Krankenhauspharmazie

About Krankenhauspharmazie

Krankenhauspharmazie — A Complete Profile of Germany's Hospital Pharmacy Journal

Krankenhauspharmazie (KPH), which translates as "Hospital Pharmacy", is the German-language monthly journal of hospital pharmacy, published in Stuttgart by Deutscher Apotheker Verlag and serving as the official organ of the Bundesverband Deutscher Krankenhausapotheker (ADKA) — the Federal Association of German Hospital Pharmacists. Its publisher's media information describes a journal that reflects the scientific and practical activities of hospital pharmacists and reaches almost all hospital pharmacies, as well as many hospital-supplying pharmacies, across the German-speaking area of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It is, in short, a professional-scientific journal for a defined profession in a defined language community — and it should be evaluated on those terms, not as a would-be international research title.

This profile is based on the publisher's own media information for the journal, the scope statement in its SCImago record, and an OpenAlex source record resolved from its ISSN. German-language source material is reported here in English translation. Where a detail could not be verified from a consulted source, it is stated as not published or could not be verified.

Quick Facts

The Journal and Its Association

Krankenhauspharmazie is the official organ of ADKA, the Federal Association of German Hospital Pharmacists. That relationship defines the journal's content and its circulation. The publisher's media information states that KPH reflects the scientific and practical activities of hospital pharmacists, reaches nearly all hospital pharmacies and many pharmacies supplying hospitals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and carries the association's news as an integral component of the journal. A member reading KPH is therefore reading, in one place, the science of the specialty, its day-to-day practice, and the business of its professional association — a combination typical of association journals and quite different from a stand-alone commercial research title.

The SCImago scope text, in German, confirms the same identity: KPH is the official organ of ADKA, appears monthly at Deutscher Apotheker Verlag in Stuttgart, reaches all hospital pharmacies in Germany, and names Dr. Matthias Fellhauer of Villingen-Schwenningen as its Herausgeber (editor/publisher-editor). The publisher's media kit gives the publishing house's address as Birkenwaldstrasse 44, 70191 Stuttgart, and identifies the target group precisely: hospital pharmacists, and pharmacists of pharmacies supplying hospitals, in the German-speaking countries. For advertisers and authors alike, that is an unusually complete penetration of a small, well-defined professional market — the journal's real asset, and one no bibliometric indicator measures.

What Hospital Pharmacy Means Here: The Content Territory

The publisher describes the journal's articles as covering all areas of clinical pharmacy: new hospital medicines; drug manufacture and drug analysis; the role of the pharmacist in advising doctors and patients and supporting medical activities; drug therapy safety; drug logistics; and pharmacoeconomics. The journal also contains literature reviews of important publications from the international scientific literature, reports from international congresses and training events, and ADKA association news. Each of those content families deserves a closer look, because together they map the working life of a German hospital pharmacy.

New hospital medicines. Hospital pharmacists must assess products that are new to the hospital setting — their handling, preparation, stability, interaction profile and place in therapy — often before ward teams use them. Articles in this family translate regulatory and trial information into hospital practice: what a pharmacy must stock, prepare, monitor and warn about.

Manufacture and analysis. German hospital pharmacies manufacture medicines — including, as the publisher's own description of the hospital pharmacist's role notes, preparations such as cytostatic infusions and pain pumps — and they analyse and control quality. KPH's coverage of drug manufacture and drug analysis speaks to that production responsibility, which distinguishes hospital pharmacy from purely advisory models of the profession.

Advice and clinical support. The publisher's role description for hospital pharmacists includes ordering, logistics and professional storage; monitoring correct drug manufacture; advising medical and nursing staff on the correct use of medicines, including storage and intake instructions; providing information on interactions with other medications; and monitoring pharmacovigilance. It also notes that the director of the pharmacy is a member of the hospital's Medicines Commission, often as its managing director. Journal content on the pharmacist as consultant to physician and patient, and as supporter of medical activities, is the published counterpart of those ward and committee duties.

Drug therapy safety. Medication safety — preventing, detecting and learning from medication errors and adverse drug events — is a core hospital-pharmacy responsibility, and a standing theme for the journal. Articles here serve the safety systems of hospitals directly: standard concentrations, prescribing checks, interaction management and incident learning.

