Medizinrecht

About Medizinrecht

Medizinrecht (MedR): Journal Profile

Medizinrecht, universally shortened to MedR, is a German-language scholarly and professional law journal devoted to medical law and health law. Published in Germany by Springer-Verlag, part of Springer Nature, jointly with the Munich legal publisher C.H. Beck, it is described by its publisher as a leading specialist journal in the fields of medical and health law, offering a forum for integrative and interdisciplinary exchange between law and medicine. For lawyers, physicians, hospital managers, health insurers and academics who work where clinical practice meets legal accountability, MedR is one of the standard German-language reference points: it tracks how courts, legislatures and regulators answer questions about medical treatment, professional liability, reimbursement and the organisation of the health system.

This profile brings together everything a prospective author, reader or librarian needs in one place: the journal's verified identifiers, its publishing arrangements, its subject scope in detail, its indexing footprint, its bibliometric record with each figure attributed to its source, its editorial and access arrangements, and practical guidance on deciding whether a manuscript belongs in MedR rather than in a clinical, forensic or general law outlet.

Journal Identity at a Glance

• Full title: Medizinrecht (abbreviated MedR)
• Country: Germany
• Language: German
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, part of Springer Nature (the Journals World publisher record resolves to Springer Verlag)
• Co-publisher: C.H. Beck Verlag, Munich — Springer lists "C.H. Beck" as co-publisher information, and the Springer journal page carries the joint copyright line of C.H. Beck Verlag oHG, München and Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland
• Print ISSN: 0723-8886
• Electronic ISSN: 1433-8629
• ISSN-L: 0723-8886 (OpenAlex source record S98369295)
• Official homepage: Springer Nature Link, journal 350 (link.springer.com/journal/350)
• Discipline: Medical law, health law, health policy, professional liability
• Current volume evidence: Springer displays volume 44, issue 10 as a recent cover record in 2026, showing a journal in its fifth decade of volume numbering with at least ten issues in the volume year

The two ISSNs are confirmed consistently across three independent points: the Journals World stored record (1433-8629, 0723-8886), the Springer journal page itself, which prints "Electronic ISSN 1433-8629, Print ISSN 0723-8886", and the OpenAlex source record S98369295, which lists exactly the same pair. Authors citing the journal should use the print ISSN for the print edition and the electronic ISSN for online-first and PDF versions encountered on Springer Nature Link.

What Medizinrecht Publishes: Scope in Detail

Springer describes MedR, in its own German summary, as presenting scientifically grounded yet readable treatises on all practice-relevant, structural and fundamental legal questions of the health system ("sämtlichen berufspraktischen, strukturellen und grundlegenden Rechtsfragen des Gesundheitswesens"). That single sentence defines three layers of content that run through every issue.

The law of medical treatment. The first layer is the doctor–patient relationship itself: treatment contracts, informed consent and disclosure duties, documentation obligations, patient rights, access to records, and the legal consequences when treatment goes wrong. Articles in this layer work through statutory provisions, leading decisions of the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof) and the higher regional courts, and the practical drafting and litigation lessons that follow from them.

Physician law and physician liability law (Arzt- und Arzthaftungsrecht). The second layer, named explicitly in the publisher's description, covers the law governing doctors as professionals and as defendants: malpractice and liability standards, burden of proof, expert evidence in medical litigation, gross treatment errors, and the interplay between civil liability, professional discipline and criminal exposure. OpenAlex topic mapping of the journal's output confirms the weight of this layer, with "Medical Malpractice and Liability Issues" among the largest topic clusters in the record.

Contract physician law and health insurance law (Vertragsarztrecht und Krankenversicherungsrecht). The third layer addresses the statutory health insurance system that structures most German medical care: the law of panel doctors accredited to treat insured patients, remuneration and audit disputes, hospital financing questions, and the decisions of the social courts that dominate this field. The publisher's description begins its enumeration with the law of medical treatment, physician and liability law, and contract physician law, before turning to health insurance law, and the journal's article flow follows the same order of priorities.

Around these core layers sit recurring satellite themes that OpenAlex also detects in the journal's corpus: healthcare regulation, bioethics and the ethics of clinical research, reproductive medicine law, organ donation and transplantation, end-of-life and palliative care decisions, pharmaceutical law, occupational and professional licensing regulation, digitalisation of health care and health data, and administrative law questions arising from hospital planning and public health governance. A manuscript that sits squarely in one of the core layers, or that connects a satellite theme back to a concrete legal question in the German health system, is the natural MedR submission. Purely clinical research with no legal analysis, and purely ethical essays with no engagement with positive law or case law, are weaker fits.

History and Development

Medizinrecht grew with the discipline it serves. Medical law emerged as a distinct German academic and practical field in the second half of the twentieth century, as case law on informed consent, liability and insurance coverage expanded and as the statutory health system generated ever denser regulation. A specialist periodical that combined doctrinal articles, case reports and commentary became the field's working tool, and MedR's volume numbering — volume 44 in 2026 on Springer's own cover record — testifies to more than four decades of continuous volume publication.

