The Journal of Minimally Invasive Surgery (JMIS) is the official journal of the Korean Society of Endo-Laparoscopic & Robotic Surgery (KSERS; formerly the Korean Society of Endoscopic and Laparoscopic Surgeons). The editorial board of JMIS has been trying steadily for several years to be indexed by the international literature databases. First, PubMed Central (PMC) accepted JMIS in March 2022. Starting with being deposited into PMC, I hope JMIS will be indexed in more international databases in the future. I want to show you the path that JMIS has been following over the years.

The history

The journal was launched as a biannual Korean journal in 1998. The first issue in the volume one was published in May 1998, which contains 21 articles and consists of 159 pages. In the early days, the secretary general of the society was in charge of publishing the journal, and in 2006, the editorial committee was formed for the first time. The past editor-in-chiefs are as follows: From 2006 to 2008, the first editor-in-chief was Professor Jun-Gi Kim from the Catholic University of Korea. From 2008 to 2014, the second was Professor Hyung-Ho Kim from Seoul National University. From 2014 to 2020, the third was Professor Suk-Hwan Lee from Kyung Hee University.

Conversion to an English journal

JMIS changed the journal’s language to English-only in 2017. Some members of the academic society objected to the conversion to an English journal. At that time, however, it was a necessary decision in order to be deposited into the international database in the future. In fact, more changes were required for the internationalization of the journal, and the JMIS system had been changing little by little before then. In 2012, the journal was renamed to its current name, the Journal of Minimally Invasive Surgery, the publication interval was changed from twice a year to four times a year, and its International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) was changed from 1738-7884 to the current print ISSN (2234-778X) and electronic ISSN (2234-5248). Subsequently, the JMIS website was newly established in English and manuscript submission was made available through the online system. In 2015, the pre-published plagiarism search program was applied in earnest, and the design of the inside of the journal was reorganized and colorized to improve readability. In 2016, not only abstracts, but full-text files of JMIS articles were searchable by Korean local databases or search engines. In addition, multimedia articles started to be submitted in line with the recent trend of minimally invasive surgery.

Lessons learned from challenging another international index database

At the end of 2019, JMIS challenged to be indexed on Scopus, which is one of the largest abstract and citation databases that was launched in 2004 by Elsevier. However, this attempt failed and we were notified to reapply to Scopus in 2 years. We took the reviewers’ comments seriously and prepared for our next attempt. We recruited more international editors, and updated regulations. Originally, we were going to apply to PMC shortly after failing with Scopus but decided to change our plan. I sent an e-mail to Professor Sun Huh, the president of the Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (https://kamje.or.kr), who has a lot of experience in this field [1]. He kindly and carefully reviewed the requirements for JMIS to be indexed into PMC. With reference to his remarks, we decided to improve the journal first and then challenge PMC 2 years later. To comply with the requirements, all descriptions related to research and publication ethics should be included in every article. In addition, it is important to minimize technical and scientific errors in articles published for at least 2 years prior to the application. Thus, we contracted a manuscript editing service company to reduce errors and improve the quality of manuscripts. We also tried to get more manuscripts from international authors to break away from being considered a local journal limited to Korea.

We applied for PMC in October 2021. Fortunately, JMIS passed the scientific review in January 2022 and then passed the technical review in March 2022. I am grateful to the KSERS for providing financial support and would like to express my special thanks to Professor Sun Huh for his sincere advice. The deposit into PMC is the first step in the global dissemination of JMIS, and more international databases await our challenge. To expose JMIS to researchers around the world, we need to get more manuscripts and citations. Thus, it is necessary to establish a strategy and implement specific procedures to overcome this hurdle.

JMIS is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal that shares the latest and advanced information on practice and research in minimally invasive surgery. We will strive to continue to publish the great work of researchers in JMIS while adhering to research and publication ethics.

Conflict of interest

Sun Jin Park is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Minimally Invasive Surgery. He was not involved in the review process of this article. There is no other conflict of interest.

Funding/support

None.