Logistics and pharmacoeconomics. A hospital pharmacy is also a supply operation and a budget holder. Content on pharmaceutical logistics and on the economics of drug therapy addresses procurement, storage, distribution and cost-effectiveness — the questions hospital managers and medicines commissions actually decide.

Reviews, congress reports and training. By reviewing important international literature and reporting international congresses and training events, the journal performs a filtering service for readers whose working language is German and whose time is limited: it brings the international evidence base into the professional conversation of German-speaking hospital pharmacy, in German.

Metrics and Standing, With Sources — and an Honest Caveat

SCImago reports for this journal: subject area Medicine, category Pharmacology (medical); publisher Deutscher Apotheker Verlag; SJR 0.116 for 2025; best quartile Q4, with a category history that SCImago's own quartile table shows reaching Q3 in several early-2000s years; an h-index of 13; and coverage from 1990 to 2026 — a long, continuing record that reflects more than three decades of tracked publication. An h-index of 13, accumulated over that span, is the profile of a specialist professional journal whose articles are cited modestly but persistently within its field.

OpenAlex tells a very different-looking story, and the difference is instructive. Resolved from ISSN 0173-7597, the OpenAlex source record S4306517829 reported only 12 works and 6 citations, with summary statistics of an h-index of 1 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.0, and topics in pharmacy and medical practices, pharmaceutical practices and patient outcomes, and clinical nutrition and gastroenterology. No reader should conclude from those numbers that the journal has published only a dozen articles since 1990; the SCImago coverage record alone disproves that. The OpenAlex figures reflect how incompletely a German-language, print-centred professional journal is captured in that particular corpus. This profile therefore reports the OpenAlex numbers for transparency, attributes them strictly to OpenAlex, and advises any reader who needs citation evidence for this journal to use the Scopus-derived record (via SCImago) and the journal's own long coverage history instead. The general lesson travels well beyond this one title: for non-English professional journals, a small number in a global open corpus is evidence about the corpus first and about the journal second.

A DOAJ search-API query for ISSN 0173-7597 returned no record at the time of research for this profile, so no DOAJ listing is claimed. That is unsurprising for a subscription professional journal of this type, and readers should check DOAJ directly if the current position matters to them.

Publishing in Krankenhauspharmazie

The journal is a venue for authors who are, overwhelmingly, practitioners and researchers in German-speaking hospital pharmacy writing in German for their peers. Suitable contributions follow directly from the content territory above: evaluations of new hospital medicines from a pharmacy perspective; manufacture and analysis studies, including stability and preparation work; clinical pharmacy service descriptions and evaluations; medication-safety analyses and interventions; logistics and pharmacoeconomic studies; and reviews that bring international literature to German-speaking readers. Association and professional news travels through ADKA channels as an integral part of the journal.

Formal author instructions — manuscript structure, length limits, submission route and any charges — are not published in the sources consulted for this profile and are stated here as not published, rather than reconstructed from the habits of other journals. A prospective author should obtain the current instructions from Deutscher Apotheker Verlag or the editorial office before drafting, should write in German unless the editors advise otherwise, and should pitch the level at the practising hospital pharmacist: practical consequence first, method and evidence in full, and implications for the pharmacy service stated plainly. Work written for an international English-language research audience, without adaptation, will miss this readership almost by definition.

Who Should Read and Submit, and Who Should Look Elsewhere

Read KPH if you practise, manage or study hospital pharmacy in Germany, Austria or Switzerland; if you supply hospitals as a pharmacy; if you sit on or serve a medicines commission; or if you research clinical pharmacy in the German health system and need to know what its practitioners are reading and debating. Submit to it if your work improves hospital pharmacy practice for that community and you can present it in German, at a practical level, with its service implications drawn out. Look elsewhere if you need an English-language international research journal, a high-quartile bibliometric credential — SCImago places the journal at Q4 in Pharmacology (medical) — or a readership beyond the German-speaking hospital world. None of that diminishes the journal: within its stated community its reach, per its publisher, approaches completeness, and a journal that reaches almost every hospital pharmacy in three countries is a powerful channel for practice-changing information, whatever its SJR.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Krankenhauspharmazie mean? "Hospital Pharmacy" — the journal's subject and its readership in one word.

Whose journal is it? It is the official organ of ADKA, the Federal Association of German Hospital Pharmacists, published by Deutscher Apotheker Verlag in Stuttgart.

What is its ISSN? 0173-7597.

