European Journal of Heart Failure

About European Journal of Heart Failure

European Journal of Heart Failure: Journal Profile

The European Journal of Heart Failure (EJHF) is the official journal of the Heart Failure Association (HFA), an association of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), and it is the leading specialist journal devoted entirely to heart failure. Founded in 1999, it publishes twelve issues a year in print and online, covering the full arc of the discipline — from molecular and cellular mechanisms through physiology, pharmacology and device and drug trials to epidemiology, health economics and the organisation of care. Its position inside the ESC journal family gives it a distinctive dual role: it is both a scientific journal and a channel through which European heart failure practice is debated, standardised and advanced.

The journal's publishing arrangements have recently changed, and older listings should be treated with caution. For most of its history EJHF was published by Wiley, whose platform hosted the journal and whose media material promoted it on behalf of the ESC. The ESC's publications pages announced that the European Journal of Heart Failure and its companion title ESC Heart Failure would be published by Oxford University Press from January 2026, and Oxford Academic now hosts the journal's current pages, metrics and submission route. This profile therefore treats Oxford University Press as the current publisher, Wiley as the long-standing previous publisher, and explains below why some databases still show other names entirely.

At a Glance

Scope and Subject Coverage

The publisher's statement of scope is worth taking at face value, because it explains the journal's unusually wide tent. EJHF is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge in heart failure, including its understanding, prevention, investigation and treatment. Molecular and cellular biology, pathology, physiology, electrophysiology and pharmacology all form part of the discipline, as do the clinical, social and population sciences. Accordingly the journal welcomes submissions across basic, clinical and population science, and original contributions on nursing, care of the elderly, primary care, health economics and other specialist fields related to heart failure are also welcome.

Clinical research and trials

The journal's centre of gravity is clinical: randomised trials of drugs and devices, analyses of registries and cohorts, studies of diagnosis and risk stratification, and work on the management of acute and chronic heart failure across the ejection-fraction spectrum. Papers reporting trials presented in the ESC congress Hot Line sessions frequently appear in the ESC journal family, and EJHF is the natural home for those centred on heart failure. Guideline-informing evidence — the studies that writing committees cite when recommendations are drafted — is disproportionately published and cited here.

Translational and basic science

Mechanistic work is in scope where it speaks to heart failure biology: myocardial remodelling and fibrosis, cardiomyocyte signalling, metabolism, electrophysiological substrates, and the pharmacology of established and candidate therapies. The test an editor applies is relevance to the failing heart rather than technical novelty alone; a strong methods paper in a distant model system will usually be directed elsewhere, while work that connects mechanism to a clinical question is welcomed.

Population, services and the wider team

The explicit welcome for nursing, elderly care, primary care and health economics distinguishes EJHF from narrower cardiology titles. Heart failure is a condition managed by multidisciplinary teams in hospitals and communities, and the journal reflects that reality: organisation and delivery of care, telemonitoring and remote management, comorbidity, frailty, palliative approaches, and the costs and cost-effectiveness of therapies all appear. Population science — incidence, prevalence, outcomes and disparities — completes the picture.

History and Development

The journal began publication in 1999, as heart failure was consolidating into a subspecialty with its own association, its own congress sessions and its own therapeutic pipeline. Under the Heart Failure Association's ownership, it grew with the field: the decades since have seen the arrival of device therapy, novel drug classes and an expanding evidence base for comorbidity management, each wave visible in the journal's contents and citation record. Its editors-in-chief have been leading figures in the subspecialty; Marco Metra, for example, led the journal from 2015 to 2023 before taking up a new ESC journal editorship, and the ESC currently lists Michael Böhm as editor-in-chief.

Two publishing eras frame the journal's recent history. In the Wiley era the journal sat on the Wiley Online Library platform, with an open access option for authors; Wiley's media material for the title reported substantial readership, including close to one and a half million full-text downloads in the year to April 2025 — a publisher-reported figure that conveys the scale of the audience the ESC journals command. The move of the heart failure titles to Oxford University Press from January 2026 placed EJHF alongside the wider ESC journal portfolio on Oxford Academic. Authors consulting submission instructions should therefore use the current Oxford Academic pages, not archived Wiley guidance.