Bibliographic databases see different slices of that run, and the differences are worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. The Journals World stored record, derived from Scopus coverage data, lists coverage in 1990 and 1992 and then continuously from 2004 to 2026. OpenAlex source S98369295 records a first publication year of 1976 and a last publication year of 2026, with 7,684 works in total — a much larger historical corpus, because OpenAlex aggregates records from several upstream sources and counts document types, such as case notes and reviews, that citation databases treat more narrowly. Neither figure is a founding date, and this profile does not invent one: the founding year of the journal is not published in the sources consulted for this profile, so it is recorded here as not publicly disclosed in those sources. What is certain from the publisher's current page is that the journal is active, current and publishing at volume 44.

The co-publishing arrangement with C.H. Beck is a distinctive part of the journal's identity. Beck is Germany's pre-eminent legal publisher, home to the standard commentaries practitioners keep on their desks, while Springer brings the journal production, platform and international distribution machinery of Springer Nature. The pairing signals the journal's dual audience: it is simultaneously a practitioner's journal, read for its case coverage and commentary, and an academic journal, read for its doctrinal and structural analyses.

Indexing and Discoverability

Springer lists Medizinrecht as abstracted and indexed in the following services on its official journal page: Baidu, CLOCKSS, CNKI, CNPIEC, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS), Dimensions, EBSCO, EMCare, Google Scholar, Naver, OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service, Ovid Discovery, Portico, ProQuest, SCImago, SCOPUS, TD Net Discovery Service, Wanfang and eLibrary.ru. Two entries in that list matter most for authors. Scopus coverage means the journal's articles enter the citation database against which the SCImago quartile is calculated, and the Journals World category record places the journal in quartile Q4 in its categories; secondary SCImago-based summaries specify Q4 in both Health Policy and in Issues, Ethics and Legal Aspects. SCImago listing in turn confirms the journal is part of the standard journal-ranking ecosystem used by many institutions.

Preservation is covered by CLOCKSS and Portico, both named by Springer, so the journal's archive does not depend on a single platform. Discovery through Google Scholar, Dimensions, EBSCO and ProQuest means practitioners searching from hospital or chambers networks will encounter MedR content through the aggregators they already use.

A Directory of Open Access Journals check was run for this profile against both ISSNs through the DOAJ search API. The search returned no record for either ISSN. That result is reported exactly as found: a DOAJ record for this journal could not be verified from the API output in hand. This is unsurprising for a subscription-based German practitioner journal — the journal is not an open access title (OpenAlex likewise records is_oa as false) — and the absence of a DOAJ record should not be read as a quality signal in either direction for a journal of this type.

Bibliometrics: Reading the Numbers Carefully

Medizinrecht's metrics look modest if they are read with the expectations of an international biomedical journal, and that reading would be a category error. German-language legal scholarship is cited mainly inside German-language legal scholarship, court decisions cite doctrine rather than the reverse, and much of the journal's influence travels through commentary literature and litigation practice, channels citation databases capture only partially. With that context, the verified figures are as follows, each attributed to its source.

OpenAlex (source S98369295, resolved through the ISSN endpoint and fetched directly for this profile): 7,684 works; 4,556 citations received (cited_by_count); h-index 19; i10-index 76, meaning 76 works have at least ten citations each; two-year mean citedness 0.069; first publication year in the record 1976 and last 2026; host organisation Springer Science+Business Media; country DE. OpenAlex also lists an article processing charge figure of USD 3,090 (with EUR 2,590 and GBP 2,190 equivalents in its price list), which reflects the journal's optional open access route on the Springer platform rather than a charge for ordinary subscription publication; authors should confirm the current optional charge on the Springer page before relying on it, because platform prices change.

Scopus and SCImago-derived figures: the Journals World stored record gives an h-index of 8, and secondary summaries built on SCImago data report an SJR of 0.108 and a Scopus CiteScore of 0.1, with the journal ranked in Q4 in Health Policy and in Issues, Ethics and Legal Aspects. The gap between the OpenAlex h-index of 19 and the Scopus-based h-index of 8 is a coverage artefact, not a contradiction: OpenAlex counts a far larger and longer corpus (7,684 works reaching back to 1976 in its aggregation) than the Scopus slice (coverage years 1990, 1992 and 2004 onward) from which the lower figure derives. Report each number with its source attached, and never merge them into a single headline metric.

What the metrics mean for authors. A Q4 quartile in a small, nationally bounded category says little about a journal's standing among its actual peers. Within German medical law, MedR's combination of Springer and Beck imprints, Scopus coverage, four decades of volumes and a practitioner readership gives it a weight that quartile arithmetic understates. Authors whose institutions evaluate them on Scopus or SCImago indicators will find the journal countable but low-scoring; authors evaluated by peers, courts and the profession will find it one of the field's natural homes. Both statements are true, and choosing the journal means choosing which evaluation logic governs the work.

