Biomedical Engineering Letters marks ten years of growth and a new editor-in-chief

Biomedical Engineering Letters, the international journal of the Korean Society of Medical and Biological Engineering, has reached the end of an editorial era. Jae Sung Lee, who served as Editor-in-Chief from 2016, has concluded a ten-year term and published a retrospective editorial in the journal describing how the publication grew from a society organ into an internationally indexed venue for biomedical engineering research. The editorial, published on 27 October 2026, traces the journal’s rise through a decisive milestone: its inclusion in the Science Citation Index Expanded in 2021, which brought broader recognition among researchers worldwide and was accompanied by a sustained improvement in the journal’s Impact Factor.

Lee writes that when he assumed the role in 2016, his foremost priority was to strengthen the journal’s visibility and standing within the international biomedical engineering community. In his framing, a journal is more than a platform for disseminating research findings; it represents a scholarly community’s commitment to provide a trusted home for significant scientific achievements. With that principle in mind, the editorial team focused on continuously enhancing the journal’s quality while maintaining what he describes as a fair, rigorous, and professional editorial process. The retrospective attributes the journal’s accomplishments not to the editorial team alone, but to the authors who chose the journal for their work and to the many reviewers who contributed their time and expertise to peer review.

The growth in submissions after Science Citation Index Expanded indexing exposed a structural limitation. An editorial system centered on a single Editor-in-Chief could no longer adequately meet the journal’s needs while preserving subject-specific expertise, timeliness, and consistency across a rising manuscript volume. In response, the journal introduced a Topic Editor system. Under this model, Topic Editors identify appropriate Associate Editors for their respective subject areas and oversee the review process, allowing the journal to manage submissions more efficiently while reinforcing the expertise and fairness of its editorial decisions. Lee characterizes this as more than an administrative adjustment, describing it as an important transition toward a shared editorial model built on distributed expertise and responsibility, one he hopes will provide a sustainable foundation for the journal’s future development.

International growth, the editorial stresses, did not come at the expense of the journal’s identity as the official international journal of the Korean Society of Medical and Biological Engineering. Lee argues that a truly international journal must reach beyond a single national community, but that its growth has limited meaning if it does not also enrich the scholarly ecosystem of the Society and its members. To that end, the journal has published a variety of Special Issues each year, designed to encourage member participation, spotlight emerging research areas, and give early-career researchers opportunities to introduce their work to an international readership. In his assessment, these efforts have fostered scholarly exchange within the Society and broadened the base of biomedical engineering research.

The editorial also credits the journal’s trajectory to the continuing growth of the Korean Society of Medical and Biological Engineering itself and to the systematic work of its Academic Committee, which Lee describes as lying at the heart of the Society’s academic activities. Expanded academic meetings and opportunities for scientific exchange have helped identify emerging topics and outstanding research, contributing directly to Special Issue planning and the attraction of high-quality manuscripts. Broader participation by early-career researchers and investigators from diverse subfields, he writes, has enabled the journal to represent an increasingly vibrant and inclusive research community in its role as the Society’s official international outlet.

Looking outward from the journal’s own history, the retrospective situates the past decade within a period of rapid transformation in biomedical engineering itself. Artificial intelligence, Lee notes, is reshaping not only the analysis of medical images, signals, and data, but also diagnosis, treatment planning, medical-device design, and clinical decision-making. Wearable sensors, digital therapeutics, robotics, precision medicine, generative AI, and multimodal data are bringing engineering innovation ever closer to clinical practice. These observations, drawn from the editorial’s survey of the field, sketch the research landscape the journal has covered and will continue to cover under new leadership.

Yet the editorial sets a deliberately cautious standard for what should count as valuable research in this fast-moving environment. Novelty alone, Lee argues, should not determine the value of a study. The questions he says the journal must continue to ask are whether work addresses genuine needs in patient care, whether it is reproducible and rigorously validated, and whether it can connect engineering innovation with medicine and industry. He states that the journal should continue to seek work meeting these standards and should serve as a forum connecting the strengths of Korean biomedical engineering with the global research community. For researchers weighing where to submit work in artificial intelligence, medical devices, or clinical data science, the statement functions as a public articulation of the journal’s editorial values at a moment of leadership transition.

The retrospective reserves substantial space for gratitude. Lee thanks the journal’s Editorial Board members, whose careful selection of reviewers and thoughtful support of editorial decisions he credits as essential to maintaining the journal’s scholarly quality and credibility. He extends particular thanks to the many anonymous reviewers who have devoted time to evaluating manuscripts and offering constructive advice, describing their expertise, fairness, and commitment to the scholarly community as indispensable to the journal’s progress. He also acknowledges the past Presidents of the Korean Society of Medical and Biological Engineering for their support of the journal, and names Director Ji-young Won of the Society Secretariat for her steadfast support of journal operations and Team Leader Eun Young Kim for managing the journal’s publication and financial affairs.

Partnership with the publisher also receives mention. Lee expresses gratitude to Editor Phoebe Kim at Springer for her close collaboration in the journal’s international publication and development, crediting the professionalism of the journal’s supporters with allowing Biomedical Engineering Letters to focus on its academic mission and build the foundation it has today. The journal is published jointly by the Korean Society of Medical and Biological Engineering and Springer Nature, and the editorial’s account of the past decade reflects that dual identity: rooted in a national society while increasingly oriented toward a global authorship and readership.

The editorial closes with the announcement of a leadership transition. Beginning in January 2027, Professor Chang-Hwan Im of Hanyang University will take over as Editor-in-Chief. Lee describes Im as a distinguished researcher whose work spans brain engineering, brain–computer interfaces, and AI-based medical technologies, noting that through his research and numerous widely recognized books he has established a strong international profile in biomedical engineering. Lee expresses confidence that Im’s broad experience and international perspective will further advance the journal’s academic excellence and global reach, while nurturing it as an open platform for early-career researchers and the many diverse areas of the field. As the journal enters its second decade since the milestones described in the retrospective, the handover marks both a conclusion and a stated expectation of continued growth under new leadership.

Subject of Research: A retrospective editorial on the ten-year editorship and development of the journal Biomedical Engineering Letters

Article Title: A decade of biomedical engineering letters

Article References: Lee, J. S. (2026). A decade of biomedical engineering letters. Biomedical Engineering Letters. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13534-026-00626-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13534-026-00626-4

Keywords: Biomedical Engineering Letters, KOSOMBE, editorial, SCIE indexing, Impact Factor, peer review, Topic Editor system, artificial intelligence, medical devices, early-career researchers, Chang-Hwan Im, Springer Nature