About Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Anesthesia

Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Anesthesia

Overview and identity

The Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Anesthesia, abbreviated JOMA and cited as J Oral Maxillofac Anesth, is an open-access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal published by AME Publishing Company of Hong Kong. It carries ISSN 2790-8852 and is published online at joma.amegroups.org, with its content also distributed through Wolters Kluwer's Ovid platform. The journal was launched in March 2022, and its first issue appeared as volume 1 on 31 March 2022. Its editorial office can be contacted at joma@amegroups.com.

JOMA occupies a deliberately narrow niche. Rather than covering anaesthesia in general, or oral and maxillofacial surgery in general, it is devoted to the point where the two meet: anaesthesia applied in oral and maxillofacial surgery, head and neck surgery, and otorhinolaryngologic surgery. That focus is stated in identical terms in its author guidelines, its Wolters Kluwer Ovid listing and its own indexing announcements, giving the journal a consistent public identity across platforms.

Origins at Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital

The journal was created through a shared long-term vision of a team from Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, and AME Publishing Company. The inaugural editorial, written by Hong Jiang and Ming Xia and published on 31 March 2022 as the journal's first article (J Oral Maxillofac Anesth 2022;1:1, doi: 10.21037/joma-21-2), announced the launch and explained that the journal would focus on all aspects of anaesthesia in oral and maxillofacial surgery.

JOMA was the second English-language journal to emerge from the same Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital group. In May 2019 the hospital team had already realised a long-held ambition by launching Frontiers of Oral and Maxillofacial Medicine, the hospital's official publication. JOMA, arriving three years later, extended that publishing programme from oral and maxillofacial medicine and surgery into the anaesthetic care that makes such surgery possible, and the two titles remain sister journals from the same institutional base.

Founding editors and the memory of Weiliu Qiu

Hong Jiang serves as editor-in-chief and Ming Xia as executive editor-in-chief. Their appointments were recorded in the inaugural editorial as running from June 2021 to May 2026, before the first issue appeared, reflecting the preparation period behind the March 2022 launch. Hong Jiang is based in the Department of Anesthesiology at Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital, and her recorded research interests include difficult airway management, including work based on artificial intelligence, anaesthesia and neurodevelopment, and head, neck and maxillofacial anaesthesia.

The journal's 2024 annual report and a separate memorial notice record the death, on 24 May 2024 at the age of 92, of Professor Weiliu Qiu, who had served as an honorary editor-in-chief of JOMA. Qiu was an honorary professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a tenured professor at the Ninth People's Hospital and a former president of that hospital, as well as director of the university's College of Stomatology. The memorial explains that his long-time dream of publishing an English journal of oral and maxillofacial surgery was first realised in May 2019, when he supported the launch of Frontiers of Oral and Maxillofacial Medicine as its honorary editor-in-chief, and that in March 2022 he worked with Hong Jiang and Ming Xia to launch JOMA in the same honorary role. The journal pledged to continue following the guidance he had given to both titles.

A cover that encodes its subject

One of the most distinctive documented features of JOMA is its cover design, explained by the founding editors in the inaugural editorial. The four letters of the journal's acronym are drawn so that they stand, graphically, for objects and views central to its field: the letter J represents an endotracheal tube, the O represents the oral cavity, the M represents a glottis image, and the A represents an injector. The editors wrote that the cover highlights the features of oral and maxillofacial anaesthesia in this visual shorthand.

The device is more than decoration. Airway control through an endotracheal tube, direct work within the oral cavity, visualisation of the glottis and the delivery of anaesthetic agents by injector are the everyday elements of the specialty the journal serves, and compressing them into the title's own letters gives JOMA a recognisable identity among the many medical journals published from Hong Kong by the same publisher.

Scope: anaesthesia where surgery meets the airway

The journal's stated scope covers front-line issues and the current situation of anaesthesia applied in oral and maxillofacial surgery, head and neck surgery, and otorhinolaryngologic surgery. The author guidelines list the topics explicitly: airway management; endotracheal intubation; induction and maintenance of general anaesthesia; oral local anaesthesia; oral comfort in diagnostic and therapeutic procedures; and the management of complications and emergencies that may arise during the administration of anaesthesia.

