About Mediastinum

Mediastinum

Mediastinum (abbreviated MED; ISSN 2522-6711) is an open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal launched in March 2017 and published by AME Publishing Company of Hong Kong, with its content also made available through Wolters Kluwer Health's Lippincott and Ovid platforms. It occupies a niche that, by its founding editor's account, no journal had previously filled: it is devoted specifically to the mediastinum, the central compartment of the thoracic cavity, and to the understanding and management of the diseases that arise in, spread to or affect that space. Since 22 May 2024 it has been the official publication of the International Thymic Malignancy Interest Group (ITMIG). Its official website is med.amegroups.org.

A journal for an overlooked anatomical space

The founding case for the journal was set out by Wentao Fang of Shanghai Chest Hospital in the foreword "Welcome to the Mediastinum", published as the journal's first article (Mediastinum 2017;1:1). Fang described the mediastinum as "an interesting but less explored space compared to other parts of the human body", conventionally divided into three compartments — anterior or retrosternal, middle or visceral, and posterior or paravertebral. He noted that there had been no medical journal focusing specifically on the mediastinum, so clinicians and researchers had to resort to journals in various other specialties, where relevant information was often scattered, or even lost, among more general literature. The new journal was created to gather that dispersed material in one place, and Fang declared himself, in the article's conflict-of-interest statement, the journal's unpaid editor-in-chief — the role in which journal directories continue to list him.

Scope: beyond diseases primary to the mediastinum

The journal's stated aim is a better understanding and management of mediastinal diseases, as a professional platform for sharing knowledge and experience between interested peers so as finally to benefit patients. Its scope is deliberately wider than the narrow space in its title. It is not limited to diseases primary to the mediastinum, but encompasses all disorders related to or affecting it, including metastatic lesions from other parts of the body, local manifestations of systemic changes, and disease extension from neighbouring organs or compartments. That framing brings thymic tumours and other anterior mediastinal masses, mediastinal lymphadenopathy, cysts, neurogenic tumours, infections and staging questions for cancers of adjacent organs within a single editorial remit, instead of leaving each to a different specialty literature.

A multidisciplinary readership by design

From its first article, the journal was pitched emphatically at a multidisciplinary audience. Alongside up-to-date clinical and basic research and state-of-the-art therapeutic approaches, it promised rich material for education, and it set out to attract attention from all specialties — multidisciplinary clinical teams including surgeons, physicians and radiation oncologists, as well as pathologists, radiologists, basic research scientists, nurses and trainees. That breadth reflects the clinical reality of mediastinal disease, in which a single patient may pass through imaging, biopsy, surgery, oncology and pathology, and in which classification and staging decisions are typically made by a team rather than by one specialty acting alone. The journal's stated ambition was to provide high-level evidence and useful resources for all healthcare professionals engaged in delivering quality care to mediastinal patients.

Official publication of ITMIG

On 22 May 2024 the journal announced that it had become the official journal of the International Thymic Malignancy Interest Group (ITMIG), the international community concerned with thymic malignancies — thymoma, thymic carcinoma and related conditions centred on the anterior mediastinum. The affiliation is recorded on the journal's own about page, which lists Mediastinum as the official publication of ITMIG. The connection ties the journal to the community that develops classification and staging work for thymic epithelial tumours: mediastinal compartment classification itself has been debated between the ITMIG approach and the four-compartment classification proposed by the Japanese Association for Research on the Thymus (JART), a debate carried in the journal's own pages in a 2024 study of 84 patients with thymomas and thyroid tumours treated between January 2017 and March 2024. For a journal founded on the claim that mediastinal scholarship was scattered, formal adoption by the field's international interest group was a significant institutional milestone.

Publication history and schedule

AME's own journal listings record the launch date as March 2017. The journal was published continuously from March 2017 to December 2019, and then moved to a quarterly publication model, with issues in March, June, September and December. Its editorial office publishes annual reports charting its development; the 2025 annual report described continued growth in its international editorial board, diverse authorship and readership, steady publication volume and significant growth in website engagement. The corresponding editor listed by the journal is Aisling Luo, and the editorial office can be reached at med@amegroups.com. Manuscripts must be the original work of their authors and must not have been published previously or be under consideration elsewhere.

Indexing: PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science

The journal's indexing record was built in stages. AME's listing of its PubMed-indexed journals records that Mediastinum was indexed by PubMed and PubMed Central in November 2021 — a milestone marked by an editorial by Fang titled "Mediastinum indexed in PubMed Central: a new beginning for the new year". Scopus coverage is recorded from 2019 in SCImago's data. The journal is also covered by Google Scholar and Ovid, and its about page currently lists Web of Science's Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) among its indexing services; a journal announcement recorded that on 28 April 2026 a confirmation letter reached the editorial office that the journal had met the criteria for ESCI, with articles published after 2024, beginning with volume 8, to be included. Together, PubMed Central deposit and Scopus and Web of Science coverage place the journal's contents in the main discovery systems used by thoracic clinicians and researchers.

Metrics

Journal-metric sources give a picture of a small specialist title with a growing citation record. SCImago records an SJR of 0.594 and an h-index of 15 for Mediastinum, meaning fifteen of its articles have each been cited at least fifteen times in Scopus data. The journal announced a 2025 CiteScore of 2.9. Journal directories list an article processing charge of USD 1,390. These figures should be read in the context of the journal's narrow field: a title covering one anatomical compartment will always publish and be cited at a smaller scale than a general thoracic or oncology journal, and its metrics measure influence within that specialist community rather than across medicine as a whole.

Editorial standards and open access

Mediastinum is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follows COPE's guidelines and the ICMJE recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing and publication of scholarly work in medical journals. All of its content is published open access under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), so articles are immediately and permanently free for all to read, download, copy and distribute on those terms. For open-access publishing the journal uses an exclusive licensing agreement under which authors transfer copyright to AME Publishing Company while retaining the right to share their article in the same way permitted to third parties, together with certain scholarly usage rights.

How authors reach print

The journal publishes its expected turnaround times openly. In-house review takes one to three weeks, external peer review one to three months, publication ahead of print follows within one month of acceptance once the article processing charge has been received, and formal publication follows within one to three months of acceptance, with original articles listed as a priority. Those stated intervals, together with the continuous-then-quarterly history, describe the practical route by which mediastinal research submitted to the journal reaches its readers.

Place among thoracic journals

Mediastinum is distinct from the broader thoracic titles published from the same Hong Kong stable, such as the Journal of Thoracic Disease, Translational Lung Cancer Research and Shanghai Chest, which range across thoracic surgery and lung disease generally. Mediastinum alone takes a single anatomical compartment as its entire remit, and then defines that remit expansively — primary tumours, metastases, systemic manifestations and extension from neighbouring organs all included. Founded in 2017 on the argument that no journal served this space, adopted in 2024 as the official publication of ITMIG, and indexed in PubMed Central, Scopus and the Emerging Sources Citation Index, it has become the specialist home for scholarship on the diseases of the mediastinum.