Acta Stomatologica Croatica (hereinafter ASCRO) is an interdisciplinary journal from the field of oral and dental medicine with a long tradition of 48 years of existence.

In fact, back in 1966 at the suggestion of several of our teachers responsible for the development of the profession, employees of the School of Dental Medicine, University of Zagreb and the leading persons of the Society of Dental Health Workers at the Croatian Medical Association, this journal was set up in order to scientifically contribute to the development of the profession, educate fellow doctors of dental medicine in the former state and enable scientists and teachers to meet the requirements for their scientific-teaching advancement by publishing the results of their studies in ASCRO.

At the time, the Editor-in-chief was Professor Zdenko Njemirovskij, PhD, a professor of dental pathology, who used his knowledge and skills to include ASCRO into international scientific databases (Index of dental literature - Index Medicus Medline precursor).

ASCRO was continuously published four times a year and was a very popular journal among colleagues in the profession throughout the former state. Unfortunately, the death of Professor Njemirovski in 1989 interrupted his work and the high status of ASCRO. After his death, Vladimir Lapter, PhD took over the duty of the Editor-in-Chief until 1996. During the breakup of Yugoslavia and the aggression on Croatia, the continuity of ASCRO publication was interrupted, the authors and reviewers became demotivated and until 1996 ASCRO was losing its popularity. From 1996 to 2006, the Editor-in-Chief was Professor Goran Knezević, PhD, and during his time as an editor the journal took a new, modern approach.  ASCRO was redesigned, an international editorial board was introduced and articles were published in two languages.

Due to previous loss of continuity, ASCRO lost its international indexing and popularity among peers and many efforts were made to return it. 

At the end of 2005, the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Goran Knezević resigned from his editorial position. 

Since the beginning of 2006 (Volume 40), some novelties were introduced, by which it was attempted to restore the regularity of publication with the intention of opening up ASCRO to the world. Some of the changes introduced were the publication in electronic form Acta Stomatologica Croatica (Online): ISSN 1846-0410 Open Access - accessible throughout the world, at any time and any place; dual international review (peer review); expansion of the international editorial board; including a biomedical statistician to control the display of results and make a scientometric analysis of the published articles. Quality control is carried out on each cited reference; the Croatian and English texts are edited with a focus on language correctness and dental terminology. Due to the aforementioned facts, ASCRO has become very popular in the world and publishes a greater number of articles by foreign authors than Croatian ones. Each paper selected by the editors passes two international reviews with the participation of teachers of the School of Dental Medicine, University of Zagreb, but only for foreign papers. Submission of articles is enabled by the Open Journal System software, which facilities faster and more transparent work of editors, authors, reviewers and editorial board.

In the last five years, ASCRO became indexed in seven international databases: Chemical Abstracts, Index Copernicus, Directory of Open Access Journals, EBSCO, Embase, CrossRef and SCOPUS as the world's largest bibliographic database.

Today, because of regular electronic monitoring of ASCRO, we can see exactly who is reading, what is read and from where. According to these data we edit each volume in such a way to attract readers and increase interest in the journal. In the last year, 250-300 readers read the journal every day via www.ascro.hr, which is over 7500 visits per month. According to the Croatian Science Portal - HRČAK - with more than two hundred scientific and professional journals, ASCRO is second by the number of readers and it is the only biomedical journal among the top ten. In 2014 ASCRO received its DOI number 10.15644/asc, and all articles in the 48th volume had the DOI number for the first time.