International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine

About International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine

Overview: a journal built around making medicine safer

The International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine is a peer-reviewed medical journal whose entire reason for existing is contained in its title: clinical care always carries risk, and the scholarly task is to understand that risk honestly, reduce it where it can be reduced, and manage it responsibly where it cannot be eliminated. The journal's own statement of purpose, hosted today on the SAGE Journals platform, describes a concern with rendering the practice of medicine as safe as it can be — promoting the highest possible quality of care while also examining how inevitable risks can be contained and managed for an international audience. The journal carries the descriptive subtitle Patient Safety – Pharmacovigilance – Liability, and those three words map its territory precisely: what happens to patients, what medicines do for good and for harm, and who answers, ethically and legally, when something goes wrong.

That positioning makes the journal unusual in the medical literature. Most clinical journals are organised around a body system, a disease, or a technique. This journal is organised around a problem that cuts across all of them. A study of adverse drug reactions, an analysis of surgical checklists, an examination of compensation schemes after birth injury, and a review of safety standards for medical devices can all sit naturally in the same issue, because each asks the same underlying question from a different angle: how does harm happen in health care, and what would prevent it next time? For readers of Journals World, that cross-cutting identity is the single most important thing to grasp before citing, submitting to, or searching the journal.

Journal identity at a glance

The identifiers above agree with the Journals World record for this post, which lists ISSNs 09246479 and 18786847 and the publisher IOS Press (NL). One structured-field point deserves an explicit note rather than silent correction: newer secondary listings describe the publisher as SAGE and the country as the United Kingdom, because the journal's home has moved to the SAGE platform. That is a publisher-platform transition, not a different journal — the title, ISSN pair, archive continuity from 1990, and subject identity are unchanged. Readers verifying the journal today should therefore expect to land on a SAGE page for a journal whose older volumes and DOI history (the 10.3233 prefix on older articles) still reflect its IOS Press years.

History and development

The journal began publication in 1990, at a moment when patient safety was emerging as a distinct field of inquiry rather than a collection of local incident reports. Through the 1990s and 2000s it published work on drug safety surveillance, on the safety of surgical and anaesthetic practice, on risks in obstetrics and gynaecology, and on the legal frameworks that follow medical injury. Its archive, preserved in full on the current platform, runs continuously from 1990 to the present, with recent volumes appearing in a regular quarterly rhythm — for example, the 2026 volume cycle lists issues in February, May, and August, including themed special issues.

Two recent special issues illustrate how the journal's agenda has widened with the field itself. One recent issue was devoted to trusted evidence for better health, examining achievements and barriers in getting reliable evidence into practice. Another addressed artificial intelligence in medical journalism and medical science — a topic that would have been unimaginable at the journal's founding, yet fits its founding question exactly, because new technologies create new categories of clinical risk even as they promise to reduce old ones. A journal about risk that ignored algorithmic decision support, automated documentation, or machine-generated medical writing would be failing its own brief; the special-issue programme shows the editors actively extending the brief instead.

The move from IOS Press to the SAGE platform is the other major development in the journal's recent history. Long-standing readers knew the journal through IOS Press, an Amsterdam-based publisher of scientific and medical titles. Its content is now browsed, searched, and cited through SAGE Journals, with the historical archive intact. For librarians and bibliometricians, the practical consequence is that catalogue records may show either publisher name depending on when they were created; the ISSN pair is the stable key that ties those records together, and it is the key researchers should use when disambiguating this title from similarly named safety and risk journals.

Scope in depth

Drugs, vaccines, and pharmacovigilance

Medicines are the journal's first-named field of special concern, and historically its busiest. Contributions examine side effects and drug interactions, the post-marketing surveillance systems that detect harms trials were too small to see, and the development of safer and more specific pharmaceuticals. Vaccine safety receives the same treatment: not advocacy for or against particular products, but scrutiny of how safety signals are detected, evaluated, communicated, and acted on. Work on biosimilar medicines illustrates the style well — the journal has published multi-country examinations of how regulators approve and monitor biosimilars, how their safety profiles are tracked after launch, and what challenges pharmacovigilance systems face when a product is similar to, but not identical with, its reference medicine. That combination of regulatory detail and clinical consequence is characteristic of the journal at its best.

