Current Opinion in Anaesthesiology

About Current Opinion in Anaesthesiology

About Current Opinion in Anaesthesiology

Current Opinion in Anaesthesiology — published in the United States under the American spelling Current Opinion in Anesthesiology — is a bimonthly review journal in anaesthesiology and pain medicine, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), part of Wolters Kluwer. It belongs to the long-running Current Opinion family, whose model is different from that of a conventional primary-research journal: instead of mainly publishing new experiments, it commissions expert review articles that survey, organise and appraise the recent literature of a defined sub-field, and it accompanies those reviews with annotated bibliographies drawn from the wider literature. For a busy clinician, that combination — a readable synthesis plus a guided reading list — is the journal's core value.

The journal's own description, on the publisher's LWW shop and Wolters Kluwer Ovid pages, is consistent in substance. It is published six times a year. Each issue features hand-picked review articles from its expert editors, fifteen disciplines are covered across the year — cardiovascular anaesthesiology, neuroanaesthesia and pain medicine are named as examples — and every issue contains an in-depth bibliography gathered from several hundred journals in the field, with annotations explaining the merits of the most important papers. The stored Journals World record gives the ISSN pair 0952-7907 (print) and 1473-6500 (electronic), a coverage span beginning in 1989 in that record, and a SCImago-derived h-index of 92. Those ISSNs match the publisher's own listings exactly: the LWW print product carries 0952-7907 and the online-only product carries 1473-6500.

Quick Facts

• Full title: Current Opinion in Anaesthesiology (American title spelling: Current Opinion in Anesthesiology)
• Publisher: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), Wolters Kluwer — United States. The stored record's publisher field contains only the number 48, which is a garbled numeric value, not a publisher name; see the verification note at the end of this profile.
• ISSN: 0952-7907 (print); 1473-6500 (online)
• Frequency: Bimonthly — six issues per year (publisher)
• Model: Subscription review journal; commissioned expert reviews with annotated bibliographies
• Subject area: Anaesthesiology and pain medicine
• Journal Impact Factor: 2.8 for 2025, as listed by Wolters Kluwer citing the Journal Citation Reports, Web of Science Group
• OpenAlex record (direct fetch, October 2026): Source S132270157 — 4,787 works, 83,185 citations, OpenAlex h-index 107

A Review Journal, Not a Primary-Data Journal

Understanding this journal starts with understanding its genre. A primary-research journal asks, what new result does this manuscript report? A Current Opinion title asks a different question: what has changed in this area recently, what does the accumulated evidence now support, and what should a practising specialist read next? Articles are therefore normally commissioned or developed with section editors rather than submitted speculatively in large numbers, they are written by recognised specialists, and they are expected to take a position — to give an opinion, in the literal sense of the series title — rather than merely listing papers.

That genre has practical consequences for authors and readers. For readers, a single article is a shortcut into a sub-field: the physiology, pharmacology or clinical controversy is summarised, the pivotal trials and observational studies are weighed, and disagreements in the literature are named. For prospective authors, the realistic route in is usually an invitation, a proposal discussed with an editor, or an established reputation in the narrow topic concerned. An unsolicited primary study — a small randomised trial, a case series, a laboratory experiment — is normally a poor fit here however well conducted, because the journal's readers expect synthesis and appraisal. Authors with an original dataset should generally look to a primary anaesthesiology journal first, and treat a review journal of this kind as a venue for a later, commissioned synthesis.

The Fifteen-Section Rotation

The publisher lists the year's section rotation by issue month, and that rotation is the clearest published map of the journal's scope. February covers thoracic anaesthesia and cardiovascular anaesthesia. April covers intensive care and resuscitation; ethics, economics and outcome; and trauma and transfusion. June covers obstetric and gynaecological anaesthesia, paediatric anaesthesia, and anaesthesia and medical disease. August covers drugs in anaesthesia and anaesthesia outside the operating room. October covers neuroanaesthesia, pain medicine and regional anaesthesia. December covers ambulatory anaesthesia, and technology, education, training and information systems.

Read as a whole, the rotation shows three things. First, the journal is deliberately perioperative in the broad sense: it follows the patient before, during and after surgery, into intensive care, and into pain services afterwards. Second, it treats the non-technical parts of the specialty as first-class subjects — ethics, economics, outcomes, education and training all have a named home, which is not true of every clinical title. Third, it gives recurring space to settings where anaesthetic risk is concentrated or changing fast: obstetric, paediatric, thoracic, neuroanaesthetic and non-operating-room practice. A topic that does not map onto any of these fifteen sections is unlikely to be commissioned, however interesting it may be in another specialty's terms.

Scope in Detail

Cardiovascular and thoracic anaesthesia. Reviews address anaesthetic management of cardiac and major thoracic surgery, haemodynamic monitoring, transfusion and coagulation management, perioperative myocardial injury, and the changing balance between surgical, percutaneous and hybrid interventions and what that balance means for anaesthetic practice.

