Best Practice Onkologie

About Best Practice Onkologie

Best Practice Onkologie — Journal Profile

Best Practice Onkologie (stylised by its publisher as best practice onkologie) is a German-language, practice-oriented oncology journal published by Springer Medizin Verlag GmbH, part of Springer Nature. It is written for physicians who deliver everyday cancer care — in their own practices as office-based specialists and in hospital clinics — rather than primarily for laboratory researchers. Its promise is in its name: to take the current state of cancer medicine and translate it, issue by issue, into guidance that a clinician can use in routine care. This profile records what can be verified from the publisher's own journal page, from bibliographic records tied to its two ISSNs, and from named bibliometric sources, and it marks clearly the points on which the publisher does not publish a figure.

At a Glance

What the Journal Is For

Springer Medizin describes the journal, in German, as addressed to all physicians who work in routine oncological care (onkologische Regelversorgung), whether as a practice-based doctor or in a clinic. The centre of each issue, the publisher says, is formed by topics with which the clinician comes into contact every day. Each issue treats three subject areas in a practice-oriented and interdisciplinary manner, and one contribution in each issue gives readers the opportunity to collect 3 CME points — continuing medical education credit within the German system. All specialist contributions pass through an editorial review process described by the publisher.

That positioning matters for anyone assessing the journal. This is not a primary-research oncology title competing for first reports of trials or molecular findings. It is a professional education and best-practice journal: review-style, didactic contributions that summarise where diagnosis and treatment of a given cancer — or a cross-cutting problem such as fertility protection during cancer therapy, the management of vertebral metastases, or familial and genetic risk in prostate cancer — currently stand, written by specialists for practising colleagues. The examples named here are real contributions from its 2024–2026 volumes, and they show the pattern clearly: a defined clinical question, a synthesis of the evidence and guidelines, and practical consequences for the reader's own patients.

Readers should therefore judge the journal by the standards of its own genre. Currency, clinical accuracy, the standing of its contributors within German oncology, and usefulness at the point of care are the right tests. Citation counts, by contrast, will always look modest for a German-language practice journal, because the international research literature cites mainly English-language primary-research titles. A low citation footprint is a property of the audience and language, not, by itself, evidence about editorial quality.

History and Place in German Cancer Medicine

Indexing coverage for the journal begins in 2006, and its volume numbering is consistent with a mid-2000s start: volume 20 appeared in 2025 — an anniversary marked by a published interview looking back over twenty years of the journal and of cancer medicine in Germany through the example of lung tumours — and volume 21 followed in 2026. Over those two decades German oncology changed substantially: molecular diagnostics moved into routine pathways, immunotherapy reshaped several tumour entities, certified cancer centres became a structural feature of care, and cross-sector care between practices and hospitals became a policy theme. A journal whose task is to keep practising physicians current has had, in other words, a steadily expanding brief.

OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSN endpoint as at checking, associates the title with two German professional societies: the Deutsche Krebsgesellschaft (DKG), the German Cancer Society, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gynäkologie und Geburtshilfe (DGGG), the German society for gynaecology and obstetrics. That association fits the journal's interdisciplinary, practice-facing character and its regular coverage of gynaecological oncology topics, including breast cancer, alongside urological, thoracic, gastroenterological and other tumour areas. Readers verifying the society link should check the current journal page, since society arrangements can change; the association is reported here as the bibliographic record presents it, not as a claim about the journal's masthead today.

The publisher, Springer Medizin, is the German medical publishing arm within Springer Nature, and the journal sits inside the wider Springer Medizin service environment: the publisher's pages point readers to its author services at springermedizin.de, to subscription information, to the e.Med combination subscription that bundles online access to journals and CME training in a specialty, and to a large certified CME programme of more than 500 continuing-education offerings drawn from its journals. For the individual clinician, that ecosystem is part of the product: the journal is read alongside structured CME, not in isolation.

Scope in Detail

The journal's scope is clinical oncology in the broad, whole-patient sense in which a practising oncologist meets it. Contributions address individual tumour entities — among them lung, breast, prostate and other common cancers — across diagnosis, staging, systemic therapy, surgery and radiotherapy interfaces, follow-up and survivorship. They also address cross-cutting themes: hereditary and familial cancer risk and the genetic counselling questions it raises in practice; fertility protection when treatment must start quickly; bone health and metastatic complications; supportive and symptom-directed care; and controversies where guidelines leave room for judgement, such as axillary management in breast cancer, the subject of a 2025 contribution on developments and current controversies.