Surgery, anaesthesia, and clinical procedures

A second core strand concerns the safety of medical and surgical practice itself. Papers in this strand study how errors occur in operating theatres and procedure rooms, how anaesthetic risk is assessed and communicated, and which organisational interventions — briefings, checklists, staffing models, supervision structures — measurably reduce harm. Because procedural harm is rarely caused by a single incompetent individual, this literature tends to be systems-oriented: it asks what the team, the rota, the equipment layout, and the institutional culture contributed, and what redesign would make the safe action the easy action.

Obstetrics, gynaecology, and maternal safety

The journal's founding scope explicitly names gynaecology and obstetrics, and the strand remains visible in the archive. Obstetric care concentrates risk in a distinctive way: two patients are involved, events can deteriorate quickly, and outcomes carry lifelong consequences, which is why obstetric injury also dominates many countries' medical compensation costs. Papers in this area address antenatal surveillance, intrapartum decision-making, and the aftermath of adverse outcomes, including how services learn from them. Historical work in the journal, such as analyses of multiple-pregnancy trends and their associated stillbirth and neonatal risks in a defined population, shows the epidemiological side of the same concern.

Medical equipment, materials, and quality assurance

Devices and materials form a fourth strand. The journal examines quality assurance in medical equipment and materials — how devices are tested before adoption, how failures are reported and investigated, and how hospitals should respond when a widely used product is recalled or restricted. As care becomes more device-dependent, from infusion pumps to implantables to diagnostic software, this strand has grown in importance, and it connects the journal to regulatory science as much as to bedside practice.

Complementary and alternative medicine

Unusually for a mainstream medical title, the journal's scope has always included alternative medicine. The reasoning is consistent with its mission: patients use these therapies in large numbers, interactions with conventional treatment are a genuine safety issue, and a safety journal that ignored a whole sector of actual practice would be describing the health system it wishes existed rather than the one that does. Contributions in this strand apply the same evidential standards as elsewhere in the journal.

Ethics, law, liability, and compensation

The ethical and legal aspects of risk run through every field above and also stand as a subject in their own right. The journal publishes on legal liability, on compensation and insurance arrangements and the ideals behind them, and on the ethics of disclosure, consent, and apology after harm. This is the strand that most distinguishes the journal from purely clinical safety titles: it treats the courtroom, the regulator, and the insurer as part of the safety system, because their incentives shape clinician behaviour, reporting culture, and institutional learning. A recurring tension in this literature — between accountability for individuals and the openness a learning system needs — is one the journal has hosted for three decades, and readers will find strong, opposed, well-argued positions in its pages.

Risk management programmes

Finally, the journal covers risk management programmes in particular fields of medicine: the organised, institutional work of identifying hazards before they injure, auditing compliance, training staff, and feeding incident data back into protocol design. Papers here are often practical and evaluative, reporting what a hospital or service actually implemented and what changed. For health-service managers, this is frequently the most directly usable part of the journal.

Who reads and cites the journal

The readership follows from the scope. Clinicians with safety responsibilities, pharmacovigilance specialists, hospital risk managers, health lawyers, medical ethicists, regulators, and health-policy researchers all find material here that their home-discipline journals publish only occasionally. The journal is indexed in the major medical and citation databases appropriate to its field — its articles carry the citation footprint of a long-running specialist title, and bibliometric listings based on Scopus and Journal Citation Reports data place it in the lower-middle quartiles of categories such as health policy, public health, and general medicine, with exact quartile and score values varying by year and by category. Readers comparing journals should check the current-year figures on the SCImago and Journal Citation Reports services directly, because those values are revised annually and any number printed in a static profile will age.

Citation practice deserves one caution. The journal's title is sometimes abbreviated inconsistently in reference lists, and two similarly named fields — risk management in health care more broadly, and drug safety specifically — have their own dedicated journals. When following a citation to this title, verify the ISSN or the article DOI rather than relying on a shortened title string alone.

Editorial approach and peer review

The journal operates conventional scholarly peer review under its publisher's procedures: manuscripts are assessed by the editorial team for fit and quality and sent to expert referees before acceptance. Its content mix spans original research articles, review articles, case reports, brief reports, and editorials, as the current-issue listings on its platform show. Special issues are a regular feature, assembled around a theme — evidence quality and artificial intelligence are two recent examples — and they sit alongside unsolicited submissions in the normal quarterly issues. Authors should consult the journal's current author instructions on the SAGE platform for formatting, ethics declarations, and submission mechanics, since platform-level requirements are updated there and a static summary cannot substitute for them.

