Acute Medicine & Surgery

About Acute Medicine & Surgery

Acute Medicine & Surgery — the official journal of the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine

Acute Medicine & Surgery (often shortened to AMS) is an English-language, open-access medical journal devoted to the care of patients whose illness or injury demands immediate action. It is the official journal of the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine and is published by Wiley. Its electronic ISSN is 2052-8817, the identifier recorded on the JournalsWorld record for this post, on the journal's Wiley Online Library home, and in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Publication began in 2014, and the journal publishes continuously online, so accepted articles appear as they are ready rather than waiting for a traditional print issue to close.

This profile sets out, from official and directory sources, what the journal covers, how its review process is described, what open access means in its case — including the article processing charges recorded by DOAJ and the waiver policy that accompanies them — where its articles are archived, and how to distinguish this journal from two similarly named titles with which it is routinely confused. No impact factor or ranking figure is asserted here, because no such figure could be verified from the journal's own publisher pages consulted for this profile; readers who need a metric should consult the database that issues it, under ISSN 2052-8817.

Duplicate-record note for JournalsWorld readers: this post (acute-medicine-surgery-2) and an earlier JournalsWorld post at acute-medicine-surgery carry the same title and the same ISSN, 2052-8817. That evidence is reported in the worker's flags to the directory coordinator so the two records can be considered under the site's duplicate-handling rule. The journal itself, of course, is a single title: there is one Acute Medicine & Surgery, published by Wiley for the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine.

Quick facts

Origin and identity

The journal began publishing in 2014, with its first volume appearing that year, as the international, English-language journal of the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine. Library records describe it in exactly those terms — AMS, official journal of the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine — and note the copyright holder as the association, with John Wiley and Sons as publisher, originally from Hoboken, New Jersey. That society ownership matters for readers: editorial direction is anchored in a national professional association of acute-medicine specialists in Japan, while production, hosting, sales of licences and global distribution are handled by a large international publisher. The combination is common among society journals, and it explains both the journal's Japanese clinical roots and its worldwide authorship and readership.

The DOI pattern confirms the identity at article level. Articles in this journal carry DOIs beginning 10.1002/ams2 — for example, early articles from volume 1 in 2014 and the association's later clinical-practice guideline articles, including the Japanese Clinical Practice Guidelines for Management of Sepsis and Septic Shock 2024, published in the journal in 2025. When a citation, a database entry or a manuscript-submission page does not show either ISSN 2052-8817 or the ams2 DOI stem, you are almost certainly looking at a different journal, whatever its title says.

Scope: medicine at the sharp end

DOAJ classifies the journal under the Library of Congress heading for medical emergencies, critical care, intensive care and first aid, and gives its keywords as critical care, acute medicine, emergency care and disaster medicine. Those four phrases are a reliable map of the journal's territory, and the JournalsWorld topic record for the sister post on this site adds the clinical themes that recur in its pages: trauma and emergency care, sepsis diagnosis and treatment, cardiac arrest and resuscitation, poisoning and overdose treatment, mechanical circulatory support, and respiratory support. In plain terms, the journal publishes research about patients who may deteriorate in minutes or hours, and about the systems — ambulances, emergency departments, intensive care units, operating theatres and disaster responses — that try to prevent that deterioration.

Emergency and acute care

The core of the journal is the undifferentiated acutely ill or injured patient: how such patients are assessed, triaged, stabilised and moved to definitive care. Studies of emergency-department practice, prehospital care by emergency medical services, and the organisation of acute-care pathways belong here. The journal's audience works under time pressure, so papers that report clear, clinically usable findings — what changed, for whom, and with what effect on outcome — fit its purpose better than purely theoretical exercises.

Critical care and intensive care

Critical care is a named pillar. Contributions address the management of patients with failing organs, including respiratory support and ventilation strategies, circulatory support, and the monitoring and treatment of patients in intensive care. The journal's publication of major sepsis guidance illustrates the level at which it operates in this field: guideline articles are not small case notes but documents intended to change practice across a country, prepared by working groups drawn from the Japanese Society of Intensive Care Medicine as well as the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine.

Trauma and acute surgery

The second half of the title is not decoration. Surgical emergencies and trauma care — including the operative and non-operative management of injured patients, emergency general surgery, and the systems that deliver trauma care, such as national trauma registries — are central topics. Analyses drawn from Japan's nationwide trauma registry have appeared in the journal, and the title's pairing of medicine and surgery reflects the reality of acute care, where a single patient may need a physician, an intensivist and a surgeon within the same hour.

