Spiritual Care

About Spiritual Care

Overview

Spiritual Care (journal code SPIRCARE) is a peer-reviewed journal published by De Gruyter in Germany, devoted to multidisciplinary research and interprofessional exchange on spiritual care in healthcare and related fields. Its print ISSN is 2193-3804 and its online ISSN is 2365-8185. It welcomes articles in German and in English, and it is a principal scholarly forum for a field that sits between medicine, nursing, theology, pastoral care, social work and psychotherapy.

The journal's stated purposes are threefold. It presents new research approaches and methods of practising spiritual care; it shows the relevance of that research for education in the health professions and in pastoral care; and it supports the conceptual development of the field in the German-speaking countries while contributing to the international discussion. Each issue is organised around a main topic, with invited, renowned authors giving overviews, reporting studies or outlining projects, complemented by experience reports and practical examples.

A note on identity is essential before anything else, because the title is generic. This profile concerns only the De Gruyter journal identified by the ISSNs above and the code SPIRCARE. Other publications with similar names — including American journals on spirituality in clinical practice and on spiritual formation — are different publications with different publishers, scopes and readerships, and nothing in this profile should be transferred to them. Where a practical detail such as a current article charge is not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted, this profile says so instead of estimating it.

At a Glance

The Journal and the Field It Serves

Spiritual Care belongs to the generation of journals created as spiritual care moved from being an activity carried out almost exclusively by hospital chaplains to being a recognised, interprofessional dimension of healthcare. Internationally, that movement drew strength from palliative care, where attention to spiritual and existential suffering had been built into the model of total care from the start, and from research showing that many patients regard spirituality as important in their illness experience and want it acknowledged by their care teams. In the German-speaking countries, the field developed its own institutions, research associations and university courses, and it needed a journal of its own.

The journal SPIRCARE answers that need from within a major scholarly publisher's list. De Gruyter, headquartered in Berlin, publishes it alongside a related book programme in studies in spiritual care, and the journal and the book series reinforce one another: themes opened in an issue are developed in volumes, and research groups visible in the series appear in the journal's pages. Authors should note that the publisher now presents its platform under the De Gruyter Brill name following the combination of the two houses; the journal's identity, code and ISSNs are unchanged by that branding.

The German-speaking anchoring is a feature, not a limitation, of the journal's design. Its instructions for authors state plainly that it supports the conceptualisation and further development of the field in German-speaking countries as well as the international discussion. Publishing in both German and English lets a study of a Swiss hospice, an Austrian nursing curriculum or a German hospital chaplaincy service reach its home professional audience in its own language while remaining open to international contributors and readers.

Within each volume, the main-topic structure gives the journal a rhythm closer to a curated conversation than to a miscellaneous issue. An invited overview from a recognised figure in the field sets the theme; studies and project outlines develop it; experience reports and practical examples test it against real services. Around that core, the journal carries its regular information function — German and international discussion, research-association news, university course information and event coverage — so that a subscriber receives both scholarship and a map of the field's activity.

Scope and Subject Areas

The journal's scope, in its own instructions for authors, is a platform for multidisciplinary research and interprofessional exchange: new research approaches, methods of practising spiritual care, and the relevance of the research area for education in the health professions and pastoral care. Its regular territory includes medicine, nursing, social work, psychotherapy and pastoral care, together with the theological, philosophical and religious-studies scholarship that underpins them.

The directory record for the journal highlights religion, spirituality and psychology, Christian leadership and education themes, and palliative and oncological care among its characteristic topics, with further strength in workplace spirituality, end-of-life issues and the study of death and mourning. The strands below organise that scope for prospective authors.

Spiritual care in medicine and nursing

The clinical heart of the journal is the care of patients whose illness raises spiritual and existential questions — meaning, hope, guilt, fear, faith and loss — alongside their medical needs. Papers in this strand examine how spiritual needs are recognised and assessed, how nurses, physicians and other professionals respond to them in wards, hospices, intensive care and community settings, and what training changes practice. Studies set in palliative and oncological care are a recurring presence, reflecting how concentrated spiritual questions become when cure is no longer the goal.

