About Yearbook of Neonatal and Perinatal Medicine

Yearbook of Neonatal and Perinatal Medicine

The Yearbook of Neonatal and Perinatal Medicine, published under the title Year Book of Neonatal and Perinatal Medicine, is an annual volume in Elsevier's Year Book series, issued through the Mosby imprint in the United States under ISSN 8756-5005. It is not a conventional journal that accepts unsolicited research manuscripts. It is a curated annual: its editors survey the year's literature across more than 500 journals worldwide, select the articles that report the most important developments in neonatal and perinatal medicine, reproduce abstracts of those articles, and add expert commentaries that evaluate each article's clinical importance and its application to practice.

That genre — the medical yearbook — has a long history in clinical publishing, and this title is one of its best-known specialty examples. For a busy neonatologist, perinatologist, obstetrician or neonatal nurse practitioner, the annual offered a single, edited volume in which the year's scattered advances had already been found, filtered and appraised by recognised specialists. Long associated with editor Avroy A. Fanaroff, of Case Western Reserve University, and a team of section editors, the Year Book translated a year of primary literature into a structured clinical update organised by organ system and clinical problem.

Honest classification matters for this record. Databases that ingest serials by ISSN, including OpenAlex, treat the Year Book as a journal-like source, and the snapshot held here records an h-index of 26, with 1,267 works and 6,701 citations tracked when the record was created. Those numbers reflect the citation of its selected abstracts and commentaries as a source. They do not make it a primary research journal, and no author should approach it with a manuscript. This profile therefore profiles it as what it is: an annual book series of selected abstracts and expert commentary, published by Elsevier under the Mosby imprint, with its own ISSN, editorial team and chapter structure.

At a Glance

What a Medical Year Book Is, and Why This One Mattered

Before alerting services, podcasts and continuously updated clinical summaries, the annual yearbook was one of medicine's main technologies for keeping up. A specialty's literature appeared in hundreds of journals, in several languages, far faster than any clinician could read. The yearbook's editors did the reading as a service: they scanned the field, chose the papers that changed practice or promised to, printed an abstract of each, and — the decisive addition — wrote or commissioned a commentary that said, in plain clinical terms, what the paper meant, whether its methods supported its claims, and how a practitioner should respond.

The Year Book of Neonatal and Perinatal Medicine applied that model to one of medicine's fastest-moving specialties. Neonatal intensive care changed repeatedly within a single professional lifetime: surfactant therapy, antenatal steroids, new ventilation strategies, therapeutic hypothermia for hypoxic-ischaemic encephalopathy, changing nutrition practice, and evolving infection prevention each altered the care of newborn infants, while perinatal medicine advanced in fetal surveillance, management of medical disorders of pregnancy, and care around labour and delivery. An annual that gathered a year's developments across that whole front, sorted them by system, and appraised them critically had a clear place on the unit library shelf.

Elsevier's description of the series, repeated across editions with only small changes, makes the same promise in the publisher's own terms: abstracts of the articles that reported the year's breakthrough developments, carefully selected from more than 500 journals, with expert commentaries evaluating clinical importance and application to practice. The consistency of that description across the 2004, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2016 editions is itself evidence of a stable editorial formula that readers bought year after year.

Contents and Chapter Structure

Each annual was organised into chapters that mirror the clinical organisation of neonatal and perinatal practice. The publisher's listings name, among others, The Fetus; Genetics and Teratology; Respiratory Disorders; Infectious Diseases and Immunology; the Cardiovascular System; Gastrointestinal Health and Nutrition; and Haematology — with further chapters in various editions covering neurology, medical disorders of pregnancy, fetal evaluation, labour and delivery, neonatal behaviour, and metabolic and endocrine questions. A reader could therefore work through a single chapter as a complete annual update in one problem area, which is how busy clinicians actually used the volumes.

The topic record for ISSN 8756-5005 in bibliographic databases reflects that breadth: infant development and preterm care, neonatal respiratory health, neonatal and fetal brain pathology, infant nutrition and health, neonatal and maternal infections, birth and development and health, preterm birth and chorioamnionitis, and maternal and perinatal health interventions. Those tags are a fair map of the annual's territory. They also show why the Year Book is cited across subfields: a commentary on a respiratory trial and a commentary on a nutrition study sit in the same volume, and both enter the citation record under the same ISSN.