Sepsis, resuscitation and disaster medicine

Sepsis diagnosis and treatment, cardiac arrest and resuscitation, and disaster medicine recur throughout the journal's record. Sepsis is a field in which the owning association is directly active as a guideline producer, and the journal serves as a vehicle for those guidelines and for the studies that test them. Disaster medicine, the fourth DOAJ keyword, reflects Japan's exposure to earthquakes, tsunamis and other mass-casualty events, and the association's role in preparing clinicians for them. Poisoning and overdose treatment, noted in the JournalsWorld topic record, completes a scope that is best summarised as: any condition in which early recognition and rapid, competent intervention decide the outcome.

Who the journal is for

The primary readership is clinical: emergency physicians, intensivists, acute-care surgeons, anaesthetists and the nurses and paramedics who work alongside them, together with researchers who study acute illness and injury. Because the language of publication is English and the publisher is international, that readership extends well beyond Japan, even though the owning society is Japanese and Japanese clinical data — registries, guidelines and cohort studies — feature prominently. For a clinician outside Japan, the journal offers a view of acute care in a health system with highly developed emergency and disaster services. For a researcher, it offers a society journal whose papers are openly readable, archived in PubMed Central, and therefore easy to cite, check and build upon.

Peer review and editorial process

DOAJ records anonymous peer review for this journal and records that the journal checks submissions for plagiarism. Anonymous review in this context means the reviewers' identities are not disclosed to authors; authors should consult Wiley's author guidelines for the journal for the precise current workflow, including whether manuscripts are anonymised to reviewers, what reporting checklists apply to clinical studies, and which ethics approvals and consent statements must accompany human-subjects research. Clinical journals operate under strict expectations in this area — trial registration, institutional review board approval, informed consent, and declarations of competing interests are standard requirements across Wiley medical titles — and authors should assemble those documents before submission rather than after an editorial query.

Authors should also set expectations about timing honestly. DOAJ records an average of about fifty-three weeks from submission to publication for this journal. Directory averages of that kind are retrospective and can be distorted by article type — commissioned guidelines, for example, follow a different path from unsolicited original research — so the figure should be read as a warning to plan ahead, not as a guaranteed schedule. A team that needs a paper published by a fixed date for a grant report or a degree requirement should contact the editorial office or choose its submission date with a generous margin.

Open access, charges and licences

The journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which records that it has published in open access since 2017, that articles are digitally archived in CLOCKSS, PubMed Central and Portico, and that the permanent article identifier is the DOI. Open access here is funded in the way most large society journals now fund it: through an article processing charge paid on acceptance. DOAJ records charges up to USD 2,250, GBP 1,500 or EUR 2,030, and records that a waiver policy exists for these charges. Wiley's own journal pages are the authoritative source for the amount payable at the time you submit, including any society-member arrangements, institutional agreements that may cover the charge in full, and the exact terms of the waiver policy. Authors should check those pages before submission, not after acceptance, and should confirm whether their institution has a Wiley open-access agreement, since such agreements now cover the charges for many corresponding authors automatically.

Licensing follows the open-access pattern recorded by DOAJ: articles are published under Creative Commons licences, with CC BY, CC BY-NC and CC BY-NC-ND among the options recorded, and the directory notes that the author does not retain unrestricted copyright and publishing rights. In practice this means the licence printed on the article you are reading governs what you may do with it. A CC BY article may be reused commercially with attribution; a CC BY-NC-ND article may not. Systematic reviewers, teachers preparing course packs, and clinicians reproducing a figure in a presentation should all read the licence line on the specific article, not assume it from the journal's general policy.

Archiving in PubMed Central deserves emphasis, because it affects how the journal is found. PMC archiving means the full text of articles is present in the United States National Library of Medicine's open archive, searchable through PubMed, which is the first place most clinicians search. Combined with CLOCKSS and Portico — dark archives that preserve content if a publisher's platform fails — the journal's preservation arrangements meet the standard that librarians and funders usually ask about.

