About Burns & Trauma

Burns & Trauma

Burns & Trauma is an open-access, peer-reviewed medical journal based in Chongqing, China, devoted to burns and traumatic injury. Launched in June 2013, it publishes basic, clinical and translational research and has grown from a new specialist title into one of the highest-ranked journals in its field. It is sponsored by the Institute of Burn Research at Southwest Hospital in Chongqing, is the official journal of the Chinese Burn Association and the Asia-Pacific Society of Scar Medicine, and has been published in partnership with Oxford University Press since 2020. Its print ISSN is 2321-3868 and its electronic ISSN is 2321-3876.

Overview

Burns and traumatic injuries pose a distinctive medical challenge: they combine emergency and critical care, surgery, infection control, wound healing, rehabilitation and, often, long-term scarring and reconstruction. Burns & Trauma was created to give that whole field a single English-language platform. Oxford University Press describes it as an open-access, peer-reviewed journal publishing the latest developments in basic, clinical and translational research related to burns and traumatic injuries. Because it is open access, its articles are freely available to clinicians and researchers worldwide rather than held behind a subscription paywall, and the journal operates on a continuous-publication model rather than waiting to assemble conventional print issues.

That combination — a Chinese sponsoring institute, English-language publication, free access for readers and free publication for authors — was deliberate. A 2019 account of the journal's development described it as the first peer-reviewed open-access journal in its related fields devoted to reporting burn research, and noted its work with international associations to provide a platform for burn researchers and doctors to present scientific achievements and exchange ideas. For readers outside China, it offers a direct window on research from one of the world's largest burn-treatment centres; for Chinese researchers, it offers an international channel that does not require payment of an article-processing charge.

Launch and Publishing History

The journal was launched in June 2013. Its early volumes were published by Wolters Kluwer Health: a welcome article in volume 1 in September 2013, “New burns and trauma journal celebrating translational research,” introduced Burns & Trauma as a new translational journal and credited Professor Jun Wu and co-workers with the effort to establish it. Professor Wu has remained the journal's best-known editorial figure and was quoted as its Editor-in-Chief when the Oxford partnership was announced.

The journal later moved to BioMed Central. That period is still visible in the scholarly record: many articles from the mid-2010s carry BioMed Central / Springer Nature article identifiers, and BioMed Central continues to host an archive of the articles it published. BioMed Central states that Burns & Trauma is no longer published by BMC and that the journal continued with a new publisher as of 1 January 2020.

That new publisher was Oxford University Press. Announcing the partnership, Oxford University Press and the Institute of Burn Research, Southwest Hospital said they would publish Burns & Trauma together from 2020. Dr Jun Wu said the journal hoped to begin a brand new journey working with OUP from 2020, would continue to publish scientific articles in basic, clinical and translational research related to burns and traumatic injuries, and intended to be the best platform to report advanced research and extend its academic influence. Rhodri Jackson, Editorial Director of Asia Journals at Oxford University Press, said OUP looked forward to helping the journal grow into the leading open-access journal in the field of burns and traumatic injuries.

Sponsorship and Its Chongqing Home

The journal's home is Chongqing, in southwest China. It is sponsored by the Institute of Burn Research at Southwest Hospital. Oxford Academic's current journal information also lists sponsorship by the Chongqing Health Statistics Information Center alongside the Institute of Burn Research, Southwest Hospital, reflecting the journal's Chongqing base in its present publishing arrangements.

Southwest Hospital is the First Affiliated Hospital of the Army Medical University, formerly known in many journal articles as the Third Military Medical University. Founded in 1929 as the Central Hospital in Nanjing, the hospital moved to Chongqing in 1941 and took the Southwest Hospital name after 1949. It is a large comprehensive Grade A tertiary hospital integrating medical treatment, teaching and research. Within it, the Institute of Burn Research is one of the anchor institutions of Chinese burn medicine. Research articles from the institute routinely carry its fuller affiliation, the State Key Laboratory of Trauma, Burns and Combined Injury, Institute of Burn Research, Southwest Hospital, in Shapingba District, Chongqing.

