editorial show.

That article mix changed at the Wiley transition. The 2024 editorial announced that HKJEM now accepts research protocol and guideline articles, but no longer publishes case reports or case series. Readers comparing older and newer volumes should therefore expect a difference: case material that was a familiar part of the SAGE-era journal is no longer part of the current programme, while protocols and guidelines — article types that help other teams design studies and standardise care — have been brought in. The change is presented by the journal as part of a wider effort to raise the contribution its pages make to patient care.

Publishing history: the SAGE years and the move to Wiley

The journal’s recent publishing history falls into two clear phases. Before 2024 it was published with SAGE. SAGE-era volumes were hosted at journals.sagepub.com under the journal code hkj, SAGE copyright and permissions lines appear on its articles, and Informit recorded SAGE Publications as publisher, with coverage from 2010 to 2023, describing it as a peer-reviewed bimonthly biomedical publication of HKCEM and HKSEMS. SAGE-era articles carry DOIs beginning 10.1177, the SAGE prefix, including the 2023 anniversary editorial.

From 2024 the journal has been published in collaboration with Wiley. The announcement editorial, published in volume 31 at pages 1–2 in 2024 with DOI 10.1002/hkj2.12012, states that HKJEM was excited to announce the collaboration with Wiley from 2024, and that through it the journal became a member of Wiley’s network of emergency medicine journals, alongside titles named in the editorial as Academic Emergency Medicine, Emergency Medicine Australasia and Journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians Open. The copyright line for that editorial records the journal as published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Hong Kong College of Emergency Medicine Limited, and the Wiley journal address is wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hkj2. Current listings likewise give John Wiley and Sons as publisher.

Open access and the changes introduced in 2024

HKJEM is an open access journal. Wiley states that all content is freely available to read, download and share immediately upon publication, and presents open access publication as a way for authors’ work to be widely downloaded, read and cited. That continues a long tradition: the editors noted in 2023 that the journal had been a free platform for knowledge dissemination for almost 30 years. The financial model, however, changed with Wiley. The 2024 editorial announced that, starting from January 2024, an article publication charge (APC) would be introduced for accepted manuscripts, and noted that emergency medicine trainees and fellows from Hong Kong could apply for sponsorship from HKCEM to cover the publication fees.

Several editorial practices changed at the same time. The journal worked with Wiley’s editorial office to make its website more informative and the manuscript submission process more streamlined and transparent. Free format submission was introduced to reduce authors’ burden in formatting manuscripts before submission. Peer review moved from double-blinded to single-blinded review, with a stated plan to adopt open peer review when reviewers were ready, in order to improve transparency. Wiley also adopted Open Research Badges to encourage preregistration of study design and sharing of data and research materials. For submitting authors, a valid ORCID linked to the ScholarOne account and email address became mandatory, statements on ethics approval, funding, conflicts of interest, patient consent and clinical trial registration were required as applicable, clinical trials were to be prospectively registered in a WHO-accredited registry in accordance with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors recommendations, and author contributions were to be reported using the Contribution Roles Taxonomy, CRediT.

Identifiers, frequency and indexing

The journal’s identifiers are stable across publishers and databases. Wiley lists its Online ISSN as 2309-5407 and its Print ISSN as 1024-9079, and the same pair — print 1024-9079, online 2309-5407 — appears in ISSN and abbreviation records, which give its standard abbreviation as Hong Kong J. Emerg. Med. Journal listings record a frequency of six issues per year, consistent with the bimonthly description used in the SAGE era.

Indexing records place the title in the major biomedical and scholarly databases. Listings record indexing in Scopus, with coverage from 2004, in the Web of Science Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and in Embase, among other services. An academic review of emergency medicine publishing in Taiwan, China and Hong Kong noted that HKJEM, as the official journal of HKCEM, was enrolled in the 2010 Journal Citation Reports Science Edition. No single metric defines such a journal, and this profile deliberately rests on those verifiable indexing and identifier facts rather than on transient ranking figures.

Editorial board, authors and readers

Wiley highlights the journal’s dedicated international editorial board, whose members have a rich and diverse clinical background, and invites authors to submit in order to gain the board’s expertise. That international board matches the journal’s stated model: a Hong-Kong-based title editing work for general interest wherever it originates. For authors, the practical offer set out by the publisher is open access visibility, a board drawn from clinical practice, and a submission and review system that was deliberately streamlined at the 2024 transition, including free format submission and the transparency measures described above.

For readers — emergency physicians, emergency nurses, critical care practitioners, prehospital providers, trainees and researchers in acute care — the value is continuity. A reader can follow Hong Kong and Asia-Pacific emergency medicine from the specialty’s formative years in the 1990s, through the SAGE volumes of the 2010s and early 2020s, into the current Wiley volumes, in a single open-access title that has remained freely readable throughout. The journal’s own stated goal, restated as it approached its fourth decade, is to improve the quality of patient care by disseminating knowledge from the emergency and critical care field.

Place in Hong Kong and Asia-Pacific emergency medicine

Three decades after July 1994, the Hong Kong Journal of Emergency Medicine occupies a distinctive place among China’s medical journals. It is not a general medical title but the specialist voice of Hong Kong emergency medicine, created alongside the society and college that established the specialty, sustained as a free platform for almost 30 years, and then relaunched in 2024 with Wiley, new supporting organisations, new article categories and modern open-research practices. Its official backing by emergency medicine, emergency nursing and critical care bodies reflects how acute care is actually delivered — by teams across the emergency department, the ward and the prehospital setting. For anyone researching emergency medicine in Hong Kong, or acute care in the Asia-Pacific region more broadly, HKJEM is both a primary source for current research and a historical record of how the specialty grew up.