Emergency Care and Medicine: Update on the Journal’s Definition, Aim, Scope, Requirements, and Recommendations for 2025

After organisational and preparatory work in 2023, Emergency Care and Medicine (ECM) was launched in 2024, culminating in the journal’s formal recognition by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) on 17 January 2025, https://doaj.org/toc/2813-7914 (accessed on 15 May 2025). A few important facts should be mentioned: the total number of manuscripts submitted in 2024 was 103. Forty-three were published after peer review, indicating an acceptance rate of 42%. Of these, 16 were original research articles, nine were scientific literature reviews, four were brief research reports, and 10 were case presentations. A project report, a protocol, a viewpoint, and an opinion were the remaining four publications.

ECM has published papers from 18 countries: in alphabetical order, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA. By 20 January 2025, the total number of views for Emergency Care and Medicine publications in 2024 was 48,678; the number of downloads was 13,154. Three Special Issues—Application of Artificial Intelligence in Emergency Care, Emergency Medicine Update: Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation, and Traumatic Cardiac Arrest: Fundamentals and Advances—are open for submissions until 31 December 2025.

Currently, ECM is covered by 13 bibliographic databases and archives (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ecm/indexing, accessed on 15 May 2025). The journal’s application for indexing by other major bibliographic databases requires granularity in the ECM profile and precision guidelines for authors. This editorial aims to highlight a refined definition, aims, scope, and requirements of the journal, along with several recommendations for authors. It is important to note that the essence of them, defined in 2024, remains the same.

Emergency Care and Medicine (ISSN 2813-7914) is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access online journal published quarterly by MDPI. It reports on advancements and developments in emergency medical services, emergency medicine, acute internal medicine, and acute care surgery, encompassing practice, theory, nursing, training, management, and education. This definition is based on four fundamental pillars of emergency medicine: emergency medical services (or emergency prehospital medicine), emergency medicine, acute internal medicine, and acute care surgery. The definitions of these four emergency medicine fields are provided below.

First, emergency medical services—commonly referred to as EMS—is a system that responds to emergencies with highly skilled pre-hospital clinicians. EMS operates at the intersection of healthcare, public health, emergency management, and public safety. Therefore, it is an indispensable part of the journal’s scope. The three other pillars of this journal represent the fundamental functions of hospital medicine.

Second is traditional emergency medicine (EM). The International Federation of Emergency Medicine defines emergency medicine as a field of practice based on the knowledge and skills required for the prevention, diagnosis, and management of acute and urgent aspects of illness and injury affecting patients of all age groups, involving a full spectrum of undifferentiated physical and behavioural disorders. It is practised within Emergency Departments, which should not be referred to as A&E or Casualty.

Third is acute internal medicine (AIM). This field of emergency medicine has evolved to provide excellence in diagnosing and treating various acute medical conditions, including stroke, myocardial infarction, thrombosis, sepsis, obstructive jaundice, severe inflammatory bowel disease, and acute kidney injury.

Fourth, acute care surgery (ACS) is a medical field that specifically addresses the treatment of surgical emergencies. Emergency General Surgery, Trauma Surgery (in a broad sense), and Surgical Critical Care constitute the three components of ACS. Trauma Surgery includes emergency and urgent surgeries across all body systems and regions. Additionally, only selected high-quality studies pertaining to the long-term effects on physical and mental health of man-made or natural disasters will be considered for publication in ECM.

Seventeen scopes of this journal are more specific than the twelve they replaced, providing authors and readers with a clear understanding of the journal’s focus. All of them fall on one side of a clearly drawn boundary—emergency medicine and surgery. Non-emergency (also often referred to as planned) medicine and surgery are outside the journal’s scope.

The submitted manuscript review process is multi-stage, well coordinated, and therefore rigorous. It is entirely based on MDPI guidelines for reviewers, which are comprehensive and include well-outlined benefits for reviewers [1]. However, it remains the responsibility of the editorial board and staff members to discuss and determine whether a submitted manuscript of any type—articles, brief reports of original research, protocols, reviews, case reports, clinical guidelines, editorials, viewpoints, commentaries on accepted papers, letters to the editor, or high-quality patient information—falls within the journal’s scope. A key feature of the ECM review process is inviting and involving more than two reviewers to evaluate the manuscript’s structure, originality, novelty, academic language fluency, and overall quality. It is not uncommon for our authors to receive three, four, or even five reviews.

ECM has no restrictions on the maximum length of the manuscript. However, they should be concise and comprehensive; full study details must be provided to ensure that the results can be reproduced according to the FAIR principles [2]. This is particularly relevant for systematic and scoping reviews. The journal’s instructions detail where to register these review projects and how to report the results and findings. Narrative review projects, currently, do not require registrations; however, it would be regarded as excellent study and publishing practice if the authors followed the recommendations for narrative review assessors. SANRA is just one of example of these recommendations [3].

Although following the EQUATOR (Enhancing the Quality and Transparency of Health Research) Reporting Guidelines [4] is not a requirement of MDPI and ECM, it is advisable to methodically plan the projects and report the results and findings of studies using a recognised reporting tool. EQUATOR serves as a valuable resource for all scientists, doctors, public health physicians, surgeons, students, nurses, managers, academicians, and reviewers. The updated ECM instructions for authors provide ten hyperlinks to standard structure reporting tools for original research articles and ten additional hyperlinks for review articles, study protocols, case reports, clinical guidelines, and letters to the editor.