The Hastings Center Report

About The Hastings Center Report

The Hastings Center Report: Overview

The Hastings Center Report is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed journal of bioethics published by Wiley on behalf of The Hastings Center, the independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit bioethics research institute based in Garrison, New York. It is one of the founding publications of modern bioethics: The Hastings Center itself was founded in 1969 by Daniel Callahan and Willard Gaylin as the first formal institution in the world devoted to the study of ethical problems in medicine and biology, and the Report began publishing within two years of that founding — dated from 1970 by the Center and from 1971 in bibliographic records, with continuous coverage from 1971. Its ISSNs are 0093-0334 for print and 1552-146X for the online edition, exactly as carried in this record. The journal publishes scholarly articles, essays, case studies with commentaries, personal narratives, and columns on law and policy, addressed not to one profession but to a broad readership of clinicians, researchers, philosophers, lawyers, policymakers and interested general readers. Its subject is the ethical, legal and social questions raised by medicine, health care, public health and the life sciences — from consent and end-of-life care to genomics, research ethics, health equity and the governance of new technologies.

Quick Facts

History: A Journal That Helped Invent a Field

The Hastings Center was founded in 1969, originally as the Institute of Society, Ethics and the Life Sciences, in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York; it is now based in Garrison, New York. Histories of bioethics describe its founding as a signal event: modern medicine’s expanding powers — over birth, death, the body and the genome — were creating problems faster than the medical profession alone could address them, and the new Center was created to study those problems across disciplinary lines. The term bioethics was chosen deliberately to cover not only medicine and health care but the human life sciences as a whole. The Center took the lead in setting the direction, methods and intellectual standards of the field through its own journal, the Hastings Center Report, which began within two years of the founding and has often been described as the world’s first bioethics journal. The Center’s timeline records that six issues a year offer articles, essays, case studies of bioethical problems, columns on law and policy, caregivers’ stories, peer-reviewed scholarly articles and book reviews — a mixture that has remained the journal’s signature.

The Center’s early agenda identified four core domains, and the journal’s early decades worked through all of them: population, including respect for procreative freedom; behaviour, responding to new knowledge of the brain; death and dying, including the controversy over defining death; and ethical issues in human genetics. Those topics have since widened to include the human impact on nature, health equity and racism, organ transplantation, physician-assisted death, stem cell research, genomics and gene editing, and the governance of artificial intelligence. The journal’s longevity gives its archive a special evidential value: because it was publishing when questions such as living wills, research on human subjects, and the definition of death were first being worked out in public, its back issues document the arguments as they were actually made. Its most-cited papers illustrate the range: a widely cited analysis of the therapeutic misconception in consent to research; a sceptical essay on the living will, “Enough: The Failure of the Living Will”; and a classic account of racism and research centred on the Tuskegee syphilis study. When the journal marked forty years of publication in 2010, its then editor Gregory E. Kaebnick used the anniversary to commission essays on the next generation of bioethics — pharmaceutical industry ethics, regenerative medicine, public health and dying — drawing 195 submissions for four places, a small but telling measure of the journal’s pull on the field.

Scope and Article Types

The journal’s own submission guidelines state that it takes a broad understanding of bioethics and welcomes work on social and ethical issues in health care, the life sciences and human alteration of the environment. Topics within scope include clinical care decisions; institutional and organisational policies; societal health policy; social and environmental determinants of health; public health; global health; and the development and use of biological science and technology for humans, other organisms and the environment. Contributions must be clearly written and of interest to a broad readership — an editorial requirement that distinguishes this journal from purely technical philosophy or law outlets. The guidelines set out the main forms. Scholarly articles, of roughly 4,000 to 8,000 words, are research-based and address moral, social, philosophical, historical or empirical questions; articles reporting empirical research focus on the question investigated, with methods kept brief or placed in a box or sidebar rather than dominating the text. Essays, of roughly 1,600 to 4,000 words, take up bioethical issues in the news, clinical ethics, institutional topics, legal and regulatory developments, medical education, books and media. Alongside these, the journal publishes case studies, which may be accompanied by commentaries; personal narratives about receiving or providing care; special reports, published as supplements and often growing out of the Center’s own research projects; and regular columns, including law and policy coverage.