Metrics: an honest note

Directory and aggregator sites attach many numbers to this journal, and they do not always agree, partly because some of them are measuring the wrong title (see the identity section below). The JournalsWorld sister record for this journal cites OpenAlex-derived counts — an h-index figure and totals for works and citations tracked in that open database. Those open-data counts describe the journal's footprint in OpenAlex at the time they were taken; they are not a Journal Impact Factor, and this profile does not present them as one. No Clarivate Journal Impact Factor, CiteScore or SCImago rank is stated here, because none could be verified from an official publisher or directory source during preparation. If a metric matters for your decision — for tenure, for a funder whitelist, for a university ranking exercise — look it up in the issuing source itself, searching by ISSN 2052-8817, and note the year of the figure you find, since all such figures are year-specific.

Identity traps: three journals that are not this one

Acute-care publishing contains a cluster of similar titles, and confusing them can send a manuscript, a citation or a subscription payment to the wrong place. Acute Medicine, without “& Surgery”, is a different journal, published by Rila Publications, with ISSNs in the 1747-4884 / 1747-4892 range; its impact and ranking figures, which circulate widely on aggregator sites, do not belong to the Wiley journal. The Journal of Acute Medicine is also different: it is associated with Taiwan's emergency-medicine community, carries ISSNs in the 2211-5595 range, and has been published by Elsevier. Neither of those journals is the official journal of the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine. The checks are quick: this journal's ISSN is 2052-8817, its DOIs begin 10.1002/ams2, its publisher is Wiley, and its society is JAAM. If any one of those four facts does not match, stop and re-identify the title before proceeding.

Within JournalsWorld itself, the identity question is the duplicate noted at the top of this profile: two posts, acute-medicine-surgery and acute-medicine-surgery-2, describe this same journal with the same ISSN. Readers who arrive at either post are reading about the same publication; the duplication is a directory housekeeping matter, flagged for the coordinator, and does not reflect any change in the journal itself.

How to submit — practical guidance

Begin on the Wiley Online Library journal home for ISSN 2052-8817 and read the current author guidelines in full; in clinical publishing, formatting, reporting standards and ethics documentation are enforced at submission, and a technically non-compliant manuscript can be returned before review. Prepare the manuscript in English, structure it according to the article type you are submitting, and complete the reporting checklist appropriate to the study design. Assemble ethics approval details, consent information, trial registration where applicable, funding statements and conflict-of-interest declarations for every author. Decide, before you submit, how the article processing charge will be paid if the paper is accepted — personal funds, a grant, a society arrangement, an institutional Wiley agreement, or a waiver application under the policy DOAJ records — and confirm the current charge on the publisher's page. Finally, keep the DOI stem in mind when the paper appears: a published AMS article will carry a 10.1002/ams2 DOI and will be openly readable and archived in PubMed Central.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN of Acute Medicine & Surgery? Its electronic ISSN is 2052-8817. It is an online journal, and that single ISSN identifies it.

Who publishes it? Wiley publishes it as the official journal of the Japanese Association for Acute Medicine, which holds the journal's copyright as a society.

When did it start? Publication began in 2014; volume 1 appeared that year, and the journal has published continuously online since.

Is it open access? Yes. DOAJ lists the journal, records open-access publishing since 2017, and records archiving in CLOCKSS, PubMed Central and Portico.

Does it charge a fee? Yes, an article processing charge applies. DOAJ records charges up to USD 2,250 / GBP 1,500 / EUR 2,030 and notes a waiver policy; confirm the current figure and any institutional agreement on the Wiley journal page.

Is it peer-reviewed? DOAJ records anonymous peer review and plagiarism checking for this journal.

How is it different from Acute Medicine? Acute Medicine is a separate Rila Publications journal with different ISSNs (1747-4884 / 1747-4892). Always check the ISSN.

What subjects does it cover? Acute medicine, emergency care, critical and intensive care, trauma and acute surgery, sepsis, resuscitation, poisoning, and disaster medicine.

Bottom line

Acute Medicine & Surgery is a society-owned, Wiley-published, open-access journal that since 2014 has served clinicians and researchers working where medicine is most time-critical. Its identity is firmly documented — ISSN 2052-8817, DOI stem 10.1002/ams2, Japanese Association for Acute Medicine ownership, PMC archiving and DOAJ listing — and its costs and licences are openly recorded, provided authors confirm the current charge before submitting. Treat look-alike titles with suspicion, check the ISSN every time, and, if you are a JournalsWorld editor reading this, note the duplicate-record flag: posts 371396 and 613733 describe the same journal.