How often does it appear? Monthly, dispatched at the beginning of the month, per the publisher's media information.

What does it publish? Articles on all areas of clinical pharmacy — new hospital medicines, drug manufacture and analysis, the pharmacist's advisory role, drug therapy safety, drug logistics and pharmacoeconomics — plus reviews of international literature, congress and training reports, and ADKA news.

What are its metrics? SCImago: SJR 0.116 (2025), best quartile Q4 in Pharmacology (medical), h-index 13, coverage 1990–2026. OpenAlex's record for the ISSN is very partial (12 works, 6 citations) and should not be used as a measure of this journal, for the reasons explained above.

In what language is it published? German, for hospital pharmacists across Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Does it charge authors? No charge is published in the sources consulted for this profile; the position is stated as not published, and authors should ask the publisher.

Is it listed in DOAJ? A DOAJ search-API query for its ISSN returned no record at the time of research; check DOAJ directly for the current position.

Sources and Verification Notes

This profile is based on the publisher's media information for Krankenhauspharmazie (Deutscher Apotheker Verlag / DAV Mediengruppe, media kits for 2024 and 2025: official-organ status, monthly frequency, target group and publisher address, subject coverage, format and printing details, and the description of the hospital pharmacist's role), the SCImago record for ISSN 01737597 (category, publisher, SJR 2025, quartile history, h-index, coverage and German scope text naming the editor), and the OpenAlex source record S4306517829 resolved from the ISSN endpoint, all consulted for this profile. A DOAJ search-API query for the ISSN returned no record, as reported. Details none of these sources supported — including author instructions and any charges — are identified in the text as not published or could not be verified.

How the Journal Fits the German Hospital System

To read KPH well, an outside reader needs a picture of the institution it serves. In Germany, hospital care is delivered through a dense network of public, charitable and private hospitals, and each hospital pharmacy carries responsibilities that go well beyond dispensing: procurement and storage of the hospital's medicines, in-house manufacture of preparations that are not commercially supplied in the needed form, quality analysis, formulary work through the hospital's medicines commission, pharmacovigilance, and advice to prescribers and nursing staff at the point of care. The publisher's description of the hospital pharmacist's role — ordering, logistics and professional storage; monitoring correct manufacture of items such as cytostatic infusions and pain pumps; advising on correct use, storage and intake; informing staff about interactions; and the pharmacy director's seat on the Medicines Commission, often as its managing director — is a compact map of that system. KPH's content families follow the same map, which is why an article in this journal can move directly from page to practice: its readers are the people who staff those commissions, run those production units and answer those ward queries.

The journal's monthly rhythm also fits that system. Hospital pharmacy decisions — a new product to evaluate, a preparation to change, a safety alert to act on, a guideline to implement — arrive continuously, and a monthly professional journal, dispatched at the beginning of the month, matches the meeting and commission cycle of hospital life better than a quarterly research title would. The association news carried in the journal closes the loop: professional policy, training events and ADKA's own activities reach the same readers in the same envelope, keeping the scientific, practical and professional conversations in one place. For a researcher studying how evidence actually reaches hospital practice in a large European health system, that arrangement is itself data: the channel is trusted because it is the profession's own, and its penetration — nearly all hospital pharmacies in three countries, per the publisher — is the kind of reach that implementation science usually struggles to buy.

That context also explains the journal's durability. A coverage record in SCImago running from 1990 to 2026 spans the reunification-era reorganisation of German hospitals, the introduction of diagnosis-related payment, repeated medicines-law reforms, the growth of clinical pharmacy services, and the digitalisation of prescribing and logistics. A professional journal that survives those transitions does so by remaining useful through each of them. Its modest citation indicators record the attention of researchers; its longevity records the attention of practitioners — and for a journal whose stated job is to reflect the scientific and practical activities of hospital pharmacists, the second record is the one that counts.

For completeness, a reader verifying this profile should note the order in which its evidence was weighed: the publisher's own media information first, for what the journal is and whom it serves; the SCImago record second, for categorisation, coverage and citation standing; and the OpenAlex record last, reported transparently but explicitly discounted as a measure of this particular journal, because its capture of German-language professional publishing is demonstrably partial. That ordering — official source, then curated bibliometric record, then open corpus with its limits stated — is the right order for almost any long-established non-English professional journal, and applying it here is what keeps a small OpenAlex number from being misread as a small journal.