Simulation in Healthcare The Journal of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare

About Simulation in Healthcare The Journal of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare

Simulation in Healthcare — Journal Profile

Simulation in Healthcare: The Journal of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare is the official journal of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare (SSH) and a multidisciplinary, peer-reviewed publication covering all areas of application and research in healthcare simulation technology. It is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), part of Wolters Kluwer, in the United States, appears six times a year, and carries the print ISSN 1559-2332 and the electronic ISSN 1559-713X. The editor named by the publisher is Nicole Harder — Nicole Harder RN, PhD, CHSE, CCSNE, in the publisher’s fuller styling. Wolters Kluwer lists the journal’s 2024 Journal Impact Factor as 2.1, from Journal Citation Reports, Web of Science Group. This Journals World record (post 350704) uses the journal’s full society-linked title as its heading; the journal itself is most often cited, searched and shelved under the short title Simulation in Healthcare, and both forms refer to one and the same journal identified by the ISSN pair above.

The journal’s subject — simulation in healthcare — is a field that grew from a training technique into a research discipline of its own. Modern healthcare simulation covers human patient simulators and manikins, standardised patients, task trainers, virtual and augmented reality, screen-based and game-based learning, in-situ simulation inside real clinical units, and modelling of diseases, drugs and epidemics. Its purposes are equally broad: teaching clinical and communication skills without risk to real patients, assessing competence, rehearsing rare and high-risk events, testing new equipment, spaces and procedures before they reach patients, and uncovering latent safety threats inside healthcare systems. Simulation in Healthcare is the society journal at the centre of that field, read by physicians, nurses, allied health professionals, educators, researchers, simulation centre staff and technology developers across many clinical specialties.

Identity and disambiguation

Two identity notes protect readers from common errors. First, the title family is crowded: a different, neighbouring journal, Clinical Simulation in Nursing, serves the nursing simulation community as the official journal of a different society (INACSL) with a different publisher, and various conference proceedings, magazine-style publications and newer open-access titles also use the word “simulation” in healthcare contexts. None of those is this journal. The ISSN pair 1559-2332 and 1559-713X, the SSH society link and the LWW imprint together identify Simulation in Healthcare uniquely. Second, a duplicate-record note for this site: Journals World also carries a second, still-thin record for the same journal under its short title at post 15166 (slug “simulation-in-healthcare”), which shows the same ISSN pair (its own publisher field is garbled in that record and does not name the publisher correctly). That record is a thin duplicate of this journal, not a separate publication — a point reported in full in the duplicate note at the end of this profile so that the site’s editors can handle the pair under the site’s merge policy. Authors and readers should treat the two records as one journal.

The society and the field behind the journal

The Society for Simulation in Healthcare was established in 2004 by professionals using simulation for education, testing and research in healthcare. Its stated purpose is to serve a global community of practice enhancing the quality of healthcare, and to improve performance and reduce errors in patient care through the use of simulation. Its membership spans physicians, nurses, allied health and paramedical personnel, researchers, educators and developers from around the world, and it fosters simulation-based modalities including human patient simulators, virtual reality, standardised patients and task trainers. The Society describes its mission in three parts: serving members by fostering education, professional development and the advancement of research and innovation; promoting the profession of healthcare simulation through standards and ethics; and championing healthcare simulation through advocacy, sharing, facilitation and collaboration.

The journal is the research arm of that mission. When a society’s work depends on persuading hospitals, universities and regulators that a training method actually improves competence and safety, it needs a peer-reviewed record in which claims are tested rather than merely asserted. Simulation in Healthcare supplies that record for the SSH community and for the wider field. Its contents are correspondingly practical as well as scholarly: alongside controlled studies, readers find reports of experience with simulation technology, work on educational and competency-assessment standards, and modelling studies whose subjects range from disease spread to drug behaviour. The journal’s own description, as given by Wolters Kluwer, states that it is relevant to a broad range of clinical and biomedical specialties and publishes original basic, clinical and translational research — a breadth confirmed by the publisher’s specialty listing for the title, which spans anaesthesiology, critical care medicine, emergency medical technology, emergency medicine and trauma, nursing, internal medicine, management and administration, and surgery.

Scope: topics the journal names for itself

The publisher’s description lists the journal’s core topics explicitly, and this profile follows that list rather than inventing a broader one. Simulation in Healthcare publishes original basic, clinical and translational research on, among other topics: safety- and quality-oriented training programmes; development of educational and competency assessment standards; reports of experience in the use of simulation technology; virtual reality; epidemiologic modelling; and molecular, pharmacologic and disease modelling. Each item on that list corresponds to a recognisable genre in the journal’s pages. Safety- and quality-oriented training work examines how simulation prepares teams for deterioration, emergencies, handover and other high-risk moments, and how in-situ exercises expose system problems — a misplaced piece of equipment, an unclear escalation route, a protocol that fails under pressure — before a real patient encounters them. Assessment work addresses how performance in simulation is observed, scored and judged, how standards for competence are set, and how simulation-based assessment can be made fair and defensible when it carries consequences for learners.

