About Medical Care Review

Medical Care Review

Overview — Read This First: A Former Title

In its own era, Medical Care Review was a pioneering venue for health services research — the discipline that studies how health care is organised, financed and delivered rather than how diseases are treated. It began, in the words of its publisher's history, as a source of abstracts, and grew into a respected journal of critical review articles that analysed, critiqued and synthesised the literature on organisational structure, economics and the financing of health and medical care systems. When the field expanded, the journal expanded with it: the 1995 rename to Medical Care Research and Review marked the addition of original empirical and theoretical research and trend analysis to the review mission.

Understanding this title therefore means understanding the birth of a field. Health services research emerged in the post-war decades as governments and insurers became major payers for medical care and needed evidence about systems, not only about treatments. Medical Care Review — rooted at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health — was one of the places that evidence was gathered, abstracted and judged. Its successor remains, in SAGE's description, at the forefront of health care research more than half a century on.

Quick Facts

A conflict in the stored record should be flagged plainly. The Journals World record names SAGE Publishing as this title's publisher. SAGE is indeed the publisher of the journal today — but of the successor title, Medical Care Research and Review. During Medical Care Review's own run, the journal's home was the University of Michigan, where its ancestor publication had been produced by the Bureau of Public Health Economics in the School of Public Health. The SAGE attribution is best read as the current steward of the journal family, carried back onto the former-title record, rather than as the publisher of record for 1967–1994 issues.

History: From Abstracts Journal to Field-Defining Review

The lineage begins in 1944, when Public Health Economics and Medical Care Abstracts was published by the University of Michigan's Bureau of Public Health Economics in the School of Public Health, as the University of Michigan's own history of health services research records. The timing is significant: wartime and post-war America was building the financing structures — employer insurance, and later Medicare and Medicaid — that made the organisation and economics of medical care a public question. An abstracts journal existed because the literature was already too scattered for any reader to follow unaided.

In 1967 the publication became Medical Care Review. Under that name it developed from abstracting toward critical review: commissioned and submitted articles that surveyed a literature, judged its quality and drew out its implications for policy and management. The publisher's retrospective describes the former-title journal in exactly those terms — a respected source of scholarly review articles analysing the organisational structure, economics and financing of health and medical care systems. In a field whose evidence is fragmented across economics, sociology, management and medicine, that synthesising function was the journal's contribution.

In 1995 the journal was renamed Medical Care Research and Review, and its scope formally widened: original empirical and theoretical research and data-trend analysis joined the review articles. The rename was therefore a scope announcement, not a relaunch — same journal, same intellectual territory, broader article types. Bibliographic systems record the change as a title succession, which is why the former title keeps its own ISSN pair and catalog record (NLM 0073130) and why citations to pre-1995 work must use the old title. The separate Journals World record for the successor (ISSN 1077-5587 / 1552-6801, H-index 101) should not be merged with this one: the two records describe successive titles of one journal, each correct for its period.

Scope and Subject Areas

The scope below is stated for the journal family as its current publisher presents it today, and it descends directly from the remit Medical Care Review built: critical reviews of the literature on the organisational structure, economics and financing of health and medical care systems, extended over time to include original empirical and theoretical research and trend analysis.

• Evaluation of health policy and practice: what happens when coverage rules, payment systems or delivery arrangements change, and how those effects should be measured.
• Health insurance markets and reform: the structure of insurance markets, the effects of reform programmes, and the behaviour of insurers, employers and enrollees.
• Health information technology: adoption and application of information systems in health-care delivery, and their consequences for quality and cost.
• Competition and regulation: how market competition and public regulation shape provider behaviour, prices and consolidation — a theme the successor journal continues to feature in special calls.
• Disparities in care: differences in access, treatment and outcomes across populations, and the organisational and policy causes behind them.
• Patient safety and quality of care: measurement of quality, safety failures and the organisational conditions that produce reliable care.
• Workforce and primary-care capacity: the supply, distribution and organisation of health professionals, especially in primary care.
• Patient engagement: how patients take part in decisions about their care and what organisations must change to support that participation.
• Economics and financing of delivery: the money flows of the health system — who pays, through what mechanisms, with what incentives.
• Organisational structure and behaviour: how hospitals, practices and systems are structured, governed and changed, including integration of hospitals and physicians.
• Comparative effectiveness and trend analysis: comparing treatments and delivery models, and tracking data trends across the system over time.
• Home-based and long-term care: the organisation and financing of care delivered at home and over long horizons, a continuing special-theme interest of the successor journal.