That list reflects the clinical reality of the field. In oral, maxillofacial and head and neck surgery, the surgeon and the anaesthetist work in the same anatomical field, and the airway itself is often part of the operative site. Articles in the journal's recent issues illustrate the scope in practice: a 2026 issue carried a debate on when to involve an anaesthesiologist versus when an oral surgeon can directly administer sedation or general anaesthesia, a narrative review of artificial intelligence-assisted airway evaluation and imaging-based decision-making in head and neck anaesthesia, a paper on ultrasound-guided superficial cervical plexus block for oral and maxillofacial surgery, and a randomised controlled trial comparing remimazolam with propofol for emergence agitation in children undergoing root canal therapy combined with sevoflurane.

Article types and special series

JOMA publishes original articles, review articles, case reports and shorter, thought-provoking contributions such as editorial commentaries and letters to the editor. Its indexing announcement of April 2025 broke down its output to that date by type: of the 104 articles published since the inaugural issue, 62 were review articles, 9 were original articles and 4 were case reports, with the remainder made up of editorials, commentaries and other short forms. The predominance of reviews is characteristic of a young specialty journal building its readership by synthesising a scattered literature.

Commissioned special series are a key feature of the journal. Its 2024 annual report recorded two published special series that year, including a series on orofacial pain covering diagnostic and therapeutic topics and nerve blocks, guest edited by Mythili Kalladka of the Eastman Institute. The journal also publishes interviews with editorial board members and outstanding authors, and a Reviewer of the Month feature, as part of the community-building activity documented in its annual reports.

Indexing in ESCI and Scopus

On 30 April 2025 the journal's editorial office received official confirmation that JOMA had met all selection criteria for inclusion in the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), part of the Web of Science Core Collection maintained by Clarivate. Articles published in JOMA from 2022 onward, beginning with volume 1, are included in the index. The journal's updated author guidelines also record that JOMA is indexed by Scopus.

The journal's announcement explained the significance it attaches to the ESCI milestone: ESCI, established by Clarivate in 2015, identifies scholarly journals demonstrating regional significance or addressing emerging research fields, and inclusion requires passing a rigorous editorial evaluation against data standards that include full-text indexing, cited reference tracking, subject categorisation and authorship verification. For a journal launched only in March 2022, achieving ESCI coverage back to its first volume within three years marked its transition from a new title to an indexed one, and an editorial published in the journal in 2026, marking the attainment of a first impact factor, treated that recognition as an affirmation of the founding vision.

Publication record and editorial community

By April 2025, a little over three years after launch, JOMA had published 104 articles. Its 2024 annual report, updated on 31 December 2024, documented the structure behind that output: an editorial board whose geographic distribution spanned countries including Canada, the Czech Republic, Germany and Ireland alongside its Chinese base, with 42 current editorial board members recorded in the report's distribution summary; the year's publications analysed by number, article type and internationality; the special series published; and interviews conducted during the year.

The journal continues into volume 5 in 2026, publishing quarterly. Its recent content shows the field's current preoccupations, including cephalometry and risk prediction in airway management, debated in a letter and response published in 2026, and the boundaries between surgeon-directed and anaesthesiologist-led anaesthesia, addressed in paired articles arguing for a shared safety framework.

Ethics, peer review and publishing practice

JOMA adheres to ethical publishing guidelines through membership of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and compliance with the standards of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Its author guidelines, updated on 15 August 2025, state that the guidelines themselves were generated following the ICMJE recommendations, COPE's code of conduct and best practice guidelines for journal editors, and the policy of the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). Authors complete the ICMJE uniform disclosure form, and commissioned editorials state their provenance and whether they underwent external peer review.

The journal is an online publishing journal with fast-track electronic publication, a feature highlighted in its annual report. It describes its purpose as creating a platform for researchers and clinicians by presenting pertinent investigations, discussing critical questions relevant to the whole field of oral and maxillofacial anaesthesia, and developing new perspectives on the issues that concern the specialty. Submissions and peer review are handled through its online system, and published articles are openly accessible without subscription.

Place in its field

Within medical publishing, JOMA's significance lies in the specificity of its remit. Anaesthesia for oral and maxillofacial surgery has historically been covered as a section within broader anaesthesia journals or broader surgical journals; a journal devoted solely to that intersection, edited from one of China's leading oral and maxillofacial surgery hospitals, gives the subspecialty a dedicated forum. Its verified record to date is that of a young journal: launched in March 2022 by the Shanghai Ninth People's Hospital team and AME Publishing Company, led by Hong Jiang and Ming Xia, shaped in its founding by the honorary editorship of Weiliu Qiu, grown to 104 articles by April 2025, and recognised in 2025 with indexing in both the Emerging Sources Citation Index and Scopus.