Abstract

The Korean Medical Journal (1930-1937) is the first Korean medical journal published by The Korean Medical Association, which Korean doctors established to resist Japanese medical organizations during the Japanese colonial period. Using the bibliometric research method for The Korean Medical Journal, this study aimed to analyze the journal as follows. First, the study analyzed the subject trends of medical research by extracting the MeSH terms from the title of the articles. Next, the study identified characteristics of authors, type of language used in the papers, publication year and countries of references included in the papers. Also, this study identified the researchers’ interests by analyzing the frequency of keywords appearing in the roundtable titles. As a result of the research, infections, pathological symptoms and diseases of the digestive system were studied most often. Most authors belonged to Severance Union Medical College, and internal medicine and general surgery departments had the most authors. Most of the titles and texts of the papers were written in Korean and Chinese characters in combination. Of the 131 papers, only 40 contained abstracts, 22 of which were English abstracts, the most number. The study analyzed 1,103 references in the papers and found that the authors mainly cited the latest journals published in Japan, Germany, and the United States. The topics discussed the most in the roundtable talks were tuberculosis, neurasthenia, and gonorrhea in order. This research examined the history of the publication of The Korean medical journal. Also, it showed that Korean doctors accumulated their academic medical research results and contributed to improving medical conditions.