The through-line from 1944 to today is the system level of analysis. Where a clinical journal asks whether a treatment works, this journal family asks whether the organisation that delivers the treatment works: how it is structured, paid for, staffed, regulated and experienced by patients. That is why its pages mix economists, sociologists, management scholars, policy analysts and clinician-researchers, and why its methods range from literature synthesis to econometrics to organisational case study.

What the Journal Published in Practice

Under the Medical Care Review title, the characteristic product was the critical literature review: an expert survey that organised a scattered field — hospital organisation, insurance design, quality measurement, manpower planning — into a judged account of what was known, what was contested and what decision-makers should take from it. The publisher notes that the journal evolved from publishing abstracts to carrying such reviews; the trajectory is from bibliography, to synthesis, to (after 1995) original research as well.

The successor's current contents show the mature form of the same mission. Recent issues carry empirical studies of dual Medicare–Medicaid enrolment and care coordination (its 2025 Article of the Year), of hospital–physician vertical integration's effects on spending and quality, and of consolidation in United States health care, alongside review-paper guidance and special-theme calls — for example on formal paid home-based health care, with submissions considered on a rolling basis to the end of 2026. A reader of the former title's archive will recognise the questions; only the article mix has broadened.

Audience and Readership

The journal was built for the people who run, pay for, regulate and study health systems: health services researchers first of all, then policymakers, health-care administrators and managers, insurers, and clinicians with system responsibilities. SAGE's description of the successor names exactly that readership — policymakers and health practitioners who need evidence to improve the health care system — and it applied equally to the review-era journal, whose syntheses were written to be usable by decision-makers, not only by scholars.

Today the former title's archive is read mainly by researchers: historians of health policy tracing how a question — hospital integration, insurance-market reform, quality measurement — was understood in its period, and systematic reviewers who must cover the pre-1995 literature under its original title. For both groups the bibliographic precision of this profile matters: searching only the current title will miss the review-era record, and citing the current title for a 1980s article misattributes it.

The Successor Journal Today

Medical Care Research and Review is a peer-reviewed bimonthly journal published by SAGE, and a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Its current editor is R. Tamara Konetzka of the University of Chicago, per the publisher's journal pages. SAGE's journal overview reports an impact factor of 2.7 and a five-year impact factor of 3.0 for the successor, with an acceptance rate of 8.8% and median process times — a first decision in days on its reported median measure, peer review around two months, and roughly 175 days from submission to acceptance. Those figures describe the current journal only; they are given here so that readers who land on this former-title record can judge the living journal accurately, and they must not be quoted as metrics of Medical Care Review itself.

For authors, the practical instruction is simple: there is nowhere to submit to Medical Care Review, because the title ceased in 1995. Manuscripts in its tradition go to Medical Care Research and Review through SAGE's submission system, where the journal actively seeks review papers, empirical and theoretical research and trend analyses, and runs special-theme issues such as the consolidation and home-based-care calls noted above.

Indexing, Metrics and Identifiers

The former title's identifiers are stable and specific: ISSN 0025-7087 in print, 2374-7889 in electronic form, NLM catalog number 0073130, and the ISO 4 abbreviation Med. Care Rev. The Journals World record reports an H-index of 37 for the title — a respectable cumulative figure for a review journal of its era, and necessarily frozen in character, since a ceased title accrues citations to a fixed corpus while its successor builds a separate count (101 in the successor's own record). Comparing the two numbers as if they were rival journals would be a category error; they are successive chapters of one journal's citation history.

