JAMA Surgery is an international peer-reviewed journal, which began publication in 1920. It is the official publication of the Association of VA Surgeons, the Pacific Coast Surgical Association, and the Surgical Outcomes Club. It is also a member of the JAMA Network, a consortium of peer-reviewed, general medical and specialty publications. Its current editor-in-chief is Melina R. Kibbe, MD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Published online weekly, every Wednesday, JAMA Surgery is also published in print/online issues 12 times a year. The journal in 2019 received over 3.2 million online visits and more than 3.7 million article views and downloads. Without any author fees, all research articles are made free access online 12 months after publication on the website. In addition, the online version is freely available or nearly so to institutions in developing countries through the World Health Organization's HINARI program.
Mission statement
To promote the art and science of surgery by publishing relevant peer-reviewed research to assist the surgeon in optimizing patient care. JAMA Surgery will also serves as a forum for the discussion of issues pertinent to surgery, such as the education and training of the surgical workforce, quality improvement, and the ethics and economics of health care delivery.
Brief history
In July 1920, the first issue of Archives of Surgery was published by the American Medical Association. William J. Mayo, MD, who was a member of the editorial board and authored the inaugural editorial, indicated that Archives of Surgery would follow the character and scope of its sister journals, Archives of Internal Medicine, Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, and the American Journal of Diseases of Children. Mayo also commented that Archives of Surgery would not compete with the other two prominent surgical journals that existed at the time: Annals of Surgery, established in 1885, and Surgery, Gynecology and Obstetrics, established in 1905. The trustees who founded Archives of Surgery believed that creating this new surgical journal would help alleviate the publication burden of the other two surgical journals while also creating a "sphere of its own" that would be "sufficiently useful to the profession to warrant its entering the field". The profession's widespread positive response to the initial issues of Archives of Surgery indicated that the new journal succeeded in that endeavor. One of the most notable changes for Archives of Surgery occurred in January 2013 when the name was changed to JAMA Surgery. This name change occurred across the entire JAMA Network. The vision was to create a network of journals that shared a digital home, similar content, and a more consistent brand that conveyed the highest possible standards in medical journalism—a commitment to quality, integrity, innovation, and excellence.
The acceptance rate for JAMA Surgery in 2019 was 16% with a median time to first decision in nine days and 40 days with review. All articles are published online first. Additional information on the types of articles published and editorial policies is available in the journal's "Instructions for Authors". It should also be noted for reference that JAMA Surgery is abstracted and indexed in Index Medicus/MEDLINE/PubMed; the journal is also listed on the University Grants Commission of Indialist of approved journals.
World ranking
According to Journal Citation Reports, the journal's 2018 impact factor was 10.668, making it the highest ranking surgery journal in the world and further distinguishing it as the first surgery journal ever to break double digits in that scientometric index. Its Journal Impact Factor for 2019 continued to increase, rising substantially to 13.625 and maintaining the journal's top ranking.