Intensive care, resuscitation, trauma and transfusion. This cluster covers the anaesthetist's critical-care role: sepsis and organ support, ventilation, resuscitation science, major haemorrhage, transfusion thresholds and blood conservation, and the organisation of trauma care. It overlaps deliberately with the April ethics, economics and outcome section, because resource use and outcome measurement are inseparable from modern critical care.

Obstetric, paediatric and medical-disease anaesthesia. These sections deal with populations in whom physiology, drug handling or comorbidity changes the risk calculation: pregnancy and labour analgesia, neonatal and paediatric practice, and patients whose cardiac, respiratory, endocrine or neurological disease dominates perioperative planning.

Drugs, pain and regional anaesthesia. Pharmacology reviews track new agents, new uses of familiar agents, and safety signals. Pain-medicine coverage spans acute postoperative pain, multimodal and opioid-sparing analgesia, regional techniques including ultrasound-guided blocks, and the transition from acute to persistent pain. Regional anaesthesia also appears in its own right in the October grouping, reflecting how central it has become to enhanced-recovery practice.

Ambulatory, non-operating-room, technology and education. Day-case and office-based practice, anaesthesia for radiology, endoscopy and other remote locations, monitoring and information technology, simulation, and training and assessment complete the picture. These sections often age fastest, because devices, software and training models change quickly, which is precisely why a bimonthly review format suits them.

Editorial Leadership — A Note on Conflicting Publisher Listings

Researchers checking the masthead should be aware that the publisher's own pages do not currently agree with each other. The LWW shop product pages name Kai Zacharowski and Philipp Lirk in the editor line. The Wolters Kluwer Ovid product page names John Butterworth and Kai Zacharowski as editors. Kai Zacharowski appears in both listings; the second name differs. This profile does not choose between those listings, because neither page carries a date that would settle which is more recent in the material consulted. Anyone who needs the current editor-in-chief for a proposal or correspondence should verify the name on the journal's own masthead page on the LWW journal site at the time of writing, rather than relying on a product catalogue. The discrepancy is also recorded in the verification note below, because it illustrates why catalogue pages are a starting point for verification, not the final word.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal is part of the LWW collection distributed through Ovid, and Wolters Kluwer lists it in collections including the LWW Current Opinion Collection and the Ovid MEDLINE Advantage collection, which reflects its established place in medical indexing. Its long Scopus coverage is reflected in the SCImago data discussed below. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals application programming interface performed for this profile returned no record for either ISSN — which is expected, because this is a subscription review journal rather than an open-access title, and it should not be read as a quality judgement. Authors who need open access for funder compliance should ask the publisher directly about any open-access option and its terms, because a specific article-processing charge for this title was not publicly disclosed in the publisher pages consulted for this profile.

Metrics — What the Numbers Are, and Where They Come From

Journal metrics are database products, not physical constants, and this journal is a good example of why the source and date must always travel with the number. Wolters Kluwer's own product page gives a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 2.8, citing the Journal Citation Reports of the Web of Science Group. That is the publisher-stated figure and the one to quote when a Journal Impact Factor is required.

A direct fetch of the OpenAlex source record for ISSN 0952-7907 (source S132270157) returned 4,787 works, 83,185 citations, an OpenAlex h-index of 107, an i10-index of 1,951 and a two-year mean citedness of about 3.43. Those are OpenAlex's own counts, computed over OpenAlex's own corpus and document-type rules; they are larger than Scopus-based counts for the same journal because the underlying corpus is broader.

SCImago-based reporting is lower, and it also moves over time. The stored Journals World record carries an h-index of 92. Secondary summaries of SCImago data have reported values in the high 80s, with a SCImago Journal Rank around 0.70 and a best quartile of Q2 in Anaesthesiology and Pain Medicine. None of these figures contradicts the others in a meaningful way: each database counts a different set of documents and citations, and each h-index can only stay the same or grow as its database is updated, apart from corrections. What would be wrong is to mix them silently — to quote an OpenAlex h-index beside a Scopus CiteScore as if they were one measurement. In this profile each figure is therefore labelled with its system.

For an individual author, the more useful questions are simpler. Is the review likely to be read by the clinicians who can act on it? In this specialty, a Current Opinion review is a visible, citable synthesis that practitioners actually use for updating. Is the topic current enough that a review will be overtaken within a year? Fast-moving drug and technology topics carry that risk in any review journal. And is the citation record relevant at all to a commissioned piece? Editors commission for coverage and authority, not for predicted citation counts, so a strong track record in the exact sub-field matters more than a general publication list.