Cataloguers and systematic reviewers should note the succession chain in full: Public Health Economics and Medical Care Abstracts (from 1944) — Medical Care Review (from 1967) — Medical Care Research and Review (from 1995). Each title change brought new ISSNs, so a complete search of the journal family's output requires all three titles. This profile's record is the middle link, and its ISSN pair is the one to use for 1967–1994 material.

Why This Record Matters

Former-title records are where bibliographic errors breed: databases merge them, authors cite the wrong title, and metrics are credited to the wrong record. Keeping Medical Care Review distinct — with its own ISSNs, its Michigan origins and its 1967–1995 run — protects the accuracy of every citation to the review-era literature and of every history of health services research that passes through Ann Arbor. The journal family's story, from a 1944 abstracts bulletin at a school of public health to a SAGE journal shaping current debates on consolidation and home care, is also a compact history of the field itself: a discipline that began by collecting evidence about medical-care systems ended by producing much of that evidence.

Conclusion

Medical Care Review (ISSN 0025-7087 / 2374-7889; Med. Care Rev.) was, from 1967 to 1995, a leading critical-review journal for health services research, descending from a 1944 University of Michigan abstracts publication and succeeded in 1995 by Medical Care Research and Review, the SAGE bimonthly that continues its mission today. Cite the old title for the old literature, submit to the new title for new work, and read the two records together as one journal's long account of how health care is organised, financed and improved.

How the Review-Era Journal Shaped Health Services Research

A review journal does quiet but decisive work in a young field: it decides what counts as the field's literature. By choosing which bodies of work to survey — hospital organisation in one era, insurance design in another, quality measurement, workforce planning, technology adoption — Medical Care Review effectively drew and redrew the map of health services research for its readers, many of whom were the officials and managers who acted on that map. Synthesis is also a quality filter. A critical review does not merely list studies; it weighs them, exposes weak designs, and tells a busy decision-maker which findings can bear weight. In a policy area where a single influential study can move budgets, that filtering function was the journal's public service, and it is the function its successor's review articles and review-writing guidance continue to perform.

The Michigan setting mattered to that role. A school of public health that maintained, in the university's own account, the nation's primary archival collection on the community aspects of medical care was an unusually good home for a journal of synthesis: the raw material of review — the scattered reports, studies and policy documents of a fragmented literature — was being collected on the same campus. The line from the Bureau of Public Health Economics' abstracts bulletin of 1944 to a modern SAGE journal with special issues on consolidation and home-based care is therefore not a story of a journal that changed its mind; it is a story of a field growing up around a journal that had been preparing its evidence base from the start.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Medical Care Review still published?

No. The title ran from 1967 and was renamed Medical Care Research and Review in 1995. The journal itself continues under the new title, published bimonthly by SAGE; only the name ceased.

What are the correct ISSNs for Medical Care Review?

Print 0025-7087 and electronic 2374-7889, with NLM catalog number 0073130 and ISO abbreviation Med. Care Rev. The successor title has different ISSNs — 1077-5587 and 1552-6801 — and its own record, which should not be merged with this one.

Who published Medical Care Review?

The journal's lineage is rooted at the University of Michigan: its 1944 ancestor was published by the Bureau of Public Health Economics in the School of Public Health. SAGE publishes the successor today. The Journals World record's SAGE attribution reflects the current steward of the journal family rather than the publisher of the 1967–1994 issues.

What did the journal publish?

Critical reviews of the literature on the organisational structure, economics and financing of health and medical care systems — the core of health services research. After the 1995 rename, the journal added original empirical and theoretical research and trend analysis.

Where should I submit a manuscript in this tradition?

To Medical Care Research and Review, the current title, through SAGE. The publisher reports an impact factor of 2.7 (five-year 3.0) and an acceptance rate of 8.8% for the current journal; its editor is R. Tamara Konetzka of the University of Chicago.

How far back does the journal's history go?

To 1944, as Public Health Economics and Medical Care Abstracts at the University of Michigan. It became Medical Care Review in 1967 and Medical Care Research and Review in 1995, making the family more than half a century old in its publisher's own description — and over eighty years old by lineage.