Within a chapter, the unit of the book is the selected article: its abstract, followed by commentary. The commentary is the value the series added, and it is the part that distinguishes a yearbook from a database printout. A good commentary places a trial in the context of previous trials, notes the population to which its result does and does not apply, flags a methodological weakness that a headline reading would miss, and states a practice implication in language a clinician can act on. Fanaroff's own commentaries, contributed across many editions alongside those of his section editors, were known for that direct, experienced voice.

Editors and Editorial Authority

Avroy A. Fanaroff is the name most closely associated with the series. Elsevier's author information describes him as an Emeritus Professor at Case Western Reserve University and a leading figure in neonatology who authored many of the commentaries himself and assembled leading experts to select articles and write commentaries. In a curated annual, the editor is not an administrator; the editor's judgement is the product. The selection a yearbook makes — which fifty or hundred and fifty papers, out of thousands, deserve a clinician's attention — expresses an expert view of the field that readers either learn to trust or stop buying.

The 2016 volume lists its wider editorial team explicitly: Avroy A. Fanaroff with William Benitz, Steven M. Donn, Josef Neu, Lu-Ann Papile and Linda J. Van Marter. Those names map onto the book's chapter structure, with recognised specialists taking responsibility for areas such as the fetus and perinatal care, respiratory disorders, gastroenterology and nutrition, infectious disease, and newborn follow-up and development. Earlier editions show a similar pattern, with M. Jeffrey Maisels and David K. Stevenson among the editors named for the 2004 volume in library records. Editorial continuity across editions, with gradual renewal of the team, is characteristic of a successful annual series.

For citation purposes, cite a Year Book item as a chapter or commentary in the named annual volume, with the volume year, the editors, the publisher and the page range where your source gives it, rather than as if it were an article in a monthly journal. Libraries catalogue the annuals both as a continuing serial under ISSN 8756-5005 and as individual monographic volumes with their own ISBNs — the 2010 volume, for example, carries ISBN 9780323068345, the 2011 volume 9780323084178, and the 2016 volume 9780323446884 — and either route is legitimate as long as the citation identifies the actual volume you used.

Publication Pattern and Editions

The series published annually. Elsevier listings show a regular sequence of dated volumes through the 2000s and 2010s, including the 2003, 2004, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2016 volumes, each issued as a hardcover annual of several hundred pages. The stated publication month varies by edition and by listing — September in the series description, November in some annual listings, and specific dates such as 19 December 2011 for the 2011 volume, 12 November 2013 for the 2013 volume, 28 July 2016 for the volume dated 2015, and 28 October 2016 for the 2016 volume. That variation is normal for annuals, whose production follows the literature year they summarise rather than a periodical's fixed schedule.

The imprint history in those listings is also instructive. Earlier volumes name Mosby, Incorporated, or Mosby as publisher; later listings name Elsevier as the imprint while the series remained an Elsevier Health product, sold through Elsevier's health-science book channels and listed on the Elsevier Health catalogue page for the series under its ISSN. Mosby is an Elsevier imprint with deep roots in medical publishing, and the Year Book series was one of the lines that made the Mosby name familiar to generations of clinicians. Directory records that give the publisher simply as Elsevier BV are therefore correct at the corporate level and incomplete at the imprint level; this profile gives both.

No new submission, subscription or continuation claim is made here beyond what publisher listings support. Annual series are periodically reviewed by their publishers, formats change, and individual Year Book titles have at different times moved between print, electronic and bundled forms. A reader who needs the latest volume should search the Elsevier catalogue by the series ISSN 8756-5005 and title, and a librarian should check standing-order records, rather than assuming that a volume exists for a given recent year.

How Clinicians and Researchers Should Use It

Used well, the Year Book is a map and a mentor rather than a final authority. A trainee who reads a chapter gains a curated sense of what mattered in that area in that year and hears experienced clinicians reason about evidence; a researcher beginning a project gains a quick, critical bibliography of the landmark papers of a period; a historian of neonatology gains a dated record of what the field's leaders considered important at the time, which is often more revealing than a retrospective review written with hindsight.

Used carelessly, it can mislead in two ways. First, an abstract is a summary, not the paper: effect sizes, eligibility criteria, harms and subgroup results that decide whether a finding applies to your patient live in the full text, and no clinical decision should rest on a yearbook abstract alone. Second, a commentary is an expert opinion, however distinguished the expert: it should be weighed alongside guidelines, systematic reviews and later evidence, especially for older volumes whose commentaries predate subsequent trials. The series' own format invites exactly that critical reading, because commentary and abstract sit side by side and can be compared.