Who Should Read It, and Who Should Try to Write for It

As a reader's journal, the title serves consultant and trainee anaesthetists, intensivists with a perioperative practice, pain specialists, and clinicians in allied areas who need a reliable annual update in a neighbouring sub-field — an obstetric anaesthetist reading neuroanaesthesia, for example, or a generalist following developments in transfusion. The annotated bibliographies are particularly useful for journal clubs, teaching preparation and examination revision, because they identify which papers an expert editor judged important and explain why.

As an author's journal, it suits senior clinicians and researchers who are asked, or who successfully propose, to summarise an area in which they have genuine standing. A good Current Opinion article is opinionated in the disciplined sense: it states what the evidence supports now, flags where practice is running ahead of evidence, identifies the trials or studies most likely to change the picture, and avoids pretending that contested questions are settled. Authors preparing such a piece should write for the intelligent non-specialist within the specialty, define terms that sub-fields use differently, use tables and figures to compress comparisons, and keep the reference list focused on work that changed, or could change, practice — supported by the annotated bibliography format where the journal asks for it.

Practical Checks Before Proposing or Citing

First, confirm the section fit using the fifteen-section rotation above; a proposal that names its section and its recent-literature window is easier for an editor to place. Second, check whether a review on the same topic has appeared in the last two to three years — in a rotating review journal, a recent article on the identical topic usually closes that slot for a cycle. Third, verify the current editor and the current commissioning route on the journal site itself, for the reason given in the editorial note above. Fourth, if open access or a specific licence is required by a funder, obtain the terms in writing before agreeing to write, because the standard model here is subscription publication. Fifth, when citing metrics in a curriculum vitae or a departmental report, name the system and the year — Journal Impact Factor 2.8 (2025, as listed by the publisher from Journal Citation Reports) is a defensible statement; an unlabelled h-index drawn from whichever database happens to be open is not.

Verification Note and Sources

The stored record for this post contained a garbled numeric publisher field — the value 48 — where a publisher name should be. The publisher identified from the publisher's own pages is Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. The stored ISSNs, country (United States) and Q2 categorisation are consistent with the publisher and SCImago-derived sources consulted. Sources used for this profile: the LWW shop product pages for the print and online editions (ISSN, frequency, section rotation, editor line); the Wolters Kluwer Ovid product page (publisher, 2025 Journal Impact Factor 2.8, editor line, collections); SCImago-derived secondary summaries for quartile and rank context, attributed as such; a direct OpenAlex source fetch for ISSN 0952-7907 (works, citations, h-index); and a Directory of Open Access Journals search returning no record for either ISSN, reported above with its proper, limited meaning.

How the Journal Has Developed With the Specialty

A review journal is a mirror of its field's anxieties, and the section rotation shows how anaesthesiology's centre of gravity has moved. Pain medicine, once an adjunct to surgical anaesthesia, now holds a permanent place in the October issue alongside regional anaesthesia, reflecting the specialty's responsibility for acute pain services, perioperative analgesia and the prevention of persistent postoperative pain. Anaesthesia outside the operating room, given its own August section, records the growth of anaesthetic practice in radiology, cardiology, endoscopy and emergency settings, where the patients are often sicker and the environment less controlled than in a theatre suite. Technology, education, training and information systems, closing the year in December, acknowledges that monitoring, data systems, simulation and the training pipeline now change practice as surely as new drugs do.

The April grouping is equally telling. Ethics, economics and outcome research share an issue with intensive care and with trauma and transfusion, because the modern specialty is judged not only on whether patients survive anaesthesia — they overwhelmingly do — but on recovery quality, complication rates, resource stewardship and the fairness with which scarce critical-care capacity is used. A journal that gave those questions no house room would be describing the anaesthesia of an earlier generation. Prospective contributors should read recent issues in their section before proposing: the fastest way to understand what an editor currently considers a live question is to see what the last two cycles of that section chose to review, and what they left for the next cycle.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Current Opinion in Anaesthesiology an open-access journal? No. It is a subscription review journal. A Directory of Open Access Journals search for both ISSNs returned no record, and the publisher sells it in print, online and combined subscription forms. Whether an individual article can be made open access, and at what charge, was not publicly disclosed in the pages consulted and should be confirmed with the publisher.

Can I submit an original research paper? The journal's model is commissioned expert review with annotated bibliography, not original-data publication. Original studies belong in a primary-research anaesthesiology journal. A review proposal should be discussed with the editorial team, and the current editor should be verified on the journal masthead because the publisher's catalogue pages consulted gave differing editor lines.

Which impact figure should I quote? For a Journal Impact Factor, quote the publisher's figure: 2.8 for 2025, from the Journal Citation Reports as listed by Wolters Kluwer. For corpus counts, quote OpenAlex or SCImago by name and date, never an unlabelled mixture.

Why do different sites give different h-index values? Because each site counts a different database. The stored record here carried 92, SCImago summaries have reported values in the high 80s, and a direct OpenAlex fetch returned 107. All three can be correct for their own corpus and date.