Eurosurveillance

About Eurosurveillance

Eurosurveillance: Journal Profile

Eurosurveillance is an open access, peer-reviewed scientific journal devoted to the epidemiology, surveillance, prevention and control of communicable diseases, published from a European perspective. It is published by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) in Stockholm, Sweden, and appears weekly, every Thursday. Its print ISSN is 1025-496X and its online ISSN is 1560-7917. Founded in 1995 and published by ECDC since 2007, the journal occupies a distinctive position between a conventional research journal and a public health bulletin: its rapid communications disseminate time-critical outbreak and threat information within days, while its regular articles carry the longer epidemiological analyses on which European prevention and control policy is built.

The journal describes itself, on its official About page, as a non-profit publication with no financial conflicts of interest, and it publishes without charging authors: the DOAJ record checked for this profile records no article processing charge. The JournalsWorld record for this post, matched by ISSN, places the journal in the first quartile (Q1) in seven SCImago categories, with an SJR of 2.81 and an h-index of 143 in the SCImago 2025 dataset. The journal's own About page reports a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 8.3 and a Scopus CiteScore of 13.6 — figures set out with their sources in the metrics section below.

At a Glance

History: From a Collaborative Bulletin to the ECDC Journal

Eurosurveillance began in 1995 as a collaborative European project, jointly funded by the European Commission, the French national public health institute in Paris (the Réseau national de santé publique, later Institut de Veille Sanitaire and now the French national public health agency), and the British Public Health Laboratory Service in London (later the Health Protection Agency and Public Health England, now the UK Health Security Agency). A pilot issue appeared in 1995. For its first decade the journal operated in weekly and monthly forms — short, fast epidemiological intelligence in the weekly release, and longer scientific papers in the monthly release.

The decisive change came with the creation of ECDC, the EU agency for disease prevention and control established in Stockholm. Collaboration between the journal and the new centre began in 2005, when a weekly epidemiological bulletin was published with the centre; in 2007 the journal was transferred entirely to ECDC, which has published it since March of that year. In January 2008 the previous weekly and monthly releases were merged into a single weekly journal, published every Thursday, combining rapid updates on major public health events and news items with longer scientific articles and reviews. Karl Ekdahl became editor-in-chief in 2008, and Ines Steffens has been editor-in-chief since 2011, according to the journal's published history.

That history explains the journal's present character. It inherited the bulletin tradition — speed, brevity, operational relevance — and combined it with full peer review and the scientific standards of a journal indexed in the major databases. It also explains the journal's European framing: its remit is infectious disease issues from a European perspective, including work from outside Europe where the relevance to European countries is clear, a criterion its reviewer guidance states explicitly.

Scope and Content

The journal covers epidemiology, surveillance, prevention and control of communicable diseases. Within that remit, the recurring subject matter includes outbreak investigations and rapid risk-related reports; surveillance system design, evaluation and results; vaccine effectiveness, vaccination coverage and immunisation strategy; antimicrobial resistance monitoring and response; foodborne, waterborne and zoonotic disease; respiratory infections including influenza and COVID-19; sexually transmitted and bloodborne infections; vector-borne diseases; and the methods of field epidemiology and epidemic intelligence. The journal's special editions and thematic collections, listed on its website across many years, illustrate the range: collections have covered topics from plasmid-mediated colistin resistance and tick-borne encephalitis to screening in migrants, vaccine hesitancy, point-of-care testing and children and COVID-19.

Two content formats define the journal. Rapid communications are short — the journal's reviewer guidance puts them at usually around 1,200 words — and do not follow the conventional Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion structure. They exist to get verified, public-health-relevant findings to the community fast: a first cluster description, an early vaccine-effectiveness estimate, a detection method for a new pathogen. The journal's most famous article is of exactly this kind: the January 2020 report describing detection of the 2019 novel coronavirus by real-time RT-PCR, which became one of the most cited papers of the pandemic period; aggregator Research.com lists it with over 3,800 citations. Regular articles are full-length peer-reviewed research and analysis papers — surveillance analyses, outbreak investigations written up in full, methodological studies, reviews and perspectives. Editorials and letters to the editor complete the mix.

The official About page gives a precise picture of scale for 2025: the journal received 1,050 submissions from 85 countries and published 69 peer-reviewed rapid communications and 131 peer-reviewed regular articles, together with 4 editorials and 13 letters, at an acceptance rate of 20 percent. Those numbers, reported by the journal itself, show both selectivity and the deliberate balance between the rapid and regular streams.

