About Translational Gastroenterology and Hepatology

Translational Gastroenterology and Hepatology

Overview and identity

Translational Gastroenterology and Hepatology, abbreviated Transl Gastroenterol Hepatol and known as TGH, is an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal published by AME Publishing Company of Hong Kong with support from Wolters Kluwer. Its online ISSN is 2415-1289. The journal provides current and practical information on the diagnosis, prevention and clinical investigation of gastrointestinal, pancreatic, gallbladder and hepatic diseases, with a focus on cutting-edge findings in translational research in gastroenterology and hepatology.

TGH is the official journal of the Society for Translational Medicine (STM), according to its author guidelines. It is published from Hong Kong, with its editorial office reachable at tgh@amegroups.com, and its content is made available on Wolters Kluwer Health's Lippincott and Ovid platforms under the AME–Wolters Kluwer collaboration.

History: from Translational Gastrointestinal Cancer

The journal's history is longer than its current title suggests. An editorial published in the journal in January 2017, announcing its acceptance into PubMed and PubMed Central, records that it was launched quarterly in April 2012 under the name Translational Gastrointestinal Cancer and carried that title from April 2012 to December 2015. From January 2016 the title changed to Translational Gastroenterology and Hepatology in order to cover a broader scope across gastroenterology and hepatology. Bibliographic records preserve the earlier title's ISSNs, 2224-476X and 2224-4778, which is why some databases list those numbers against the journal's name.

In its first five years, from 2012 to 2016, the journal published 299 articles, of which 102 appeared in five focused issues and six special focuses on hot topics. Early focused themes included intraperitoneal chemotherapy for gastric cancer. The focused-issue model — assembling a set of papers on a single theme under guest editors — became a lasting feature of the journal's programme and of AME journals generally.

Indexing milestones

In January 2017 the journal announced that it had passed all the evaluation required by PubMed Central and had been officially accepted for inclusion in PubMed and PubMed Central, with coverage recorded from January 2017. It is also indexed by Scopus, with coverage from 2016 in Scopus-based summaries, and by the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), recorded from January 2019 in its directory record.

TGH achieved an impact factor of 3.3 in the 2025 Journal Citation Reports, as stated in its author guidelines. SCImago-based summaries give it an SJR of about 0.85 to 0.91 and place it in the second quartile (Q2) in both Gastroenterology and Hepatology, with a CiteScore of 4.5 in one recent summary and an h-index of 33. As with all such figures, the current release should be checked on the journal's site and in the Journal Citation Reports.

Scope and content

TGH focuses on translational research — the movement of laboratory findings into clinical application — across the digestive system. Its stated territory covers the gastrointestinal tract, pancreas, gallbladder and liver, and its published content addresses inflammatory bowel disease, colorectal and oesophageal disorders, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, hepatitis and liver cancer, among other conditions. Sample articles illustrate the range: a review of treatment strategies for locally advanced hepatocellular carcinoma and a review of systemic therapy for advanced gastroesophageal cancers both appeared in the journal and are typical of its clinically oriented translational reviews.

The journal provides information on diagnosis, prevention and clinical investigations, and publishes original research, reviews and focused-issue collections. Its author guidelines, updated on 21 September 2026 in the version consulted, state adherence to the ICMJE Recommendations, COPE's Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors, and WAME's policy, the standard ethical framework applied across the AME portfolio.

The publisher: AME Publishing Company

AME Publishing Company was founded in July 2009 by Stephen Wang and is headquartered in Hong Kong, with additional offices in Guangzhou, Changsha, Nanjing, Shanghai, Chengdu, Beijing, Taipei and Hangzhou. The company specialises in open-access medical journals and books, publishes more than sixty peer-reviewed journals, and states that its journals follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), of which AME became a publisher member in July 2021. Since October 2025 AME content has also been distributed through a collaboration with Wolters Kluwer Health, which makes journal content available on the Lippincott and Ovid platforms and broadens the reach of nearly fifty open-access titles.

Because TGH began in 2012 as Translational Gastrointestinal Cancer, it belongs to AME's earliest cohort of titles, launched within three years of the company's founding and alongside the Journal of Gastrointestinal Oncology. Its 2016 broadening and renaming mirrors a pattern seen elsewhere in the portfolio, where a narrow founding remit was widened once a journal had established an author base.

Frequency change and growth

For most of its life under the current title TGH was published quarterly. The journal has announced that, to serve its global community and accommodate a rising volume of high-quality submissions, it will transition from quarterly to bimonthly publication effective January 2026, with regular publication months of January, March, May, July, September and November. The announcement describes the change as underscoring the journal's rapid growth and influence since its launch in March 2016 under the new title.

A move from four to six issues a year typically reflects both submission pressure and citation performance, and in TGH's case it follows the attainment of a 3.3 impact factor. More frequent publication shortens queues for accepted articles and allows focused issues to appear without displacing regular content.

Readership and use

The journal serves gastroenterologists, hepatologists, gastrointestinal surgeons, oncologists treating digestive cancers, and translational researchers working on digestive disease mechanisms. Its open-access model means that its reviews — often the most clinically useful format for practising specialists — can be read without institutional subscriptions, and PubMed Central deposit makes the archive searchable through PubMed, where its 2017 indexing editorial itself is preserved (PMCID PMC5313287).

To cite the journal, authors use the abbreviation Transl Gastroenterol Hepatol and DOIs under the AME prefix 10.21037 with the code tgh. The official website is tgh.amegroups.com, also presented under the amegroups.org domain, where current issues, the archive reaching back to the Translational Gastrointestinal Cancer years, guidelines for authors and focused-issue calls are maintained.

Assessment

Translational Gastroenterology and Hepatology is a useful case study in how a small, narrowly titled open-access journal can develop: founded in 2012 on gastrointestinal cancer, broadened in 2016 to the whole of gastroenterology and hepatology, indexed in PubMed Central in 2017 and Scopus and ESCI thereafter, reaching an impact factor of 3.3 by 2025 and expanding to bimonthly publication in 2026. Published from Hong Kong by AME as the official journal of the Society for Translational Medicine, it occupies a clear niche between basic digestive-science journals and purely clinical titles, and its full archive is freely available to any reader with an internet connection.

How the journal fits its field

Gastroenterology and hepatology together cover some of the highest-burden diseases in Asia, including viral hepatitis, fatty liver disease and gastric and colorectal cancers, and the translational framing TGH adopts is well matched to that burden: progress depends on moving biomarker, imaging, endoscopic and pharmacological discoveries from study into clinic. By keeping diagnosis, prevention and clinical investigation in its stated remit alongside translational findings, the journal serves both the researchers generating that progress and the specialists expected to apply it, and its focused issues allow an emerging theme — a new therapy class, a screening strategy, a surgical technique — to be examined from laboratory and clinical angles in a single collection.