The Journal of Clinical Medicine (JCM, ISSN: 2077-0383) held an Editorial Board Meeting for the Section “Gastroenterology & Hepatopancreatobiliary Medicine” on 1 March 2024. Professor Doctor Hidekazu Suzuki, the Section Editor-in-Chief, had an engaging conversation with the Editorial Board Members Professor Doctor Pieter Hindryckx, Professor Doctor Stephen Riordan, and the journal relations team.

The meeting started with a presentation about the development of the journal, as well as the Section “Gastroenterology & Hepatopancreatobiliary Medicine”, with the following information being presented:

• The journal’s history, publication statistics, distribution of scholars (2018–2023), the benefits of open access, journal awards, conference sponsorship, and promotion on social media;
• The geographical distribution of the Section’s Editorial Board Members, decision-making statistics, and Section statistics.

The meeting chaired by Professor Doctor Suzuki mainly addressed the following points:

• The Impact Factor and citations of the Section and the journal;
• Article type: in addition to original articles, comprehensive review papers and guidelines will be encouraged. Excellent case reports on rare diseases and papers with videos or high-quality tables/figures will also be considered for submission;
• Hot topics: recommendations by Editorial Board Members within the Section, such as AI and its application in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), endoscopy, etc.;
• Manuscript processing: papers’ topic distribution, paper lengths, the reviewer database, reviewer vouchers, acceptance/rejection rates;
• Journal promotion: we discussed enhancing the journal’s advertising and describing author benefits in social media posts;
• Conferences/meetings: enriching of the geographical distribution of our conferences, the proposal of an offline board meeting, and suggestions for the board’s meeting frequency (quarterly or half yearly).

We would like to thank every Editorial Board Member and contributing academics for their support. We look forward to receiving more suggestions so that we can continue our progress together.

Attendee list (in no particular order):

• Prof. Dr. Hidekazu Suzuki (Section Editor-in-Chief), Tokai University School of Medicine, Kanagawa, Japan;
• Prof. Dr. Pieter Hindryckx, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium;
• Prof. Dr. Stephen Riordan, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Due to time-zone differences, some Editorial Board Members were unable to attend this meeting.

The latest official CiteScore (2022 Scopus data) for the Journal of Clinical Medicine is 5.4, ranking 137/830 (Q1) in the “General Medicine” category. The current Impact Factor of JCM is 3.9 (2022), ranking 58/167 (Q2) in the “Medicine, General & Internal” category.

To access more journal statistics, please click here.

To find out more information about the Section, please visit the following link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jcm/sections/Gastroenterology_Hepatology.