A companion title matters to the journal's ecosystem. ESC Heart Failure, launched as an open access sister journal, shares the HFA's ownership and a related scope, and operates as a fully open access venue publishing six issues a year. The ESC operates a manuscript transfer system across its journals, so a paper declined at EJHF may be offered transfer to another ESC title, including the companion — a route many authors use, since reviews can travel with the manuscript.

Peer Review, Article Types and Access

EJHF is a peer-reviewed journal publishing original research alongside reviews and editorials; the ESC's own description emphasises that it publishes reviews and editorials to improve the understanding, prevention, investigation and treatment of heart failure, in addition to original contributions. Issues appear monthly, and articles are available online and in print. The access model is subscription with optional open access: readers at subscribing institutions read everything, and authors who need or choose open access publication can select it, typically where a funder or institutional agreement requires it. Oxford University Press operates Read and Publish agreements with many institutions and runs waiver and discount schemes for open access charges in its fully open access titles; authors should check their eligibility on the publisher's site rather than assuming a charge applies to them.

No acceptance rate or median review time for the journal is published on its Oxford Academic about page at the time of writing, and none is claimed here. Authors who need current processing times should consult the journal's author instructions or contact the editorial office; figures circulating on third-party journal-selection sites are not published by the ESC or the publisher and should not be relied on for planning.

Metrics and Standing

The journal's current publisher page provides a full, sourced metrics panel, which this profile uses as its primary evidence. From Clarivate data for 2025: Journal Impact Factor 10.3; five-year Journal Impact Factor 12.4; a rank of 16th of 237 journals in Cardiac and Cardiovascular Systems by impact factor, and 9th of 237 by Journal Citation Indicator; a cited half-life of 5.8 years; an immediacy index of 2.8; an Eigenfactor score of 0.03287; and an Article Influence score of 4.51. From Scopus for 2025: a CiteScore of 19.7, ranked 10th of 409 journals in Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine. The ESC's own journal page previously listed an impact factor of 10.8 for 2024, which illustrates the normal year-to-year movement of these indicators rather than any contradiction.

Two further sources describe the same journal differently, and the differences are instructive. SCImago, whose figures appeared in this journal's earlier JournalsWorld record, reported an SJR of 4.965 with an h-index of 195 — an h-index computed on Scopus's document set. OpenAlex (source S87609158, consulted directly for this profile) records 9,113 works and 314,146 citations with an h-index of 222 on its broader, differently bounded corpus. Neither is wrong; they count different things. What should not be carried forward is the old template record's presentation of a bare impact factor of 16.9 — a figure from an earlier Journal Citation Reports year — as though it were current. The dated, sourced figures above replace it.

The same OpenAlex record also demonstrates why database housekeeping matters, and this profile flags it openly: OpenAlex lists the journal's host organisation as Elsevier BV in the Netherlands and its first publication year as 1980. Both are at odds with the verifiable record — the journal began in 1999, was published for many years by Wiley, and is published by Oxford University Press from 2026; Elsevier is the publisher associated with the journal's earliest history in some legacy metadata, and the 1980 start date appears to reflect predecessor material folded into the source record. Where a database field conflicts with the publisher's and society's own pages, the publisher and society govern, as they do throughout this profile.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal is indexed in the major biomedical and citation services appropriate to its field, including Scopus — the basis of the CiteScore quoted above — and the Web of Science citation indexes underlying the Clarivate metrics, as well as the medical literature services through which clinicians search. Its presence in those systems, rather than in the Directory of Open Access Journals, is the relevant discoverability fact: a direct DOAJ search by both the print ISSN (1388-9842) and the electronic ISSN (1879-0844), carried out for this profile, returned no listing, which is the expected position for a subscription journal with an optional open access route, and OpenAlex likewise records the journal as not in DOAJ.

The Journal's Role in Guidelines and Practice

Few specialist journals sit as close to clinical standard-setting as this one. The Heart Failure Association's parent body, the ESC, produces the European heart failure guidelines that structure practice across Europe and influence it well beyond, and the community that writes those guidelines publishes, reviews for and reads EJHF. The journal consequently carries a steady stream of position papers, consensus documents, trial design papers and scientific statements from HFA study groups and ESC working parties, alongside the primary evidence on which recommendations rest. For a reader, that proximity is the journal's chief value: a subscription places the primary literature and the interpretive layer that turns it into practice between the same covers. For an author, it means the audience includes the people who write recommendations and design the next generation of trials — a readership that amplifies work it finds convincing and scrutinises work it does not.

