Scope and Stature of the Journal

Annals of Emergency Medicine, the official journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians, is an international, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to improving the quality of care by publishing the highest quality science for emergency medicine and related medical specialties. Annals publishes original research, clinical reports, opinion, and educational information related to the practice, teaching, and research of emergency medicine. In addition to general emergency medicine topics, Annals regularly publishes articles on out-of-hospital emergency medical services, pediatric emergency medicine, injury and disease prevention, health policy and ethics, disaster management, toxicology, and related topics. The journal welcomes submissions from international contributors and researchers of all specialties.

Although Annals of Emergency Medicine is the official journal of the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) the journal maintains editorial independence from ACEP. Its content is selected by the editorial board and does not necessarily reflect the policies and beliefs of ACEP.

Annals continues to be the largest circulation peer review journal in emergency medicine (over 28,000 subscribers, several times its nearest competitor). It is also one of the most accessible to non-subscribing readers, since 6,400 institutions include Annals in their online licenses for ScienceDirect (the world's largest electronic collection of science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information). ScienceDirect was utilized for access to Annals articles approximately 658,000 times last year, a 19% increase from the prior year. Annals is also available on the Web (with full text of all articles dating back to its inception), where it received more than 392,000 visitors.

Annals is the emergency medicine journal most frequently cited by authors and has the highest impact factor over the years of all 19 journals in the emergency medicine category of the SCI (Science Citation Index). The impact factor (the average number of citations per published article) is the commonest measure of journal influence; the 2010 impact factor for Annals was 4.14, placing it in the top 12% of all 8,005 science and medical journals tracked by the SCI. Not only is Annals most frequently cited, but it is cited more promptly and longer than any other emergency medicine journal (9.5 years, 83% longer than its nearest competitor). In the past 5 years, more than1,200 different journals in the ISI science journal database cited an article in Annals, and in a typical year, Annals articles are cited by more than 400 different scientific journals, most of them from a broad range of specialties outside of emergency medicine.

Annals' articles generate considerable interest in the lay media. From October 2009 through September 2010, there were 5,089 hits in various media outlets, including print, radio and blogs. Major outlets included Wall St. Journal, ABC News, Boston Globe, Business Week, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, USA Today, New York Times, Modern Healthcare, Washington Post, the AM News, EM News, JEMS, and Reuters Health, as well as many trade publications.

Annals is an international journal; 54% of the full text articles accessed via ScienceDirect were downloaded by readers in 93 countries outside the U.S. Our contributors are also international in scope; in 2010 submissions came to us from 46 different countries, with 41% of submissions originating outside the United States, and 25% originating outside North America and Western Europe. The largest volume other than the U.S. was submitted from Taiwan, Canada, Turkey, France, United Kingdom, China, Australia, Korea, Netherlands, Italy, and Japan, in descending order. But the list also includes Brazil, Thailand, Tunisia, India, Iran, Nigeria, and Serbia.

We strongly believe we have an obligation to make our journal available to international audiences regardless of their financial resources, and therefore have participated for many years in the HINARI initiative sponsored by large journal publishers ( http://www.healthinternetwork.org/src/eligibility.php), which makes Annals available free or at greatly reduced cost in low-income countries.