The scale of that clinical base matters to the journal's identity. A study of paediatric burns in southwest China described the Institute of Burn Research as one of the earliest burn centres in China and one of the largest burn centres worldwide, with 125 inpatient beds, including 18 intensive-care beds, receiving approximately 1,300 burn patients annually from across southwest China, including Chongqing, Sichuan and Guizhou. A journal edited from a centre treating patients at that volume sits close to the clinical problems — resuscitation, infection, inhalation injury, skin grafting and rehabilitation — that fill its pages.

Society Affiliations

Burns & Trauma is the official journal of the Chinese Burn Association. The Oxford University Press partnership announcement also identified it as the official journal of the Asia-Pacific Society of Scar Medicine. Other journal accounts list a wider family of affiliated societies as well, including the Chinese Society for Scar Medicine and the Chinese Burn Care and Rehabilitation Association. Those affiliations explain two recurring features of the journal: its strong coverage of scar medicine, and its role as a publisher of association guidance.

The connection is practical, not merely ceremonial. The journal has published guidelines organised by the Chinese Burn Association and related bodies, including the “Guidelines for burn rehabilitation in China” in 2015, produced with the Chinese Association of Burn Surgeons and the Chinese Burn Care and Rehabilitation Association, and the “Clinical practice guideline for pediatric scar prevention and treatment (2025 edition),” developed by the Chinese Burn Association with domestic and international experts and published in the journal in 2025. It also published selected abstracts from the 12th Asia Pacific Burn Congress, held in Singapore in August 2019, in a supplemental issue, working with the congress organisers and the Asia Pacific Burns Association.

Aims, Scope and Subject Focus

The journal's stated scope is basic, clinical and translational research related to burns and traumatic injuries. Within that broad remit, Oxford University Press highlights a special focus on biomaterials, tissue engineering, stem cells, critical care, immunobiology, skin transplantation, prevention, and regeneration of burns and trauma injury. In practice, that scope spans the laboratory and the ward: materials and dressings that help wounds close, cell and tissue approaches to rebuilding skin, the immunology and infection risks that follow major injury, the intensive care of severely burned patients, and the prevention of injury and scarring in the first place.

Analysis of the journal's published research shows the same pattern from the article side. Its most frequent topics have included surgery, wound healing and burn injury, with work on scars, skin grafting and soft tissue under surgery, and work on angiogenesis, mesenchymal stem cells, stem cells and regeneration under wound healing. Studies of burn injury in the journal have also addressed injury prevention, epidemiology and emergency medicine, while intensive-care research has applied in particular to sepsis — a major cause of death after severe burns. This is therefore not a journal confined to burn surgery alone; it covers the full course of injury, from prevention and emergency response through critical care to healing, scarring and rehabilitation.

Article Types and Peer Review

The journal publishes a standard range of scholarly article types for a specialist medical title. Its author instructions have listed research articles, reviews, guidelines, case reports, commentaries, editorials and letters to the editor. Research articles report original basic, clinical or translational studies; reviews survey and synthesise a topic; guidelines set out association-backed recommendations for practice; and case reports are expected to make a contribution to medical knowledge, with educational value or a lesson for clinical practice or diagnostic approaches — for example an unusual presentation of a disease, an unexpected association, or findings that shed new light on how a disease or adverse effect develops.

Peer review is central to the model described by the journal's earlier publisher: submitted manuscripts would generally be reviewed by two or more experts, asked to evaluate whether the manuscript was scientifically sound and coherent, whether it duplicated already published work, and whether it was sufficiently clear for publication, with editors reaching a decision on the basis of those reports and consulting editorial-board members where necessary. Authors and referees are asked to declare competing interests, manuscripts may be screened with plagiarism-detection software, and the journal has stated its membership of, and subscription to, the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics.

Open Access and Publication Charges

Two features make Burns & Trauma unusual among high-ranking medical journals. First, every article is open access, so any clinician, researcher, student or patient advocate with an internet connection can read the full text without a subscription. Second, authors do not pay to publish. The journal's publishing information states that the publication costs for Burns & Trauma are covered by the Institute of Burn Research, Southwest Hospital, so authors do not need to pay an article-processing charge for each article accepted for publication.