The journal's content programme reflects this dual role. Alongside original articles it publishes state-of-the-art reviews that define current understanding of a syndrome or therapy, editorials that place new results in context, research letters and short reports for focused findings, and correspondence in which results are debated. Heart failure is also a field in which negative and neutral trials are unusually informative, because they close off therapeutic avenues the community has invested in; the journal's willingness to publish rigorous work of that kind is part of why its citation record is durable — its cited half-life of 5.8 years, reported in the metrics panel, indicates that papers continue to be cited well beyond the two-year window on which the impact factor rests.

Readership and Community

The readership spans hospital cardiologists and heart failure specialists, internists and geriatricians, primary care physicians managing long-term therapy, specialist nurses who run titration and monitoring services, pharmacologists and physiologists working on mechanisms, and health economists and policymakers assessing the affordability of device and drug programmes. Wiley's earlier media material for the title described an audience of exactly that breadth, and the journal's scope statement — with its explicit invitation to nursing, elderly care, primary care and health economics contributions — is written for them. The HFA's own congress and educational activities reinforce the journal's community role: research discussed at the association's meetings and research published in its journal circulate among substantially the same professional audience.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Not

The ideal submission advances heart failure knowledge in a way the subspecialty's clinicians and scientists will use: a well-powered trial or trial analysis, a registry study that changes risk assessment or management, mechanistic work with a clear clinical thread, or population and health-services research that speaks to how heart failure care is delivered. The multidisciplinary welcome is genuine — nursing, primary care and health economics papers are not decorative additions but part of the journal's stated scope — provided the heart failure contribution is central and the methods are sound.

Poor fits include general cardiology work in which heart failure is incidental, small single-centre case series without a transferable lesson, and studies whose population or intervention belongs more naturally to another ESC title or to the fully open access companion. Authors should also consider the transfer system pragmatically: submission to EJHF with a willingness to transfer can be an efficient route into the ESC journal family.

Practical Submission Notes

Think about discoverability as part of submission craft. Heart failure literature is searched by syndrome, by therapy and by trial acronym, and titles and abstracts that name the population, the intervention and the design plainly are found and cited more reliably than those built around a slogan. The journal's articles are surfaced through the major medical indexes and through the ESC's own channels, so the abstract you write will often be the only part a busy clinician reads before deciding whether your findings change their practice. State the primary result, with its effect size, in the abstract's opening lines.

Use the submission route and author instructions on the journal's current Oxford Academic pages, since platform, publisher and instructions changed in January 2026. Prepare trial reports to the relevant reporting standards, register trials prospectively, and write the clinical implications plainly — the readership includes the guideline writers and practising clinicians who will act on the findings. If open access is required by your funder, check before submission whether your institution's agreement with the publisher covers the charge; the optional open access charge recorded for the journal in earlier platform data should not be assumed to be the current figure.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who owns the European Journal of Heart Failure? It is the official journal of the Heart Failure Association, an association of the European Society of Cardiology.

Who publishes it now? Oxford University Press, from January 2026. Wiley was the previous publisher; third-party databases that still name Wiley, or that name Elsevier, are carrying legacy metadata.

What is its impact factor? 10.3 for 2025, with a five-year figure of 12.4, as reported on the publisher's journal page from Clarivate data; its 2025 Scopus CiteScore is 19.7.

Is it open access? It is a subscription journal with optional open access for individual articles. Its companion, ESC Heart Failure, is fully open access.

How often does it appear? Twelve issues per year, available online and in print.

Sources and Verification

This profile is based on the journal's Oxford Academic about page, including its Clarivate and Scopus metrics panel; the European Society of Cardiology's journal and publications pages, including the announcement of the January 2026 move to Oxford University Press and the listing of the editor-in-chief; Wiley's media material for the title's previous platform period; OpenAlex source S87609158, consulted directly, whose bibliometric counts are used with the caveats recorded above; and DOAJ searches by print and electronic ISSN, which returned no listing. The previous JournalsWorld template record contained an internal conflict — its text named Wiley in the United Kingdom while its structured publisher field named Elsevier BV in the Netherlands, and its running text reduced the publisher to a garbled number. The verified position, per the ESC and the current publisher, is as stated in the table above.