Publisher and Editorial Leadership

The journal belongs to The Hastings Center and is published for it by Wiley, whose imprint appears as Wiley-Blackwell in bibliographic records — consistent with the publisher named in this record. The Center describes itself as an independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit organisation addressing fundamental ethical issues in health, health care and the life sciences, and the journal is its flagship publication alongside Ethics & Human Research, its companion journal on the ethics of research involving human participants, founded in 1979 under an earlier title. Editorial leadership sits with the Center: Gregory E. Kaebnick has edited the Report for many years — he was already its editor at the fortieth anniversary in 2010, and his “From the Editor” columns are a fixture of the journal — and the Center’s current press information lists Gregory E. Kaebnick and Laura Haupt as co-editors, with a small editorial staff at the Center. That structure, a learned-institute journal produced with a major commercial publisher, gives the Report both an academic editorial home and professional production and platform delivery through Wiley Online Library.

Indexing and Metrics

The journal is a mainstream indexed title in its field. Secondary listings report indexing in Scopus, the Science Citation Index Expanded, PubMed and Embase, together with social-science and humanities services appropriate to a bioethics title, and its coverage in Scopus-derived rankings runs continuously from 1971. According to SCImago data summarised by secondary sources, the journal has an SJR of 0.498 and an h-index of 76, with a best quartile of Q1: SCImago places it in the first quartile for Philosophy, the second quartile for Health (social science) and for Issues, Ethics and Legal Aspects, and the third quartile for Health Policy. Journal Impact Factor figures vary by year and should always be quoted with their year: the journal’s 2021 Journal Impact Factor was 4.298, when it ranked fifth of sixteen journals in the Medical Ethics category of Journal Citation Reports, while more recent secondary summaries quote figures in the region of 2.3 to 2.7. Those variations reflect the small, specialised categories in which bioethics journals sit and the outsized effect a few heavily cited papers can have on a bimonthly journal’s numbers. The durable indicators of standing are the ones stated first in this section: five decades of continuous publication by the field’s founding institute, indexing across medical, scientific and humanities databases, and an h-index that reflects a deep, still-cited back catalogue.

Publication Model and Access

The Report is a subscription journal with open-access options through its publisher: the version of record is delivered on Wiley Online Library, libraries and individuals subscribe through the Center and Wiley, and authors at institutions covered by a Wiley open-access agreement may be able to publish their article open access under that agreement — one university publishing guide records, for example, a full article-charge discount for corresponding authors at Dutch institutions under the national Wiley deal running to the end of 2026. No standard single article processing charge for this journal is published in the sources consulted, so an author considering open access should confirm the current terms in the publisher’s acceptance workflow rather than relying on a third-party figure. Readers without a subscription can still reach a good deal of the journal’s content: abstracts and some articles are openly readable on the publisher’s platform, the Center posts selected content and press material on its own site, and its free Bioethics Briefings resource summarises many of the same topics for students, journalists and policymakers.

Submission Guidance

Prospective authors should start from the journal’s own submission guidelines on The Hastings Center’s website, which are the authoritative statement of length, form and process. Three practical points follow from them. First, fit the form to the guidelines: a scholarly article of 4,000 to 8,000 words, or an essay of 1,600 to 4,000 words, written for a broad readership; a manuscript that reads like a technical journal article in philosophy, law or empirical social science, with its methods and literature apparatus in the foreground, will usually need rewriting for this audience. Second, write plainly: the journal’s defining house quality is that a clinician, a patient advocate and a philosopher can all read the same piece with profit, and jargon that only one tribe understands is grounds for revision. Third, respect the journal’s genres: a difficult clinical case may belong in the case-study format with commentary rather than as a full article; a timely reaction to a court decision or a news event may belong as an essay; and work specifically about the ethics of conducting research with human participants may fit the companion journal, Ethics & Human Research, better than the Report. Manuscripts are handled through the publisher’s submission route for the journal, and authors should use only the route linked from the Center’s or Wiley’s official pages.

How to Verify This Journal

Verification is easy because the journal’s identity is anchored by its owner. The Hastings Center’s own website carries the journal’s submission guidelines and press information naming its co-editors; its bioethics timeline confirms the Center’s 1969 founding by Daniel Callahan and Willard Gaylin and the Report’s launch within two years; the journal’s print ISSN 0093-0334 appears in the journal’s own masthead material, with online ISSN 1552-146X in bibliographic records; and its rankings and indexing can be checked in SCImago and PubMed under those ISSNs. The one detail to state carefully is the start year: the Center dates the journal’s founding to 1970, while catalogue coverage generally runs from 1971, so both dates circulate and neither indicates a different journal.