In systematic searching, treat the Year Book as a source of leads and of commentary citations, not as a primary-study database. When a Year Book commentary is itself the object of study — for example in research on how expert opinion influenced practice — cite it directly. When the underlying trial is the object, retrieve and cite the trial. Bibliometric datasets that count Year Book items as journal articles will otherwise double-count work and inflate the apparent primary literature of neonatal medicine, a distortion that careful reviewers should name in their methods.

Distinguishing It From Similarly Named Titles

Neonatal publishing contains several easily confused names. The Year Book of Neonatal and Perinatal Medicine (8756-5005, Elsevier / Mosby annual) is not the Journal of Perinatal and Neonatal Nursing, a Lippincott Williams and Wilkins journal with entirely different ISSNs; it is not the Journal of Perinatology, the Nature Portfolio journal with ISSN 0743-8346; it is not Seminars in Perinatology or Clinics in Perinatology, Elsevier's review periodicals; and it is not the journal Neonatology published by Karger. It is also one of many Year Book titles — Elsevier published parallel annuals in other specialties — so the specialty words in the title are part of its identity, not decoration.

The spelling variation in its name deserves a final note. The publisher's title uses two words, Year Book, reflecting the historic Year Book series brand. This directory's record uses the one-word form Yearbook in its title and slug. Both forms refer to the same serial, ISSN 8756-5005, and searches should be run under both spellings. In formal citations, follow the publisher's two-word form and give the ISSN, and the record will be found whichever spelling a reader starts from.

A Reader's Checklist for This Title

Before citing this annual, verify the item in four steps that reflect its unusual genre. Confirm the ISSN is 8756-5005 and the volume year matches the literature year you intend, remembering that an annual dated for one year largely summarises work published in the period leading up to it. Confirm whether you are citing a selected article's abstract or an editor's commentary, and cite the part you actually used, with its author where the volume names one. Confirm the publisher and imprint from the volume itself — Elsevier, Mosby — and add the volume ISBN when your citation style allows it, because the ISBN resolves the exact book you held. And if the item reports a clinical trial or study, retrieve that original study before you rely on its result for anything beyond historical or bibliographic purposes.

For teachers of neonatal and perinatal medicine, the annuals retain a classroom value that databases do not replace. Assigning a trainee a Year Book chapter alongside the original papers it discusses teaches two skills at once: how to read a trial, and how to listen to an experienced clinician interrogate it. The gap between an abstract's confident conclusion and a commentary's caution is often where clinical judgement lives, and making that gap visible is a teaching act. Older volumes are especially useful here precisely because later evidence is known, so trainees can also judge the commentary against what the field learned next.

For the directory record itself, the lesson of this title is that a serial identifier does not settle what a publication is. An ISSN, an h-index and a citation count made this annual look, in automated data, like an ordinary journal with an ordinary submission route. Reading the publisher's own description restored its real identity: a curated book series whose editors selected and appraised other journals' work. That is why this profile insists on genre, and why readers should insist on it everywhere — the most expensive bibliographic errors are not wrong digits, but wrong kinds of things.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of the Yearbook of Neonatal and Perinatal Medicine?
8756-5005.

Is it a journal that accepts submissions?
No. It is an annual curated volume of selected abstracts from more than 500 journals, with expert commentaries. It does not operate a manuscript-submission route for original research.

Who published it?
Elsevier, through its Mosby imprint, in the United States. Individual volumes also carry their own ISBNs.

Who edited it?
Avroy A. Fanaroff, Emeritus Professor at Case Western Reserve University, was its long-standing editor. The 2016 volume also lists William Benitz, Steven M. Donn, Josef Neu, Lu-Ann Papile and Linda J. Van Marter.

How often was it published?
Annually. Publisher listings show dated volumes through the 2000s and 2010s, commonly appearing in the autumn, with the exact month varying by edition.

What does it cover?
The year's key developments across neonatal and perinatal medicine, organised in chapters including the fetus, genetics and teratology, respiratory disorders, infectious diseases and immunology, cardiovascular care, gastrointestinal health and nutrition, and haematology.

Sources and Verification

This profile was prepared from the journal's own publisher and university pages, national and international serial listings, and the bibliometric record already held for this title. Facts that could not be confirmed from an official source are described in the text as not published or not publicly disclosed, rather than being estimated. Readers should confirm submission status, fees and indexing on the official site linked in the sources file before making a submission or purchasing decision, because frequencies, editors and policies change over time.