On the Occasion of PMC Registration of Hip & Pelvis

Hip & Pelvis is the official academic journal of the Korean Hip Society and has the longest tradition and unparalleled academic achievement among others in the Korean Orthopaedic Association. The publication was first released in 1989 as Journal of Korean Hip Society and issued 4 times a year since 2000. The Journal specializes in orthopedic topics related to the hip and pelvis. Its focus goes beyond fracture treatment adjacent to hip joint and hip arthroplasty to include surgical operations such as the recently emerging issues of arthroscopy, osteotomy and robot-based operations, as well as diverse clinical and fundamental studies on diseases of the hip and pelvis. To increase the reach of the Journal in the global academic setting, the Journal changed its title to Hip & Pelvis starting with the June, 2012 issue. Since the June, 2014 issue, the Journal has been fully published in English. As part of the efforts to expand the global presence of Hip & Pelvis, the Society has established an online submission system and an open-access publication. The Journal has selected four foreign editorial board members for global human network. Based on these efforts, the Journal achieved registration status with the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine for PubMed Central (PMC) this July, demonstrating the global recognition of the excellent quality of its papers. Important factors in SCOPUS and Science Citation Index (SCI) registration are known to include experts’ assessment, compliance with available standards, and impact factor. The major criteria used by experts to assess journals include whether a journal has been regularly published; complied with global editing regulations; written its papers, abstracts, keywords, and references in English; and evaluated its contributed papers’ suitability, research method, creativity and references according to the international examination criteria. Hip & Pelvis has successfully satisfied all of these criteria. Still, for SCOPUS and SCI registration, external expansion is also important in addition to meeting the aforementioned evaluation criteria and publishing quality papers. In this situation, the Journal is planning to have more foreign editorial board members and reviewers as well as more papers by overseas scholars to lay the foundation for an increased global reach. It is also important to maintain online electronic publications and an open-access policy reflective of the latest trends of renowned international journals. This will make papers readily available while minimizing the time needed for peer review. We expect such efforts would help increase the quantity and quality of papers submitted to the Journal from around the world including the Asian region. We at the Society continue to work hard to establish the Journal as one of the most professional and authoritative academic publications in the field of the hip and pelvis.