Two features define the scope more sharply than any topic list. The first is interdisciplinarity: Springer states that the three theme areas in each issue are handled in an interdisciplinary way, which reflects how German cancer care is actually organised — through tumour boards and certified centres in which medical oncology, surgery, radiotherapy, pathology, radiology and the relevant organ specialty share decisions. The second is the teaching format: contributions are written to be learned from, with the CME-bearing article in each issue carrying formal educational credit. A submission or a reading plan that treats the journal as a venue for narrow, single-discipline research reports would misunderstand it; its unit of value is the clinically usable overview.

Readership and How It Is Used

The stated readership — physicians in routine cancer care, in practice and in clinic — includes office-based oncologists and haematologists, hospital physicians in oncology and in organ specialties that treat cancer, and doctors in further training who need structured, credit-bearing continuing education. For these readers the journal competes not with international research titles but with the working week: it is read to stay current between guideline updates, to prepare for the range of entities a general oncology practice sees, and to earn CME points through material that is relevant to daily work rather than detached from it.

For librarians and researchers outside Germany, the journal is useful in a different way: as a window on German clinical practice and guideline interpretation. Because it is German-language and practice-facing, its contents show how international evidence is being received, adapted and taught within the German care system — information that an English-language trial report cannot supply. Systematic reviewers should note the language and genre when deciding on inclusion: its contributions are expert syntheses, valuable for context and for tracing German recommendations, rather than primary data sources.

Editorial Process, Publication Model and Charges

Springer states that all specialist contributions undergo editorial scrutiny, and the journal's contributions are typically commissioned or shaped by issue editors — individual published articles name a responsible editor (Redaktion) for the contribution, such as the editors named on its breast-cancer and prostate-cancer articles in 2025. Prospective contributors should not assume an open, unsolicited research-article pipeline of the kind run by primary-research journals: the practical route is the publisher's author information for Springer Medizin journals, linked from the journal page, and direct contact with the editorial office about a proposed practice-oriented topic.

The journal is a subscription title. Springer's page directs readers to subscription price information through springermedizin.de and notes its inclusion in the e.Med package. A specific article-processing charge, acceptance rate and median review time are not published on the pages checked for this profile, and no figure is offered here for them; anyone who needs a current price or a current statement on open-access options should take it from the publisher's current pages rather than from any secondary listing. Likewise, no DOAJ listing was found in the DOAJ search-API check made for this profile (both ISSNs returned zero results), which is consistent with a subscription, German-language professional journal; DOAJ covers open-access titles, so absence there is expected and is not a quality judgement.

Indexing and Discoverability

Springer's own journal page lists the services in which the journal is abstracted and indexed. The list includes Scopus and SCImago, EMBASE, EBSCO, ProQuest, Dimensions, Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, Baidu, CNKI and CNPIEC, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, Naver, OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service, Ovid Discovery, TD Net Discovery Service, Wanfang and eLibrary.ru, with preservation through CLOCKSS and Portico. For a German-language practice journal that is a wide discovery footprint: a contribution can be found through the standard scholarly search tools used in hospitals and universities, and the archive is covered by recognised preservation services.

Two cautions belong with any indexing list. First, the list is the publisher's current statement; databases add and remove titles, and a reader whose institution requires indexing in a specific service should verify that service's own title list at the moment the requirement matters. Second, indexing is not endorsement of any individual article: it establishes that the journal is catalogued and its contents retrievable, while the quality of a given contribution still has to be read and judged on its own terms.

Metrics — Read by Source

The figures for this journal differ by source, because the sources count different literatures over different periods, and this profile keeps them separate rather than blending them into a single invented number. The Journals World record previously carried an H-index of 4, consistent with the Scopus-based SCImago tradition for this title, under which the journal sits in the fourth quartile (Q4) for Oncology with coverage from 2006. SCImago-derived summaries likewise describe a small citation footprint concentrated in recent years, which is what a German-language review journal used mainly for professional education would be expected to show.

OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint as at checking (source S72913437), presents a broader count: 1,564 works, 311 citations, an H-index of 5, an i10-index of 1 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.063, with first publication year 2006 and last 2026 and the publisher recorded as Springer Science+Business Media. OpenAlex counts a wider range of citing material than Scopus, so its higher work and citation totals do not contradict the Scopus-based picture; they measure a different universe. Neither source supports quoting a Journal Impact Factor for this title, and none is given here: a Clarivate impact factor for the journal could not be verified from the sources checked, and inventing one would mislead exactly the readers — clinicians checking a journal's standing — whom this profile is meant to help.