Healthcare chaplaincy and pastoral care

Chaplains and pastoral carers are the professionals most directly charged with spiritual care, and the journal is a principal German-language forum for research about their work: their place in the interprofessional team, their documentation and outcome measurement, their theological self-understanding and their education. The tension built into the role — belonging at once to a faith community and to a plural, professional healthcare team — is a characteristic theme, as is the movement towards outcome-oriented chaplaincy and the re-evaluation of older clinical pastoral education models.

Concepts, theory and the definition of the field

Spiritual care is a young field still negotiating its own concepts, and the journal explicitly supports the conceptualisation and further development of the area. Theoretical papers clarify what spirituality means in a healthcare context, how spiritual care differs from religious care, psychosocial support and existential counselling, and how secular readings of the field — for example through concepts such as the boundary situation — can be articulated. Such work matters practically, because definitions decide who is trained, who is employed and what is documented and funded.

Education for the health professions

If spiritual care is part of good care, it must be taught. The journal covers the relevance of spiritual care research for education in the health professions and in pastoral care: curricula for medical, nursing and allied-health students, interprofessional teaching formats, simulation and bedside teaching, and the competencies graduates are expected to show. Reports from German-speaking universities on course structures and their evaluation sit alongside international contributions, making the journal a useful record of how a new competency enters established professional training.

Spiritual care in social work, psychotherapy and related fields

The journal's field of vision extends beyond the hospital. Spiritual and existential questions arise in social work with people who are homeless, addicted or bereaved, in psychotherapy where a client's faith is both a resource and sometimes part of the difficulty, and in care for older people and for people with dementia. Papers from these settings test whether concepts developed in acute and palliative medicine travel well, and they keep the journal honest about the diversity of the settings in which spiritual care is practised.

Death, mourning and ritual

Dying, funerary practice and mourning appear in the journal's subject mix both as clinical realities and as cultural and religious phenomena. Contributions examine rituals at the bedside and after death, the needs of relatives, professional exposure to repeated loss, and the changing place of religious ritual in plural societies and institutions. This strand connects the journal to religious studies and cultural anthropology as well as to clinical research.

Religion, society and public discussion

The journal also informs readers regularly about the German and international discussion of spiritual care, including news from research associations, university courses and events. That reporting function, together with book reviews, interviews and conference reports, makes each issue partly a professional bulletin for the field — a feature authors and readers in the German-speaking countries rely on to follow a small, dispersed discipline.

Editorial Model and Peer Review

The journal's instructions for authors, published by De Gruyter, are the controlling guide to its scope and general policies, the ethical conduct of research, manuscript submission and preparation, and the post-acceptance process, and prospective authors should work from the current version of that document on the publisher's site. The journal is a peer-reviewed scholarly publication; contributions are assessed for their contribution to the field's research, practice or conceptual development, and the themed-issue structure means the editors also judge fit with the issue's main topic and with the balance of the issue as a whole.

That structure has a practical consequence authors should grasp early. Alongside open submissions, each issue contains invited contributions on its main topic from renowned authors, so an unsolicited paper may be excellent and still need to wait for, or be shaped towards, an appropriate issue. Authors with a topic that matches a forthcoming theme will generally be better placed than authors submitting without reference to the journal's programme, and a brief enquiry describing the proposed contribution is a reasonable step where the publisher's guidance invites it.

Standards of evidence in this field are plural, and the journal's multidisciplinarity means a paper is judged by the standards of its own method. A qualitative interview study must show its sampling, interview and analysis process and its ethics approval; a survey must report its instrument and response pattern; a conceptual paper must argue, define its terms and engage the existing German and international literature; a field or case report must extract what another service can learn. What unifies acceptable work is transparency: a reader from a different profession should be able to follow what was done, on what evidence, and with what limits.

Article Types

The instructions for authors list a notably wide range of contribution categories, reflecting the journal's dual role as research journal and professional forum. SPIRCARE welcomes German- and English-language articles in these categories:

• Original Articles — research contributions presenting new studies and approaches.
• Reviews — accounts that organise a topic within spiritual care research or practice.
• Field reports — reports from practice settings describing services, projects and experience.
• Case reports — accounts of individual cases or situations with a transferable lesson.
• Essays — reflective, argument-led contributions on questions of the field.
• Letters to the editor, Editorials and Communications — shorter interventions in current discussion.
• Das Stichwort — a keyword feature examining a central term of the field.
• Spiritual impulse — a short reflective contribution.
• Interviews, Conference reports, Book reviews and Obituaries — the journal's record of the field's people, events and literature.