Reports of experience document what actually happened when a centre, a programme or a technology was introduced: the design choices, the costs in staff time, the failures and adjustments, and the lessons another team can reuse. That genre is one of the ways a practice-based field accumulates shared knowledge, and its presence in the journal’s stated scope signals that well-documented, honestly reported implementation work is welcome alongside experimental designs. Virtual reality and technology reports cover simulators, part-task trainers, screen-based environments and immersive systems, evaluated as educational and assessment tools rather than merely described as equipment. The modelling topics complete the picture: epidemiologic modelling uses simulation to explore how diseases spread and how interventions might change that spread, while molecular, pharmacologic and disease modelling applies computational simulation to questions that cannot be answered by direct experiment alone. A manuscript that fits none of these broad families — for example, a general medical education paper with no simulation component, or a clinical trial in which simulation plays no part — is unlikely to fit this journal, however strong it is on its own terms.

The readership implied by that scope is deliberately interprofessional. Simulation is practised by mixed teams, and its research questions — about teamwork, communication, human factors, technology and systems — cross professional boundaries by design. Authors should write accordingly: define specialist terms from their own discipline, explain the simulation modality precisely enough for a reader from another specialty to reproduce the design (the simulator or scenario, the participants, the facilitation and debriefing approach, the measures used), and discuss limitations in terms a general healthcare-simulation reader can evaluate. Papers in this field are frequently cited for their methods as much as for their results, because the next team needs to know exactly what was done.

Publication model, frequency and access

Simulation in Healthcare is a subscription journal published six times a year in print and online form by LWW; the publisher’s store offers the print journal with online access under ISSN 1559-2332 and an online-only edition under ISSN 1559-713X, both at the same bimonthly frequency. Journal access is a benefit of SSH membership, as the publisher’s journal page states, which means many of its core readers reach it through their society membership as well as through institutional subscriptions. The journal is not an open-access title: secondary listings consulted for this profile describe its access model as subscription-based, and authors who require a fully open-access venue for funder-compliance reasons should confirm the publisher’s current open-access options for this specific title before submitting, rather than assuming that an option offered on another LWW journal applies here. Article-level arrangements, where they exist, are a matter for the publisher’s current author documentation for this journal.

For libraries and readers, the practical routes are the LWW journals platform and the Ovid platform named in the publisher’s listing. Citation practice should use the short title with the journal’s standard bibliographic elements — authors, article title, journal title, year, volume, issue, page range or article identifier, and DOI where assigned — and any reader verifying a citation should match it against the ISSN pair, because the short title alone collides with conference material and with the neighbouring nursing-simulation title described above.

Metrics and indexing: what is verified, and from whom

The headline metric for this journal can be stated from the publisher directly: Wolters Kluwer lists a 2024 Journal Impact Factor of 2.1 for Simulation in Healthcare, attributed to Journal Citation Reports, Web of Science Group. That is the figure this profile reports, with its year and its source, because both are given on the publisher’s own page. Readers will encounter other numbers on aggregator and journal-list websites — Scopus-based CiteScore values, SCImago rank figures and h-index values among them — and those figures vary between aggregators and between the dates on which they were captured; one secondary listing consulted gave a Scopus CiteScore of 3.9 with coverage from 2006, an h-index of 72 and quartile placements across education, epidemiology, medicine and modelling categories, while other listings give different rank values for the same period. The lesson is not that one aggregator is careless and another exact; it is that every metric belongs to a database, a category and a year, and should be quoted with all three attached, from the database itself, rather than copied from a summary page.

On indexing, secondary listings consulted for this profile consistently associate the journal with Scopus, PubMed and Embase coverage, and the publisher’s impact-factor listing itself presupposes Web of Science Journal Citation Reports coverage. Authors whose institutions require a specific service should still verify the current listing directly in that service by ISSN, since coverage lists change and since the neighbouring simulation titles create a genuine risk of checking the wrong journal’s record. What can be said without qualification is that this is the established society journal of its field, published by a major medical publisher, with a Journal Impact Factor reported by its publisher — a standing that authors in healthcare simulation, medical education and patient safety will recognise, and that distinguishes it from the many unranked outlets that use similar words in their titles.

Editorial leadership

The publisher names Nicole Harder as the journal’s editor. Her fuller professional styling in the publisher’s journal store — Nicole Harder RN, PhD, CHSE, CCSNE — itself tells a reader a good deal about the journal’s centre of gravity: a nursing background, a research doctorate, and the field’s own professional credentials in simulation education and leadership (the CHSE and CCSNE designations are the simulation community’s certified healthcare simulation educator and operations credentials family, held widely among senior figures in simulation centres). An editor drawn from practising simulation education, in a journal whose society spans medicine, nursing and allied health, reflects the interprofessional character described above. No further editorial-board detail is asserted here, because board membership changes between volumes and should always be read from the current masthead on the publisher’s site rather than from a profile of this kind.

