Annals of Emergency Medicine

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 36,000 subscribers, several times its nearest competitor). It is also one of the most accessible to non-subscribing readers, since more than 8,000 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 850,000 times in 2017. Annals is also available on the Web (with full text of all articles dating back to its inception), where it received more than 1.8 million downloads in 2017.

Annals is the emergency medicine journal most frequently cited by authors and has the highest impact factor over the years of all 25 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 2016 impact factor for Annals was 5.352. Not only is Annals most frequently cited, but it is cited more promptly and longer than any other emergency medicine journal (9.6 years, versus only 5.1 years for its nearest competitor).

Annals' articles generate considerable interest in the lay media. During the calendar year 2017, there were 8,534 hits in various media outlets, including print, television, radio blogs and social media. Major outlets included The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, Politico, National Public Radio, New York Post, The Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Dallas Morning News. Annals is an international journal; more than half of the full text articles accessed via ScienceDirect were downloaded by readers in countries outside the U.S. Our contributors are also international in scope; in 2017 submissions came to us from 60 different countries, with 43% of submissions originating outside the United States, and 26% originating outside North America and Western Europe. The largest volume other than the U.S. was submitted from Canada, Taiwan, France, Italy, China and Japan, in descending order. But the list also includes Paraguay, Peru, Serbia, Uganda, Norway.

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.who.int/hinari/enhttp://www.who.int/hinari/en), which makes Annals available free or at greatly reduced cost in low-income countries.