Authors should choose the category honestly: a small practice project described as a field report will be judged fairly and may be published quickly, while the same material inflated into an original-article claim invites methodological criticism it cannot answer.

Indexing, Metrics and Visibility

The directory record for the journal gives an H-index of 13, a figure that should be read with an understanding of the field and the journal's language profile. Spiritual care research is a small, young literature; a substantial part of this journal's content is in German, which limits its citation pool in the Anglophone-dominated citation databases; and much of its influence runs through professional training, chaplaincy practice and curriculum design, where uptake leaves no citation trace. Judged as the house journal of a developing discipline in the German-speaking countries, its significance is better measured by its centrality to that community than by raw citation counts.

For the same reason, authors should be cautious with third-party metric sites for this title. Aggregators frequently confuse this journal with English-language publications of similar name, attaching the wrong publisher, the wrong subject categories or the metrics of a different journal entirely. Any metric that matters for an appointment, funding or assessment decision should be checked against the journal's De Gruyter page and the ISSN pair 2193-3804 and 2365-8185, and attributed to a named database and year.

The journal's visibility strategy is in part the publisher's: content is presented on the De Gruyter platform alongside the related studies-in-spiritual-care book programme, which places journal articles in front of readers browsing the field's monograph literature. For a small field, that kind of curated adjacency — the right readers rather than the most readers — is a genuine form of visibility.

Publishing Model, Fees and Access

The sources consulted for this profile, including the publisher's instructions for authors, do not state an article processing charge for Spiritual Care, and no submission-fee figure is publicly disclosed there. The journal follows the traditional subscription-based model of a German scholarly publisher for a title of this kind, in which the author-facing economics are set by the publisher's current terms rather than by a published open-access price list. Authors who require open access for funder compliance, or who need to know about any page, colour or language-related conditions, should confirm the current position directly with De Gruyter before submitting, and should treat any third-party website quoting a fee for this journal with suspicion — fee listings for this title on aggregator sites are frequently attached to the wrong journal of a similar name.

Readers will normally reach the journal through an institutional subscription on the De Gruyter platform, through the publisher's own sales channels, or through the professional networks of the field in the German-speaking countries. Individual themed issues and the related book series are also routes by which practitioners encounter its content outside a subscription.

How to Submit

Authors should begin from the publisher's instructions for authors for SPIRCARE, which cover scope and general policies, ethical conduct of research, submission, preparation of manuscripts and the post-acceptance stage. In practical sequence:

• Confirm identity and fit: you are submitting to De Gruyter's SPIRCARE (ISSN 2193-3804 / 2365-8185), and your topic concerns spiritual care research, practice, concepts or education.
• Choose your language deliberately — German or English — considering whether your primary audience is the German-speaking professional community or the international research discussion.
• Select the correct category (original article, review, field report, case report, essay or one of the shorter forms) and write to that category's expectations.
• Where your topic may match an issue's main topic, consider the journal's themed programme and, if the publisher's guidance allows, make a preliminary enquiry.
• For empirical work, document ethics approval, consent and anonymisation; for case material, ensure no patient, client or family can be identified.
• Prepare and submit the manuscript exactly as the current instructions for authors direct, and keep the submission acknowledgement for your records.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Read It

The journal addresses researchers and practitioners across the professions that deliver spiritual care: chaplains and pastoral carers, nurses and physicians, social workers, psychotherapists, and the theologians, philosophers and religious-studies scholars who work on the field's concepts. It also addresses educators designing spiritual-care content for health-profession and pastoral training, and the research associations and course providers whose activities it reports. That interprofessional readership is the journal's reason for existing: a nurse, a chaplain and a theologian reading the same themed issue are meant to leave with a shared, better-articulated understanding of the same patient problem.

Authors should write for that mixed readership. Define discipline-specific terms, avoid assuming that a clinical reader knows theological vocabulary or that a theological reader knows clinical workflow, and state the practice implication of a research finding in plain language. Papers that speak only to one profession in its own jargon underuse the journal; papers that translate across professions are the ones the field cites, teaches and argues with.

If your work is a general study of religion and health with no engagement with the practice, professions or German-speaking discussion of spiritual care, a religion-and-health journal may fit better. If your work studies, describes, evaluates or clarifies spiritual care as it is practised, taught or organised — above all in a German-speaking or European setting — this journal is one of the few addresses designed precisely for it.

