The South African Medical Journal is a monthly peer-reviewed

Peer review

Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...

 open-access medical journal which has been published in South Africa since 1884. It is sponsored by the South African Medical Association

South African Medical Association

The South African Medical Association is a trade union for doctors in South Africa. It is affiliated with the Congress of South African Trade Unions.-External links:* ....

 and published by the association's publishing arm, the Health & Medical Publishing Group.

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in BIOSIS Previews

BIOSIS Previews

BIOSIS Previews is an English-language, bibliographic database service, with abstracts and citation indexing. It is part of Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge suite. Content that was originally integrated from the BIOSIS company before the merger in 2004 is now part of the Web of Knowledge...

, Current Contents

Current Contents

Current Contents is a rapid alerting service database from the Institute for Scientific Information, now part of Thomson Reuters, that is published online and in several different printed subject sections.-History:...

/Clinical Medicine, PubMed

PubMed

PubMed is a free database accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health maintains the database as part of the Entrez information retrieval system...

/MEDLINE

MEDLINE

MEDLINE is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care...

, and the Science Citation Index

Science Citation Index

The Science Citation Index is a citation index originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information and created by Eugene Garfield in 1960, which is now owned by Thomson Reuters. The larger version covers more than 6,500 notable and significant journals, across 150 disciplines, from ...

. According to the Journal Citation Reports

Journal Citation Reports

Journal Citation Reports is an annual publication by the Healthcare & Science division of Thomson Reuters. It has been integrated with the Web of Knowledge, by Thomson Reuters, and is accessed from the Web of Science to JCR Web. It provides information about academic journals in the sciences and...

, the journal's 2009 impact factor

Impact factor

The impact factor, often abbreviated IF, is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to articles published in science and social science journals. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field, with journals with higher impact factors deemed...

is 1.325, ranking it 65th out of 133 journals in the category "Medicine, General & Internal".