Archives of Plastic Surgery Indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central and Scopus, and on the Road to Becoming an SCI(E) Journal

The Korean Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, with over 2,000 members, is the third largest society of its kind, following those of the United States and Brazil. Based on this foundation, advances in surgical techniques have promoted the international status of Korean plastic surgery, which has led Korean plastic surgeons to actively participate in international conferences and volunteer work worldwide. Archives of Plastic Surgery (APS) is the official journal of the Korean Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons. Our journal has been published since the year 1974, with 179 issues through the year 2011, written fully in Korean, which led to difficulties in accessibility of the journal to international readers [1]. In 2012, the journal converted to a fully English form, with the new English title Archives of Plastic Surgery. Along with this transition, the journal was converted to open access, allowing readers to view or download the full text of all journal content without a subscription. For convenient online search of APS articles, the journal is indexed in representative databases such as PubMed, PubMed Central (PMC), Scopus, and Google Scholar. The strong intellectual and institutional value of the journal can be inferred from the fact that the journal was indexed in PMC and Scopus only a few months after its conversion to English.

For APS to continue to increase its respectability, the next step would be to be indexed as an Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI[E]) journal. It is uncommon for journals dedicated to plastic surgery to be indexed in SCI(E). There are only 10 such plastic surgery journals worldwide: seven in the United States and one each in the UK, Canada, and Sweden. Notably, there are none in the Asia-Pacific region so far. There are cultural differences in plastic surgical practice, and when a plastic surgeon of the Asia-Pacific region submits a journal on new surgical concepts or technical approaches conforming to regional, geographical and cultural practices to the present SCI(E) journals, a lack of understanding of these underlying factors may lead to rejection of an otherwise excellent article. If APS attains SCI(E) status, it could provide a particularly valuable forum for the publication of articles on patients of different ethnic backgrounds from throughout the Asia-Pacific region, and could earn the status of the leading plastic surgery journal in this region.

To be indexed as an SCI(E) journal, the impact factor (IF) is of utmost importance. In general, journals dedicated to plastic surgery do not have high impact factors. Of the 10 SCI(E) journals in this field, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery has the highest IF of 3.382 (2011), five of the journals have their IF in the 1s, and the remaining four journals have an IF below 1. The Journal of the Korean Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons, the former body of APS, has a calculated IF of 0.072 for the year 2011 (Table 1). Taking in to account that this was a journal in the Korean language with no open access, the new IF of the APS to be calculated in the year 2014 may be safely be predicted to be higher. To perform as the leading journal of the Asia-Pacific region, publishing as a co-official journal with the societies of other Asian countries is being planned, and given the Republic of Korea's status as an IT powerhouse, development of iPad and Android applications for the journal is also underway. The APS is making multilateral efforts to earn SCI(E) status, to become an internationally renowned journal, and to lead the plastic surgery profession of the Asia-Pacific region.

Table 1

The SIC(E) journals related to plastic surgery along with Archives of Plastic Surgery