Aims and scope
Why we started this journal
Diagnosis is essential to care, but it does not always explain how a person’s symptoms arise, change, and affect daily life. This journal begins with the work of observing that remainder more carefully and turning it into better questions, without rushing to fill it with a new label.
What we are here to do
We take questions arising in Baekrokdam’s clinic to East Asian primary texts and commentaries, clinical cases and medical history, Chinese and Japanese clinical traditions, contemporary biomedicine, and research on lived experience. The aim is not an elegant synthesis for its own sake, but to clarify where these sources address similar phenomena, where they differ, and what should be observed next in care and research.
Scope
- Conceptual history and textual/commentarial lineages in Korean medicine
- Comparative studies of Chinese master-clinician cases, formula/herb presentations, and Japanese Kampo
- Medical-historical and textual methods for the formation, transformation, and transmission of acupuncture and formula theories
- Translational, mechanistic, and systems-biology hypotheses
- Evidence maps, systematic and scoping reviews, and methods research
- Clinical research protocols and reproducible analyses
- Safety, adverse effects, interactions, and counter-evidence
- New conceptual, measurement, and clinical hypotheses derived from structural gaps in the knowledge graph
Who this is for
Our primary readers are Korean-medicine doctors, physicians, clinical researchers, and students. Abstracts and key explanations are also written for patients who want to understand how lived symptoms become research questions. Clinical guidance for patients remains clearly separate from researchers’ hypotheses.
Why the name Commons
Good research is more than a finished paper. Questions, close readings of source texts, failed hypotheses, critiques, and revisions should remain available for the next investigator. Commons names a shared record that others can read, challenge, and extend.