About Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence
Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence
Overview and identity
The Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal devoted to research and new ideas in the application of artificial intelligence to medicine. It is known by the abbreviation JMAI, cited as J Med Artif Intell, and carries the online ISSN 2617-2496. The journal was launched in April 2018 and is published by AME Publishing Company of Hong Kong, with support from Wolters Kluwer, under which its content is also made available on Wolters Kluwer Health's Lippincott and Ovid platforms. Its official website is jmai.amegroups.org, where its aims, author guidelines, annual reports and article archive are hosted.
The journal's defining condition for publication is that articles must discuss the incorporation of artificial intelligence in the medical field. That focus makes it an interdisciplinary title rather than a journal of a single clinical specialty: its readers and authors work across clinical medicine, biomedical research, data science and health technology, and the journal states that it aims to open new ground for researchers to present the latest issues in medical artificial intelligence from interdisciplinary perspectives.
Launch with Tencent in 2018
The journal's launch was a public event rather than a quiet first issue. AME Publishing Company and the Chinese technology company Tencent jointly announced the launch of the Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence at the 2018 China "Internet Plus" Digital Economic Summit, held in Chongqing on 12 April 2018. The announcement, published in the journal's first volume, set out a wider cooperation between AME and Tencent in scientific research and academic publishing, described as all-round and multilevel, with the ambition of establishing a new platform for Chinese clinicians in the field of medical artificial intelligence.
Under the cooperation as announced in 2018, the two parties planned specialised training events intended to narrow the gap between clinical experts and artificial intelligence scientists and to promote the integration of knowledge, expertise and skills between the two communities. The medium-term element of the plan was the peer-reviewed English-language journal itself, intended to expedite research and development in medical artificial intelligence, while the longer-term perspective looked towards a collaborative medical artificial intelligence platform built on scientific research and available technology, working with clinical medical experts. The Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence was therefore conceived from the start as the publishing arm of a broader industry-academic initiative, not only as a standalone periodical.
Publisher: AME Publishing Company
AME Publishing Company is an open-access academic publisher specialising in medical journals and books, founded in July 2009 by Stephen D. Wang and headquartered in Hong Kong, with additional offices in mainland Chinese cities including Guangzhou, Changsha, Nanjing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Beijing and Hangzhou. The company's name is interpreted by its founder as "Academic Made Easy, Excellent and Enthusiastic". AME publishes more than 60 peer-reviewed journals, predominantly in English, covering fields including oncology, pulmonology, cardiothoracic disease, andrology and urology, alongside English-language and Chinese-language books and e-books.
In October 2025, Wolters Kluwer Health announced a collaboration with AME under which 49 of AME's open-access journals, collectively publishing more than 5,000 medical articles a year, would be made available on the Lippincott and Ovid platforms. Announcing the agreement, AME's founder and chief executive Stephen D. Wang noted that 34 of the company's open-access journals had been recognised with impact factors. The Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence is one of the titles distributed under this arrangement, and its journal pages record the Wolters Kluwer support alongside its AME publication.
Aims and scope
The journal publishes articles from a wide variety of new research and innovative ideas in medical artificial intelligence. Its stated scope includes, but is not limited to, artificial intelligence in bio-medicine and clinical medicine; machine-learning-based decision support; robotic surgery; data analytics and data mining; laboratory information systems; and artificial intelligence in medical education. Articles are expected to address the incorporation of artificial intelligence into medicine, so the journal sits at the point where computational method meets clinical application.
In practice, the scope spans the full pipeline of medical artificial intelligence work. It covers the development and evaluation of machine learning and deep learning models on clinical data, the use of artificial intelligence in diagnostic imaging and laboratory medicine, decision-support systems intended for use at the point of care, surgical applications including robotics, the analysis of large health datasets, and the educational and professional questions raised by these technologies, including their ethics and their effect on clinical practice.
What the journal publishes
The journal's article mix can be seen in its own accounting: by 29 May 2025, the journal had published 208 articles since its inaugural issue, including 88 original articles, 50 review articles and 20 editorials, with the remainder made up of other article types such as brief reports and letters. Original research and reviews together account for the clear majority of its output, which is consistent with its aim of presenting both new results and synthesis in a fast-moving field.