The practical reading of the metrics is therefore simple. Within German clinical oncology education, the journal's standing rests on its publisher, its society associations, its longevity — twenty volumes — and its CME role. Internationally, its citation metrics are small. Both statements are true at once, and a fair assessment holds them together instead of using either to erase the other.

Publishing in the Journal — Practical Notes

Authors considering the journal should start from its genre. A suitable contribution is a practice-oriented, interdisciplinary overview of a defined clinical topic, written in German, that tells a practising physician what has changed, what the current standard is, where genuine controversy remains, and what to do on Monday morning. Case-anchored teaching, clear structure, current guideline awareness and honest treatment of uncertainty are the qualities its published contributions display. A narrow report of a single centre's data, or a molecular study without direct practice consequences, belongs in a primary-research title instead.

Because contributions are editor-shaped and issues are planned around theme areas, the sensible first step is contact with the editorial office through Springer Medizin's author services, with a short outline of the proposed topic and its practice relevance, rather than a finished manuscript sent on speculation. Authors must follow Springer Medizin's current author information for formatting, declarations of interest — published contributions carry explicit conflict-of-interest statements, as its 2024–2026 articles show — and for the ethics declarations that accompany each article. Timelines, fees for any optional services and licensing terms are matters for the publisher's current information; they are not published in the sources used here and are therefore stated as not publicly disclosed in this profile rather than guessed.

Strengths, Limits and Verdict

The journal's strengths are focus and fit: a clear audience, a publisher with a deep German medical list, two decades of continuous publication, CME integration, wide indexing for its genre, and archival preservation. Its limits are the mirror image of the same facts: German language and a practice-education genre cap its international citation visibility; it is not a venue for primary research; and several operational details that authors often want — charges, acceptance rates, timelines — are not published and must be obtained from the publisher directly.

Verdict: for a physician practising oncology in the German system, Best Practice Onkologie is a legitimate, long-running professional journal whose value lies in curated, credit-bearing, interdisciplinary updating. For a researcher seeking international research visibility or a citable primary-research outlet, it is the wrong tool, and its modest citation metrics should be read as a genre signal, not a warning about legitimacy. Verify the current issue, the current editorial arrangements and any society association on Springer's journal page (journal 11654) before relying on them, and cite its ISSNs exactly: print 0946-4565, electronic 1862-8559.

How to Cite and Catalogue This Journal

Librarians and authors citing the journal should use the title as the publisher styles it, best practice onkologie, with the journal code 11654 in Springer references and DOIs in the form 10.1007/s11654 followed by the article suffix. In reference lists the title is commonly written in title case as Best Practice Onkologie, as in this profile and in the journal's own article citations — for example, the citation of its twentieth-anniversary interview as best practice onkologie volume 20, pages 314–319 (2025). When a catalogue record distinguishes the media, the print ISSN 0946-4565 belongs to the printed journal and the electronic ISSN 1862-8559 to the online edition, a distinction Springer's page states explicitly and that matters when a library checks holdings or a researcher verifies that a found record is this journal and not the separate Springer title Onkologie, which carries different ISSNs and a different brief. That last confusion is a real one in secondary listings, some of which mix the two titles' data; the ISSN pair and the s11654 DOI prefix are the reliable discriminators, and any record that lacks both should be treated with caution until it is checked against the publisher's page.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Best Practice Onkologie? Print ISSN 0946-4565 and electronic ISSN 1862-8559, as stated on Springer Medizin's journal page.

Who publishes it? Springer Medizin Verlag GmbH, part of Springer Nature, in Germany.

Is it a research journal? Primarily no: it is a practice-oriented continuing-education journal publishing interdisciplinary overviews for physicians in routine cancer care, with one CME-bearing contribution per issue worth 3 CME points according to the publisher.

What metrics does it have? By source: an H-index of 4 in the Scopus/SCImago tradition carried in this site's earlier record, and, in OpenAlex as at checking, 1,564 works, 311 citations and an H-index of 5. No verified Journal Impact Factor could be confirmed from the sources checked.

Is it open access? It is a subscription journal with access also bundled in Springer Medizin's e.Med package; no DOAJ listing was returned by the DOAJ search API for either ISSN in the check made for this profile.

How do I propose a contribution? Through Springer Medizin's author information linked from the journal page, ideally by approaching the editorial office with a practice-oriented topic outline; contributions are editor-shaped and issues are planned around theme areas.