Special Reports, Supplements and the Wider Hastings Output

A distinctive feature of the journal is the special report. Periodically an issue carries, or is accompanied by, a supplement reporting the results of one of the Center’s research projects: a multi-author, consensus-seeking examination of a single problem, written to be used by clinicians, institutional committees and policymakers as well as by scholars. These supplements grow directly out of the Center’s working method, in which interdisciplinary project groups — philosophers, physicians, lawyers, scientists, theologians, social scientists and others — study a question over months or years, and they explain why the journal reads differently from a conventional disciplinary journal: much of its content is the public output of an ongoing research institute, not only a collection of independently submitted papers. Around the journal sits the Center’s wider publication programme, which authors and readers should keep distinct from the Report itself: Ethics & Human Research, the companion peer-reviewed journal on research ethics; the Hastings Bioethics Forum, the Center’s online venue for shorter commentary on current issues; and Bioethics Briefings, its free, nonpartisan reference chapters on topics of high public interest, from organ transplantation and physician-assisted death to racism and health equity, stem cell research and brain injury. A piece placed in one of those outlets is not a Report article, and citations should name the outlet actually used.

Readership and Use in Teaching

Few journals are assigned in as many different classrooms as this one. Because its articles are written for a broad readership, a single issue can be used in a medical school ethics course, a law school seminar on health law, a nursing programme, a philosophy class and a hospital ethics committee meeting, and its case studies with commentaries are built for exactly that discussion use: a short, concrete clinical dilemma followed by two or more expert responses that do not fully agree. The journal is also a standard source for journalists and policymakers who need the arguments on a bioethical controversy stated fairly and compactly, which is why its essays so often frame later public debate on subjects such as assisted dying, embryo research and pandemic policy. For a researcher, the practical consequence is that publishing here reaches readers who act on ideas — ethics committee members, clinicians, regulators and teachers — in addition to scholars who cite them. For a reader, the corresponding discipline is to remember the journal’s genre: an essay in the Report is an argued position by a knowledgeable author, presented for debate, and should be cited as such rather than as a statement of consensus, unless the piece in question is one of the Center’s project special reports, which do aim to state a worked-through institutional view.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of The Hastings Center Report?

Print ISSN 0093-0334 and online ISSN 1552-146X.

Who publishes The Hastings Center Report?

The Hastings Center owns the journal, and Wiley (Wiley-Blackwell) publishes it on the Center’s behalf from the Center’s base in Garrison, New York.

When was The Hastings Center Report founded?

Within two years of The Hastings Center’s founding in 1969 — dated 1970 by the Center, with bibliographic coverage from 1971. It is widely described as the world’s first bioethics journal.

What does The Hastings Center Report publish?

Peer-reviewed scholarly articles, essays, case studies with commentary, personal narratives, law and policy columns and book reviews on the ethical, legal and social issues of medicine, health care, public health and the life sciences.

Who edits The Hastings Center Report?

The Center’s press information lists Gregory E. Kaebnick and Laura Haupt as co-editors. Kaebnick has edited the journal for many years.

Is The Hastings Center Report indexed?

Yes. Secondary listings report Scopus, Science Citation Index Expanded, PubMed and Embase coverage. According to SCImago, its SJR is 0.498, its h-index is 76, and its best quartile is Q1 in Philosophy.

How long should a submission be?

Per the journal’s guidelines, scholarly articles run roughly 4,000 to 8,000 words and essays roughly 1,600 to 4,000 words, clearly written for a broad readership.

A Note on Citing the Report

Cite the journal as Hastings Cent Rep in abbreviated styles, with year, volume and issue; six issues a year are grouped in three two-month pairs in the print era, so an issue may be dated, for example, January–February or November–December. Supplements should be cited as supplements, with their own pagination, and the companion journal Ethics & Human Research should never be cited under this journal’s name. Where a DOI is printed on the article, include it: it resolves through the publisher’s platform to the version of record and settles any ambiguity between the print and online editions.