Editorial and Peer-Review Process

The journal publishes its evaluation and review process openly, and several features are worth knowing before submitting. Reviewers are asked to judge timeliness, public health implications, European relevance, methodological validity, scientific importance, presentation quality and originality. For rapid communications the editorial team processes manuscripts with priority to ensure timely dissemination, and reviewers may advise whether a submission is better suited to publication as a regular article instead.

Editing is unusually intensive. The journal states that the revised manuscript and the authors' point-by-point responses are evaluated in detail; that accepted articles are rigorously edited for content and style; and that authors can expect three editing rounds, including a clearance round in which the editor-in-chief reviews and approves the article before publication. For rapid communications the journal does not formally accept the article before editing is complete, because points can arise during editing that were not visible during evaluation. After final approval, articles are published in one of the next available weekly issues, usually within two weeks of finalisation of the text, with rapid communications prioritised. Authors accustomed to journals where copy-editing is light should budget time for this process: the journal's house standard is that the editorial team, not the author, has the final word on clarity and style, and the published record is better for it.

The editorial model is that of a publicly funded agency journal. ECDC is an EU agency, and the journal is a non-profit publication; its About page states that as a non-profit publication the journal has no financial conflicts of interest. Content includes results from ECDC and from the EU-funded surveillance networks alongside independent submissions, giving the journal a dual role as both a scientific venue and a channel through which Europe's coordinated surveillance output reaches the professional community.

Open Access and Charges

Eurosurveillance is fully open access and free to publish in. The DOAJ search API, queried directly for this profile, returned the journal's record under its online ISSN (1560-7917); the print ISSN search returned no separate record, because the DOAJ record is keyed to the electronic edition. The DOAJ record states that the journal has no article processing charge, records the licence as CC BY, and gives an open access start year of 1996. The journal's own author pages confirm that it does not levy publication fees. All articles since 1995 are openly accessible on the journal website, according to the About page, which makes the complete archive — three decades of European outbreak and surveillance literature — freely searchable.

For authors this combination is increasingly rare at this citation level: a Q1, high-impact-factor journal in infectious diseases with no author charges at all, funded instead as part of a public agency's mission. It removes the funding barrier that open access charges create elsewhere, and it is one reason the journal receives submissions from 85 countries in a single year, as its 2025 statistics show.

Metrics and Standing — Read With Attribution

Uniquely among the journals in this batch, Eurosurveillance publishes a full metrics panel on its own About page, and this profile takes its headline figures from there. For 2025 the journal reports: Journal Impact Factor 8.3 (InCites Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate, 2026), placing it at number 8 of 141 journals in Infectious Diseases, with a top-10 position in that category held since 2012; Scopus CiteScore 13.6 for 2025, with top-10 category ranks including number 1 of 43 in Immunology and Microbiology (miscellaneous), number 9 of 173 in Epidemiology and number 9 of 86 in Virology, plus number 18 of 725 in Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health; SCImago Journal Rank 2.810; and a Scopus-based h-index of 143. Google Scholar metrics cited by the journal give an h-index of 110 and an h5-median of 212, ranking the journal third in Epidemiology and ninth in Communicable Diseases in that system.

The SCImago figures on the journal's About page match the JournalsWorld record carried here — SJR 2.81 and h-index 143 — and the record adds Q1 placement in seven categories in the 2025 dataset: Epidemiology; Infectious Diseases; Medicine (miscellaneous); Microbiology; Microbiology (medical); Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health; and Virology, with 232 documents and 4,434 citations in the latest three-year window. OpenAlex, checked directly for this profile, counts 7,081 works and 221,512 citations, with an OpenAlex h-index of 173 and a two-year mean citedness of about 8.11; the OpenAlex figures run higher because that database counts a broader citation universe, and they should be cited as OpenAlex figures, not mixed with Scopus numbers.