That funding model lowers a barrier that open-access publishing often creates. In many open-access journals, the cost removed from readers reappears as a charge to authors, which can disadvantage researchers without grant funding for publication fees. Here, the sponsoring institute absorbs the cost instead. Combined with indexing in PubMed Central, where the full text of its articles is deposited, the arrangement is designed to maximise both the submission pool and the readership: work can come from, and be read in, settings where neither subscription budgets nor publication funds are readily available.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

The journal's rise can be tracked through its indexing history. According to a 2019 journal account, after being indexed by PubMed in 2015, Burns & Trauma was included in the Science Citation Index Expanded in 2018 and gained its first Impact Factor, of 2.493, in 2019, in the Journal Citation Reports from Clarivate Analytics. Southwest Hospital's own history notes that in 2019 the journal's SCI impact factor again made it the world's highest-impact journal in the field of burns.

Oxford Academic currently lists all articles in Burns & Trauma as included in CABI, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), PubMed Central, the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus. Its reported metrics have risen sharply since that first impact factor. Oxford Academic lists a 2025 Impact Factor of 11.0, a 2025 five-year Impact Factor of 11.1, and a Surgery ranking by Impact Factor of 3 out of 321 journals. For Scopus, it lists a 2025 CiteScore of 15.7, with CiteScore rankings of 2 out of 597 in Surgery, 1 out of 111 in Emergency Medicine, 4 out of 122 in Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine, and 28 out of 342 in Biomedical Engineering. Bibliometric listings likewise place the journal in the first quartile, Q1, across categories including biomedical engineering, critical care, dermatology, emergency medicine, immunology and surgery. Its identifiers remain ISSN 2321-3868 in print and eISSN 2321-3876 online.

Notable Content, Guidelines and Special Series

Beyond individual research papers, the journal has used themed collections and guidelines to shape its field. By 2019 it had organised 11 special series covering hot topics in burns and trauma, including scar management, cell therapy and skin regeneration, 3D bio-printing and paediatric burns, inviting leading scholars to review advanced technologies and progress in those areas. Those topics map closely onto the journal's declared special focus on biomaterials, tissue engineering, stem cells and regeneration.

Its guideline publishing is equally characteristic. The 2015 “Guidelines for burn rehabilitation in China” argued that quality of life and functional recovery after burn injury are the final goal of burn care, especially as most burn patients now survive their injury, and set out the role of physical and occupational therapy during treatment. An earlier guideline, on diagnosis, prophylaxis and treatment of invasive fungal infection after burn injury in China, appeared in the journal in 2014. The 2025 paediatric scar guideline, focusing on 10 key aspects of scar prevention and treatment in children and formulating 20 recommendations, shows that guideline role continuing under Oxford University Press more than a decade after launch. The journal has also carried historical reflection on its own discipline, including a 2017 article on the progress of Chinese burn medicine from the Third Military Medical University in memory of Professor Li Ao, described as one of the founders of Chinese burn medicine, who established one of China's earliest special departments for burns at the university in 1958.

Readership and Distinction from Similar Titles

The natural readership of Burns & Trauma is the multidisciplinary team that treats severe injury: burn and trauma surgeons, plastic and reconstructive surgeons, intensivists, emergency physicians, dermatologists, rehabilitation specialists, nurses and researchers working on wound healing, biomaterials, stem cells and tissue engineering. Its society roles make it a reference point in China and the Asia-Pacific region in particular, while open access and Oxford University Press distribution give its articles a global audience.

Readers should distinguish it from the similarly named International Journal of Burns and Trauma, a different journal published by E-Century Publishing Corp with ISSN 2160-2026. Burns & Trauma — ISSN 2321-3868, sponsored in Chongqing and published with Oxford University Press — is the Chinese Burn Association journal described here. Checking the ISSN and publisher is the simplest way to tell the two apart when searching databases.

In little more than a decade, Burns & Trauma has moved from a June 2013 launch, through BioMed Central, to Oxford University Press, from first PubMed indexing in 2015 and Science Citation Index Expanded inclusion in 2018 to Impact Factor and CiteScore rankings near the top of surgery and emergency medicine. That trajectory rests on a specific institutional foundation — a major Chongqing burn institute covering authors' costs, specialist societies using it for guidance, and an open-access model that lets the resulting research be read anywhere. For anyone following how burns and traumatic injuries are prevented, treated, healed and rehabilitated, it is one of the field's essential journals.