Who should submit, and how to judge fit

Simulation in Healthcare is a natural target for: researchers evaluating a simulation-based intervention, curriculum or assessment method in any health profession; teams reporting rigorous, well-documented experience with simulation technology or a simulation programme, where the lessons transfer beyond their own centre; researchers working on competency standards, assessment validity and the use of simulation in licensing, credentialing or remediation contexts; and modellers whose epidemiologic, pharmacologic or disease models fall within the journal’s stated modelling scope. It is a weaker target for work with no genuine simulation component, for purely descriptive accounts with no evaluation or transferable lesson, and for clinical research in which simulation is only a background detail of staff training. As with any society journal, authors should read several recent issues in full — not only abstracts — to match the journal’s article types, reporting depth and referencing practice, and should follow the publisher’s current instructions for authors for this title on manuscript categories, reporting guidelines, ethics approvals for educational research involving learners or patients, and disclosure requirements. Educational simulation studies often involve students as participants, and the ethical handling of the teacher–learner power relationship is a point competent reviewers in this field examine closely; authors should address consent and the separation of research data from grading decisions explicitly in their methods.

One further practical consideration is audience. Because the journal is the SSH society journal and a membership benefit, a paper published here reaches the organised simulation community directly — the centre directors, educators and researchers most likely to use, cite and build on simulation research. For work intended to change simulation practice, that audience can be worth more than a marginally higher metric elsewhere; for work whose audience is a single clinical specialty, a specialty journal may still be the better first choice. Fit, in other words, should be judged by readership and scope first and by metrics second, using the verified figures given above.

Frequently asked questions

What is Simulation in Healthcare?

It is the official journal of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal covering all areas of application and research in healthcare simulation technology, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (Wolters Kluwer).

What are the ISSNs of Simulation in Healthcare?

The print ISSN is 1559-2332 and the electronic ISSN is 1559-713X.

Who edits Simulation in Healthcare?

The publisher names Nicole Harder — styled in the publisher’s store as Nicole Harder RN, PhD, CHSE, CCSNE — as the journal’s editor.

How often is Simulation in Healthcare published?

Six times a year (bimonthly), in print with online access and in an online-only edition, per the publisher’s journal store.

What is the impact factor of Simulation in Healthcare?

Wolters Kluwer lists a 2024 Journal Impact Factor of 2.1, from Journal Citation Reports, Web of Science Group. Other databases publish their own metrics for the journal; quote any metric with its database and year attached.

What topics does Simulation in Healthcare cover?

Original basic, clinical and translational research including safety- and quality-oriented training programmes, development of educational and competency assessment standards, reports of experience with simulation technology, virtual reality, epidemiologic modelling, and molecular, pharmacologic and disease modelling.

Is Simulation in Healthcare open access?

It is a subscription journal, and access is a benefit of Society for Simulation in Healthcare membership. Authors needing an open-access route for funder compliance should confirm the publisher’s current options for this title before submitting.

Is there another Journals World record for this journal?

Yes. Post 15166, under the short-title slug “simulation-in-healthcare”, is a thin duplicate record for the same journal, showing the same ISSN pair. It is the same publication, not a second journal.

Duplicate-record note (for the site editors)

During the preparation of this profile, the duplicate check for this journal — carried out by direct REST records, not by fuzzy search listings — found post 15166 (slug “simulation-in-healthcare”, title “Simulation in Healthcare”) carrying 258 words of thin template content and the same ISSNs (1559-2332 and 1559-713X) as this record, post 350704. The twin record’s own publisher field is garbled — it reads “2766” where a publisher name should stand — but its title, slug and ISSN pair establish the identity. The pair is therefore a confirmed duplicate of identity, but the twin is thin, not a full-depth profile, so this profile was published on post 350704 as instructed and the pair is reported here for handling under the site’s standing merge policy.

Editorial note on sources

This profile is based on the journal’s own record on Journals World (post 350704) and on the directly fetched duplicate record (post 15166), on Wolters Kluwer’s official journal page for Simulation in Healthcare, which states the society link, the multidisciplinary scope and topic list, the publisher, the editor, the ISSN and the 2024 Journal Impact Factor, on the publisher’s LWW journal store, which states the bimonthly frequency, the print and online editions and the membership-access arrangement, and on the Society for Simulation in Healthcare’s own descriptive material as reproduced in organisational listings, covering its founding in 2004, its purpose, membership and mission. Aggregator figures beyond the publisher’s stated impact factor are discussed as aggregator figures, with their variability noted, rather than asserted as the journal’s own verified metrics.