For authors

Author guidelines

Founding author

Yeonseung Choe

Founding author and designer of Baekrokdam Research Commons. His work connects questions arising in clinical practice with East Asian medical texts, medical history, contemporary research, and testable study designs.

View publications by Yeonseung Choe

During launch, publication is limited to commissioned and internal research; unsolicited submissions are not accepted. This page will be revised after the editorial board, contact channel, and review operations are appointed.

Scope

We publish testable questions concerning the concepts, interventions, and safety of Korean medicine, including multidisciplinary work in biomedicine, medical history, philology, complexity science, data science, and clinical epidemiology. Unsupported efficacy claims and simple equivalence claims between Korean-medicine and modern concepts are out of scope.

Article types

  • Research protocol: question, prespecified methods, stopping rules, and planned outputs
  • Research article: results based on original data or reproducible analysis
  • Review or evidence map: synthesis with disclosed searches, criteria, and risk-of-bias assessment
  • Methods, perspectives, and counter-hypotheses: testable proposals with explicit limitations

Required transparency

  • Author names, affiliations, contribution roles (CRediT preferred), and ORCID when available
  • Funding, competing interests, ethics review, and data/code availability
  • Where AI was used and who performed human verification; AI cannot be an author
  • Traceable claim-level sources, counter/qualifying evidence, and uncertainty level

Scholarly contribution and clinical bridge

Every major manuscript must explain what becomes newly visible beyond the existing literature, which assumption it corrects, and which local clinical observation or study design could follow. Statistical significance is not a stand-alone acceptance or rejection criterion; effect size, uncertainty, heterogeneity, patient importance, external validity, and feasibility must also be reported.

Minimum conditions for citation-worthy research

Length, scholarly appearance, and reference count do not guarantee citation value. The following objects are required so another investigator can safely reuse the central claims.

  • Contribution delta: exactly what is added beyond the closest prior work
  • Claim map: direct evidence, inference, hypothesis, counter-evidence, and scope for each central claim
  • Reproducible methods: searches, editions, selection criteria, analysis code, exclusions, and stopping rules
  • Evidence-grade rubric: rules behind ratings such as high/low and the independent assessor
  • Version and review record: who challenged what and what the author changed
  • Reusable outputs: passage ledger, tables, data, code, or problem/hypothesis objects

Reporting and files

Authors should follow the applicable EQUATOR reporting guideline and include DOI or persistent URLs in references when available. Source data for tables and figures and analysis code should normally be deposited in a public repository. Patient-identifying information and copyrighted material without publication rights must not be submitted.

Fees, rights, and versions

Submission and publication charges are currently zero. Authors retain copyright and grant a CC BY 4.0 licence. Protocols, working papers, peer-reviewed records, corrections, and retractions are labelled distinctly.