Older figures in circulation should be treated with care. The journal's impact factor reached exceptional levels during the COVID-19 period (a value above 21 was reported for 2021), reflecting the extraordinary citation of its early pandemic rapid communications; the 2025 value of 8.3 reported by the journal is the current, post-pandemic figure and the one to use. Any profile quoting the pandemic-era number without a year is out of date.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal states on its About page that it has been selected for coverage by Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate) and is indexed and abstracted in the Science Citation Index Expanded and in the Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition beginning with volume 14(1), 2009. Its Scopus coverage is confirmed by the CiteScore and SCImago data the journal itself publishes, and its DOAJ listing is verified directly in the DOAJ API for this profile. As ECDC's journal it is also the version of record for a substantial share of Europe's coordinated communicable-disease surveillance literature, and its articles carry DOIs built on the online ISSN and are indexed in PubMed as a matter of course for a journal of this standing in infectious diseases; readers verifying a specific index for a formal evaluation should confirm it in that index directly, as with any journal.

Who Should Read It, and Who Should Submit

The core readership is epidemiologists, microbiologists, public health physicians and officials, infectious disease clinicians, and the staff of national public health institutes and surveillance networks in Europe and beyond. During an unfolding cross-border event, the journal's Thursday release is one of the first places the professional community looks for verified, peer-reviewed information, precisely because the rapid communication format is designed for that moment.

For authors, fit turns on the journal's stated review criteria: timeliness, public health implications and clear European relevance. A technically sound study with no implications for European prevention and control is a poor fit however good it is; a methodologically solid outbreak report, surveillance analysis or vaccine-effectiveness study with direct European relevance is exactly what the journal exists to publish, including work describing events outside Europe where the European relevance is made explicit. Authors should choose the format deliberately — rapid communication for short, urgent, practice-changing findings; regular article for complete analyses — follow the journal's author instructions closely, and expect, and welcome, the intensive editorial process described above. With a 20 percent acceptance rate reported for 2025, triage is real, and a presubmission reading of recent issues is the best guide to whether a manuscript matches the journal's current priorities.

The Journal in European Public Health Practice

To understand what Eurosurveillance is for, it helps to see where it sits in the machinery of European disease control. National public health institutes across Europe run surveillance systems and outbreak responses; ECDC coordinates at European level, operating epidemic intelligence and supporting the networks through which member states share data; and this journal is the peer-reviewed publication channel of that whole arrangement. When a multi-country foodborne outbreak is investigated, when a vaccine-effectiveness estimate is needed mid-season, or when a new pathogen variant is first characterised in Europe, the resulting rapid communication in Eurosurveillance is frequently the first citable, quality-controlled account — the document that other countries' response teams, and later historians of the event, actually reference.

Three features of that role deserve emphasis. First, permanence: unlike situation reports and dashboards, which are updated and overwritten, a journal article is a fixed, citable record with a DOI, which is why the rapid communications from the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic are still being cited years later. Second, neutrality of method: the intensive editing and the editor-in-chief clearance round exist partly because the journal speaks with institutional weight, and an error in a rapid communication can move policy in several countries at once. Third, the readership's trust is the asset: the journal's About page notes that it has held a top-10 Journal Citation Reports position in Infectious Diseases since 2012, through very different disease landscapes, which is the citation footprint of a community that treats the journal as infrastructure rather than as one journal among many.

The special editions listed on the journal's website underline the same point from another angle: themed collections on subjects such as screening in migrants, antimicrobial use and healthcare-associated infections, hepatitis C, immunisation information systems and vaccine hesitancy record the standing policy concerns of European public health between emergencies. A reader who works through those collections in order gets, in effect, a peer-reviewed history of what European disease control worried about, year by year — a secondary value of the archive that pure citation counts do not capture.

Verification Notes and Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes Eurosurveillance? The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Stockholm, Sweden, which has published the journal since 2007. The JournalsWorld record's publisher and country (ECDC; Sweden) match the journal's own account.

Is it open access, and does it charge authors? Yes to open access, no to charges. The DOAJ record (verified directly) records CC BY licensing and no article processing charge, with open access from 1996.

How often is it published? Weekly, every Thursday, combining rapid communications with regular articles in a single release since January 2008.

What are its current metrics? Per the journal's own About page for 2025: Impact Factor 8.3, CiteScore 13.6, SJR 2.810, Scopus h-index 143, acceptance rate 20 percent, 1,050 submissions. Pandemic-era impact factors above 20 are historical values, not current ones.

What is a rapid communication? A short (usually around 1,200 words), non-IMRaD, priority-processed peer-reviewed report for time-critical public health findings, published after rigorous editing and editor-in-chief clearance, usually within two weeks of finalisation.

Does it only publish European research? Its perspective is European; work from outside Europe is considered where its relevance to European countries is clear, which the journal's reviewer guidance lists as an explicit criterion.