Anesthesiology and Perioperative Sciences earns first impact factor of 7.5

The open access journal Anesthesiology and Perioperative Sciences has received its first Journal Impact Factor, the editors announced in an editorial published on 25 August 2026. The metric, awarded in the summer of 2026, stands at 7.5 and places the journal in the first quartile of both of its assigned categories: number 4 in Anesthesiology and number 11 in Surgery. For a journal that published its first paper on 9 March 2023, the achievement marks a rapid ascent through one of the most crowded and contested corners of scientific publishing.

The editorial, written by the journal’s editorial leadership, traces the publication’s origins to 2021, when Anesthesiology and Perioperative Sciences, abbreviated APS, was created out of a collaboration with the Tianfu Society of Anesthesiology. A publishing agreement with Springer Nature was signed in June 2022, and the journal formally launched in 2023. The editors describe the environment into which APS entered as a highly competitive publication market populated by predatory journals and publishing houses, and they argue that establishing a new journal under such conditions demanded a clear vision: to recognise and address the need for a publication spanning anesthesiology, perioperative medicine and surgery, with a deliberate emphasis on interdisciplinarity and on research and clinical activity that crosses speciality boundaries. Under their framing, anesthesia and surgery, usually treated as single entities, both benefit from the overarching umbrella of perioperative medicine.

The journal’s publication model was set from the outset in response to what the editors describe as Plan S and funder-driven trends reshaping the publishing landscape. APS adopted open access and article-based publication from its inception. To date the journal has published three full volumes under an issue-based model and has begun volume 4 under continuous article publishing, in which papers appear individually and are later collated into volumes. According to the editorial, this workflow has reduced the median time from acceptance to publication to 22 days.

The numbers behind the new impact factor are laid out in some detail. Since that first editorial in March 2023, the journal has published 187 items in total. For the current impact factor review period, APS published 59 citeable articles, 81 items in total, which accumulated 441 cites. The editors note that a relatively high proportion of the journal’s output, approximately 73 percent, consists of citeable articles rather than non-citeable material, a composition they link to the citation performance underlying the metric. At the time of writing, two further articles are in the publication process.

Alongside the impact factor, the editorial reports several operational statistics that the editors present as evidence of the journal’s efficiency and selectivity. The median time from submission to first decision is reported as just 8 days. In 2025 the journal recorded just short of a quarter of a million downloads. For 2023 and 2024, the period used in the current impact factor calculation, the overall acceptance rate was 34.2 percent. The editors attribute the highly cited status of the published articles, and by extension the impact factor itself, to this selectivity.

Indexing is another milestone the editors highlight. Beyond the impact factor, the journal is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, known as DOAJ, as well as in Google Scholar and Portico.

The editorial also surveys the content the journal has accumulated in its first years. The editors identify their top six publications by citations as a cluster of articles covering multimodality and outcomes. They note that APS has published a suite of articles centred on the use of big data and the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The ultrashort-acting benzodiazepine sedative remimazolam, they report, has been covered extensively, from its conceptual development through use in pediatrics and in dental sedation. The controversy surrounding opioid-sparing analgesia, viewed against the backdrop of the growing opioid crisis, has also received attention in the journal’s pages.

Underlying this content strategy, the editors describe what they call one of the central controversies in anesthesiology and perioperative medicine: the extent to which patient outcomes are directly shaped by the interventions, decisions and practices applied in clinical settings. The areas they list as major focuses of ongoing research include tools for outcome prediction, more precise use of existing pharmacological agents, opioid-sparing techniques that preserve analgesia, and a drive toward individualised, patient-centred medicine. Much of this work, they write, is underpinned by basic and translational science, and the journal actively welcomes in silico, in vitro and translational animal studies addressing the fundamental basis of clinical practice. These are stated editorial priorities and scope descriptions rather than findings of any single study, and the editorial does not report new clinical results of its own.

Looking forward, the editors draw a distinction between bibliometric standing and what they call real-world clinical impact. They acknowledge that the impact factor is a numerical metric used by institutions and promotion committees, but state that real-world clinical impact is the journal’s vision. They commit to working with authors, professional bodies in the specialties and patients to publish material with impact, which they argue will in turn sustain the impact factor metric, and to working with opinion leaders to publish material that helps understand the underpinning science, delivers clinical change and produces favourable outcomes for patients. The editorial closes by updating the call to readers that ended the journal’s inaugural 2023 publication, which had invited frank suggestions and criticisms from contributors and readers; the new version substitutes sincere for earnest in the same appeal.

What the announcement documents is a journal that has, in just over three years since its first paper, secured the bibliometric credentials that institutions and funders typically look for, while explicitly arguing that those credentials are a means rather than an end.

Subject of Research: First impact factor and category rankings of the journal Anesthesiology and Perioperative Sciences

Article Title: Anesthesiology and Perioperative Sciences: first impact factor milestone achieved

Article References: Liu, J., Ma, D., Lambert, D. G., & Wang, Y. (2026). Anesthesiology and Perioperative Sciences: first impact factor milestone achieved. Anesthesiology and Perioperative Science, 4(1), Article 41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44254-026-00190-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44254-026-00190-1

Keywords: impact factor, Anesthesiology and Perioperative Sciences, open access, Springer Nature, perioperative medicine, Q1 ranking, journal metrics, DOAJ, acceptance rate, remimazolam, opioid-sparing analgesia, editorial