ULTRASONOGRAPHY: two years of globalization and the achievement of ESCI status

Two years have passed since the launch of Ultrasonography as an English-language journal. The goal of converting the official language of the journal from Korean to English was globalization of the Korean Society of Ultrasound in Medicine (KSUM) and our official journal [1]. As the editor-in-chief, I would like to summarize the results of our two-year effort toward globalization, to report on the publication of two volumes composed of a total of eight serial quarterly issues, and to provide a perspective on the journal's future. From late 2013, before the publication of the first English-language issue (Vol. 33, No. 1), the domains for the homepage of our journal (http://www.e-ultrasonography.org) and submission page (http://submit.e-ultrasonography.org) were renewed for English-only sites. Google analytics (https://www.google.com/analytics/web/) has shown a gradual increase in visits to the journal’s homepage ever since. In comparison to the proportion of domestic visitors from within Korea, the proportion of visitors from around the world has markedly grown along with the number of visitors’ nationalities (domestic, n=573; global, n=1,228 from 82 different countries in July 2015), although the growth has stagnated a bit during the most recent few months. Through the free mobile applications available on Google Play or the App Store, many readers have downloaded the journal’s contents in accordance with the full Open Access policy of the journal. As of the publication of this issue, the journal page of Ultrasonography is the first result of a search for the word ‘ultrasonography’ via google. co.kr and third via google.com, even though ‘ultrasonography’ is a general term indicating an imaging technique in addition to a proper noun referring to the title of our journal. We suppose that readers of our journal frequently access the journal content by googling the term ‘ultrasonography,’ resulting in the most frequent selection of the journal’s homepage among search results for this term. This could be influencing the journal’s prominent location in Google search results. The number of articles submitted for publication by authors from outside Korea has sharply increased from 9% in 2014 to 43% so far in 2015. Among published articles, the four issues of 2014 contained only Korean authors, but six out of 40 papers were written by Editor-in-Chief Ultrasonography http://dx.doi.org/10.14366/usg.15078 pISSN: 2288-5919 • eISSN: 2288-5943 Ultrasonography 2016;35:1-2