Individual issues illustrate the range. Its 2024 volume included a hybrid artificial intelligence outcome-prediction study combining features extracted from stress perfusion cardiac magnetic resonance images with electronic health records; a study of glioma grade prediction using learned features from convolutional neural networks; a machine learning analysis of factors influencing maternal mortality and newborn health; a narrative review of artificial intelligence in periodontology and implantology; a brief report exploring the capabilities and limitations of large language models, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and Google Bard, in nuclear medicine knowledge; and a letter taking a devil's advocate position on the potential negative impacts of artificial intelligence on surgery. Among its most-read articles of 2025 were a systematic review of the role of artificial intelligence in healthcare settings, work on jailbreaking large language models and the crossroads of innovation, ethics and health risks, a narrative review of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT in medical writing, a systematic review of deep learning in periodontal disease, a study of the diagnostic capabilities of GPT-4 in comparison with physicians, work on prediction of chronic kidney disease, and a narrative review of disability and algorithmic fairness in healthcare.
Publication history and frequency
The journal's publication pattern has changed as it has grown. It was published continuously from April 2018 to December 2023, meaning articles appeared online as they were ready rather than in fixed issues. From January 2024 to December 2025 it followed a quarterly publication model. From January 2026, the journal transitioned from quarterly to monthly publication, a change its editorial office explained as a response to a rising volume of high-quality submissions and to the sustained support of authors and the academic community, underscoring the journal's growth and influence since its 2018 launch.
The journal also publishes detailed annual reports, a practice it shares with a number of AME titles. The 2025 annual report sets out the journal's basic information, the distribution of its editorial board, the types of articles published during the year, page-view figures for 2024 and 2025, and its most-read articles of the year. These reports give the journal an unusually public record of its own output and readership for a young specialty title.
Indexing and metrics
The journal's indexing record was built in stages. It is indexed in Scopus, and on 8 April 2025 it was accepted into the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). On 28 May 2025 its editorial office received confirmation that the journal had met the selection criteria for inclusion in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) of Web of Science, with articles published after 2023, beginning with volume 6, to be included in the index. The Emerging Sources Citation Index, established by Clarivate in 2015, identifies scholarly journals demonstrating regional significance or addressing emerging research fields, a description that fits a journal founded for the then-emerging field of medical artificial intelligence.
Its citation metrics followed. The journal achieved a 2025 CiteScore of 4.0, ranking 153rd of 466 journals in the Medicine (miscellaneous) category and 235th of 570 journals in the Artificial Intelligence category. It then attained its first impact factor, of 3.0, for the 2025 citation year — a notable figure for a journal that had entered the Emerging Sources Citation Index only in 2025, and the highest-profile metric in its record to date.
Editorial model and open access
The Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence is a peer-reviewed journal, and all of its content is published open access, free for readers. Publication is handled by AME Publishing Company in Hong Kong, and distribution is extended through the Wolters Kluwer arrangement, which places the journal's content on the Lippincott and Ovid platforms used by hospitals, universities and health systems. The journal's author guidelines and peer-review arrangements follow the standard AME framework applied across the publisher's medical titles.
The combination of open access and platform distribution matters for this journal's subject. Medical artificial intelligence research is produced by a mixed community of clinicians, computer scientists and health-system researchers, many of whom sit outside the subscription networks of traditional clinical publishing. An open-access journal distributed through both its own site and established clinical platforms is positioned to reach that whole community.
Place in medical AI publishing
When the journal was launched in 2018, dedicated journals for artificial intelligence in medicine were still few, and much of the field's output appeared either in general medical journals or in computer science venues. The Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence was established specifically to give the clinical side of the field a journal of its own, backed at launch by one of China's largest technology companies and aimed in the first instance at building a platform for Chinese clinicians working with artificial intelligence.
Its subsequent record — more than 200 articles in its first seven years, indexing in Scopus and the Directory of Open Access Journals, entry into the Emerging Sources Citation Index in 2025, a first impact factor of 3.0 and a move to monthly publication from 2026 — documents a journal that grew with its field. As large language models and clinical decision support moved from research topics to deployed tools, the journal's contents moved with them, from convolutional neural networks for glioma grading to evaluations of GPT-4's diagnostic performance and the ethics of jailbreaking medical language models.
Key facts
Title: Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence. Abbreviation: JMAI (J Med Artif Intell). Online ISSN: 2617-2496. Launched: April 2018, announced jointly by AME Publishing Company and Tencent at the 2018 China "Internet Plus" Digital Economic Summit in Chongqing on 12 April 2018. Publisher: AME Publishing Company, Hong Kong, with Wolters Kluwer support and distribution on the Lippincott and Ovid platforms. Frequency: continuous publication 2018–2023, quarterly 2024–2025, monthly from January 2026. Output: 208 articles by 29 May 2025, including 88 original articles and 50 reviews. Indexing: Scopus; Directory of Open Access Journals (from April 2025); Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index (from May 2025, coverage from volume 6, 2023). Metrics: 2025 CiteScore 4.0; first impact factor 3.0 for 2025. Official website: jmai.amegroups.org.