Research Integrity and Ethics

The journal's instructions for authors include the ethical conduct of research as a named section, and in this field the requirement has particular force. Spiritual care research often involves people who are dying, bereaved, cognitively impaired or in acute distress; consent, capacity, the right to withdraw and the handling of refusal require demonstrable care, and ethics-committee approval should be reported for empirical studies. Interview material in this field can be intensely personal — accounts of faith, doubt, guilt and hope — and anonymisation must protect not only names but the recognisable circumstances of a case within a small ward or community.

Pastoral and chaplaincy authors carry an additional duty arising from their professional confidentiality. Material learned in a pastoral relationship is not research data by default; using it, even anonymised, requires a defensible basis in consent and professional ethics, and composite or disguised cases should be presented as such. Authors should also declare dual roles — for example where the researcher is also the chaplain of the service being evaluated — since that relationship shapes both the data and its interpretation.

Standard scholarly obligations apply in full: no duplicate submission, accurate citation of the German and international literature, honest authorship that reflects real contributions, and declaration of funding and institutional interests. Because the field is small, unattributed borrowing is both an ethical failure and a practical certainty to be noticed.

How to Verify the Journal and Cite It Correctly

Verification for this title must start from identifiers, because the name alone is ambiguous. The genuine journal is Spiritual Care, publisher code SPIRCARE, published by De Gruyter in Germany, print ISSN 2193-3804, online ISSN 2365-8185, publishing in German and English with themed issues. Check those details on the publisher's platform before submitting or paying anything, and be alert to aggregator pages that attach this ISSN pair to unrelated subject descriptions, or that describe under this name an American psychology or ministry journal — those are different publications.

When citing the journal, cite it as Spiritual Care with year, volume, issue and pages or article identifier as printed, and include the DOI where the article carries one. In reference lists for an international audience, adding the ISSN or the publisher in a covering bibliography can prevent the common confusion with similarly titled journals. Librarians and systematic reviewers searching this title should build the ISSNs into their search strategies, since title-only searches retrieve a mixture of at least three different journals.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which Spiritual Care journal is this profile about?
The De Gruyter journal with code SPIRCARE, print ISSN 2193-3804 and online ISSN 2365-8185, published in Germany in German and English. Similarly named journals from other publishers are different publications.

Who publishes Spiritual Care?
De Gruyter — presented on its current platform as De Gruyter Brill — in Germany.

What does the journal cover?
Multidisciplinary research and interprofessional exchange on spiritual care: its practice in medicine, nursing, social work, psychotherapy and pastoral care, its concepts and theory, and its place in health-profession education.

In which languages can I submit?
German and English are both welcomed, across all the journal's article categories.

How are issues organised?
Each issue deals with a main topic, with invited renowned authors providing overviews, study results and project outlines, complemented by experience reports and practical examples.

What article types are accepted?
Original articles, reviews, field reports, case reports, essays, letters to the editor, editorials, communications, the Das Stichwort keyword feature, spiritual impulses, interviews, conference reports, book reviews and obituaries.

What is the journal's H-index?
The directory record gives an H-index of 13. The field is small and partly German-language, so citation figures understate its professional influence.

Does the journal charge a submission or publication fee?
No fee figure is publicly disclosed in the publisher's instructions consulted for this profile. Confirm current terms, including any open-access option, directly with De Gruyter.

Is the journal only about Christian pastoral care?
No. Pastoral care and chaplaincy are central, but the journal is interprofessional and multidisciplinary, covering spiritual care in clinical, social-work and psychotherapy settings and the spiritual needs of patients of all backgrounds and none.

Conclusion

Spiritual Care is the scholarly home of a young, interprofessional field in the German-speaking countries, published by De Gruyter with a clear three-part mission: to present research and practice methods, to inform education for the health professions and pastoral care, and to develop the field's concepts while joining the international discussion. Its themed issues, wide range of article forms and regular reporting on the field's associations, courses and events make it part journal, part professional forum.

For authors with empirical, practical or conceptual work on spiritual care — especially, though not only, from German-speaking settings — it offers a readership of exactly the professions the work concerns. Verify the title by its ISSNs and SPIRCARE code, choose the article category that honestly matches your material, meet the ethical standards the subject demands, and follow the publisher's current instructions for authors at every step.