On access: the journal is principally a subscription title. Many articles sit behind subscriber access, while a minority are published open access and are marked as such on the platform, and editorials are sometimes made freely readable. Institutional access through a library is the normal route for most readers; the platform's most-read and most-cited lists, refreshed from Crossref data, are publicly visible and give a quick sense of the journal's current centre of gravity.

How this journal differs from neighbouring titles

Three neighbouring territories are worth distinguishing. First, general medical journals publish safety research when it is practice-changing, but safety is not their organising principle; here it is. Second, dedicated pharmacovigilance titles concentrate on medicines; this journal covers medicines prominently but places them beside surgery, devices, obstetrics, and law. Third, health-policy journals approach risk from the system-financing side; this journal stays closer to clinical practice while still welcoming policy and legal analysis. A researcher deciding where to submit should ask where the paper's central claim lives: if the claim is fundamentally about how harm arises, is detected, or should be governed in medical care, this journal is a natural home; if the claim is about a disease mechanism or a therapy's efficacy, it belongs elsewhere.

Using the archive well

The back archive is a resource in itself. Because the journal has tracked safety questions since 1990, longitudinal questions — how reporting culture changed, how a particular drug-safety controversy unfolded, how compensation models evolved — can be answered from its pages with a continuity few newer titles can offer. Searchers should remember that older articles carry IOS Press-era DOIs and formatting, and that terminology has shifted: older papers may use "medical error", "adverse event", "iatrogenic harm", or "clinical risk" where a modern paper would say "patient safety incident". Building a search with several synonyms is essential for recall in this archive.

Frequently asked questions

Is the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine still published by IOS Press?

Historically yes, and older volumes and DOIs reflect IOS Press. The journal is now presented on the SAGE Journals platform, and current listings name SAGE as publisher. The title and ISSNs are unchanged.

What are the journal's ISSNs?

Print ISSN 0924-6479 and online ISSN 1878-6847 — the same pair carried in the Journals World record for this post.

How often does it publish?

Quarterly — four issues per year.

What subjects fit its scope?

Patient safety, drug and vaccine safety and pharmacovigilance, surgical and anaesthetic safety, obstetric risk, device and materials quality assurance, safety aspects of alternative medicine, and the ethical and legal dimensions of medical risk, including liability and compensation.

Is it open access?

It is mainly subscription-based, with some articles published open access and marked accordingly on the publisher platform. A specific article-processing charge for optional open access is set by the publisher and should be checked on the journal's current author pages rather than assumed.

When did the journal start?

In 1990; its publisher archive runs continuously from February 1990.

Reading the journal critically

A safety journal invites a particular kind of critical reading. Many of its papers report interventions — a new reporting system, a revised protocol, a training programme — and the honest question is always whether harm actually fell, or whether reporting simply changed. The journal's long archive is helpful here, because follow-up studies and sceptical commentaries often appear in later issues, letting a careful reader watch a claim being tested over time rather than accepting a single enthusiastic report. The same discipline applies to its legal and ethical content: jurisdictions differ sharply in how liability and compensation work, and an argument built on one country's arrangements may not travel. The better papers say so explicitly, and readers should carry that caution into their own citations.

It is also worth noticing what the journal's existence demonstrates about the field. In 1990, a journal devoted to risk in medicine was a niche proposition; three and a half decades later, patient safety is a recognised discipline with its own degrees, regulators, and international strategies, and this title has been a continuous witness to that transformation. Its special issues on evidence quality and on artificial intelligence show the witness still at work, applying an old question — where is the harm, and who is watching for it? — to the newest tools in medicine. For students entering the safety field, working backwards through those special issues is an efficient way to learn both the field's foundations and its current frontiers.

Sources and verification

This profile was built from the journal's current publisher home and journal-overview pages on the SAGE Journals platform (title, subtitle, aims, archive span, issue rhythm, article types), IOS Press-era article pages (historical publisher and DOI prefix), the SCImago-derived listings for ISSN, abbreviation, frequency, and subject categories, and the Journals World record itself for the stored ISSN and publisher fields. Where sources disagreed — publisher name and country — the difference is explained above as a platform transition and both forms are reported rather than one being silently substituted for the other. Metrics that change annually are described qualitatively, with readers directed to the current SCImago and Journal Citation Reports figures.