Editorial Model, Access and Fees

Medizinrecht is a subscription journal. Its content sits on Springer Nature Link, where institutional subscribers, Beck-online users in the German legal market and individual purchasers encounter it; OpenAlex records the title as not open access overall, with roughly one in ten works in its corpus openly accessible (754 of 7,684 works), consistent with a hybrid model in which individual articles can be made open at the author's or funder's request against the optional charge noted above. The fee for standard subscription-model publication is not published as an article charge in the sources consulted; the only verified price figure in hand is the OpenAlex-listed optional open access charge of USD 3,090, and any author planning to use that route should verify the live figure with Springer at submission time.

The named editor-in-chief of the journal is not stated on the Springer journal home page text consulted for this profile, so no editor name is asserted here; editorial leadership information is recorded as could not be verified from that page. What can be verified from Springer's current article flow is the journal's working shape: issues combine full doctrinal articles (Abhandlungen), case law reports and decisions with commentary, and shorter practice notes. The most recent article listing on the journal page at the time of research led with an "Arztrecht" (physicians' law) contribution by Andreas Spickhoff, a name long associated with German medical law scholarship and with the standard Deutsch and Spickhoff textbook on the subject — an illustration of the seniority of the journal's contributor base rather than a masthead claim.

Language and style follow from the journal's market: manuscripts are in German, follow German legal citation conventions, and engage German statutes and decisions as primary sources, with comparative and European material welcomed where it bears on the German position. Authors from outside the German-speaking legal world who work on German health law, or on European health law questions that land in German courts and regulators, are the journal's natural international contributors.

Guidance for Authors: Is MedR the Right Outlet?

Choose Medizinrecht when your manuscript does at least one of the following: it works through a German statute, draft bill or regulatory instrument in medical or health law and draws out consequences for practice; it analyses a line of court decisions — Federal Court of Justice, Federal Social Court, constitutional court or European courts acting on German health questions — and states what the line means for doctors, hospitals, insurers or patients; it connects clinical reality to legal doctrine, for example on consent, documentation, triage, digital health records or new treatment methods, in a way a legally trained readership can use; or it compares the German solution with another jurisdiction's in order to sharpen the German debate. The journal's own scope statement promises readers treatment law, liability law, contract physician law and health insurance law, so framing the submission's contribution in one of those four vocabularies, in the introduction and the cover communication, materially helps an editor see the fit.

Before submitting, verify three things on the live Springer page, because they change faster than any directory profile: the current submission route and manuscript requirements for journal 350; the current optional open access charge, if your funder requires open publication; and the journal's current issue contents, to confirm your topic has not just been covered by a near-identical piece. Verify indexing claims the same way: this profile records Scopus and SCImago coverage from Springer's own list, but institutional evaluators work from the live Scopus source list, which is the version that counts.

Common reasons a good manuscript fails in a journal of this type are instructive. Work that summarises a foreign legal system without returning to the German question reads as out of place. Work that reports clinical results and appends a paragraph of legal generalities fails the doctrinal standard. Work that ignores the social court case law in a reimbursement dispute, or the Federal Court of Justice line on disclosure, will be sent back by any competent reviewer in the field. Conversely, a tight piece that takes one decision, one statutory change or one recurring practice problem and treats it completely — facts, doctrine, consequences, open questions — is exactly the unit of scholarship this journal has traded in for over forty volumes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Medizinrecht? Print ISSN 0723-8886 and electronic ISSN 1433-8629, confirmed on Springer's journal page and in OpenAlex source S98369295.

Who publishes Medizinrecht? Springer-Verlag GmbH Deutschland, part of Springer Nature, as co-publisher with C.H. Beck Verlag of Munich; Springer states the co-publisher information and carries the joint copyright line on the journal page.

Is Medizinrecht peer reviewed and indexed? Springer lists the journal as abstracted and indexed in Scopus, SCImago, EBSCO, ProQuest, Dimensions, Google Scholar and others (full list in the indexing section above). Its category standing in Journals World records is Q4, with SCImago-based summaries specifying Q4 in Health Policy and in Issues, Ethics and Legal Aspects.

What is Medizinrecht's h-index? It depends on the database, and the source must travel with the number: OpenAlex reports an h-index of 19 over a 7,684-work corpus, while the Scopus-derived stored record reports 8 over the narrower Scopus coverage slice.

Is Medizinrecht open access? No — it is a subscription journal with an optional open access route for individual articles. OpenAlex lists an optional charge of USD 3,090; a DOAJ record for the journal could not be verified through the DOAJ search API for either ISSN, which is expected for a subscription title and is reported here without further inference.

In what language does Medizinrecht publish? German. The publisher's scope description is itself in German, and the journal serves the German-speaking legal and medical professions.

Where do I submit? Through the official journal site on Springer Nature Link (journal 350), following the submission instructions given there; always confirm the live instructions on that page before sending a manuscript.